Visio Divina Take Three

Part of my invitation to you this Advent is not just to ponder prayerfully the images for a few moments, but to continue to focus and frame as you move around your daily life.  I hope you might enter the photo, stand in the center, move to the fringe and fray of the picture, and try to see what is beyond the edge.  What do you smell, hear, taste, or feel touching you on your skin?  Let this practice linger in your life.

Perhaps one way you can move from Visio Divina into the rest of your day is each day after reading the devotional, you might go on a contemplative walk.  The purpose of the walk is not just to hit 10,000 steps on your Fitbit, although when I do, I really like the fireworks on the screen.  The purpose of a contemplative walk is to engage the living color of the world around us.  The purpose of a contemplative walk is to move from one still photograph to a moving picture of our world spinning at 1000 miles per hour.

There is nowhere to "get to".

Just walk.

Just breathe and be.

Just focus and frame each step from the sole of your foot to the soul stirring and whirling within you and around you.

In a season of gift giving, taking time for Visio Divina and a contemplative walk is the gift of doing nothing other than being with God's gift of this present moment.

I love what John Muir once said, “I don't like either the word [hike] or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains - not 'hike!' Do you know the origin of that word saunter? It's a beautiful word. [B]ack in the middle ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going they would reply, 'A la sainte terre', 'To the Holy Land.' And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not 'hike' through them.”*  Sauntering is seeing what shimmers around us, savoring what stirs in us.  Sauntering is a way of moving slowly, perhaps as Joseph and Mary sauntered their way to Bethlehem.

So often our prayer life can be just another item on our to-do list before we get to the real work of the day.  When we focus and frame, we realize the real work of life is discovering the divine is intertwined and interwoven into every moment.  The invitation of you in the days unfolding is that the grace of God is no longer just a trace, but truly part of everything and everyone.  I pray you are ready to go saunter with the sacred.

Blessings ~~

* John Muir: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8564557-i-don-t-like-either-the-word-hike-or-the-thing