Visio Divina at the Art Museum

My church sits right next to an art museum. A mission start by the General Synod in Ohio, Glenwood Lutheran Church was formed in 1901, the same year that the Toledo Museum of Art was established by industrial leaders of the city. The Museum was founded on the premise that it would always be free to the public, one of the more golden ventures in the Gilded Age. Church and Museum grew up alongside each other, the Museum quickly dwarfing the church in size and power. The presence of this extraordinary art collection next door to Glenwood Lutheran (named after a street running through the neighborhood) implies the question, “How might a church gather people to encounter God at this museum?”

Ever since I visited during my first trip to meet the Call Committee at Glenwood, though, I’ve loved the Museum. On my first stroll through, I planned about an hour to see what I thought would be a quaint, regional Museum. Then I spied a familiar face over my shoulder and I was stopped in my tracks. Martin Luther gazed out at me with Melancthon, Bugenhagen and a cadre of reformers, all hiding behind a giant figure, Elector John, in Lucas Cranach the Younger’s “Martin Luther and the Wittenberg Reformers.” 

The Museum became a place of rest for me. After worship on Sundays, an anxious Toledo transplant and first call pastor, I would walk next door to this free museum each week to find calm, and I would focus on just seeing a few pieces. It was like encountering friends. I would find one familiar piece to look at afresh and one new piece to discover each week. My relationships with the art and museum staff did not automatically result in my congregation’s encounter of God at the museum.

Experiments

We experimented together with different kinds of trips. We celebrated Reformation Sunday with a Reformation Era docent tour. We celebrated Epiphany with an ‘adoration of the Magi’ themed trip.  We even celebrated Black History month with an exhibit called “Living Legacies: Art of the African American South” which featured an extraordinary range of pieces, including a gem from the museum’s permanent collection, a depiction of Revelation 21. The docents are terrific teachers and very well-informed. I highly recommend their tours. What they cannot offer, however, is a chance to pray.

Our more recent experiment has been inviting people to come to the Museum to contemplate a few pieces of art and to pray. So last year I teamed up with a colleague down the street, the Rev. Dr. Brenda Peconge, Pastor of Grace Lutheran Church and fellow art museum fan, to a group of congregants and pastors from the Northwestern Ohio Synod through the Toledo Museum on Good Friday. Our goal was to gather people to encounter the crucifixion in visual art and to pray together. 

We explicitly announced—loudly so that guests and museum staff can hear—that we are not docents and we encourage everyone who wants to learn more about the art to go that direction. What we offer is a chance to slow down, to contemplate a piece of art and to let a great piece of art do its work on us. 

Visio Divina

We used a method like lectio divina, a stepwise prayer process with chances to share with the group what one is noticing and attending to in the ‘text’ before us. This visio divina process consists of four questions. 

1. “What do you see?” 

There are always art nerds who feel the urge to show off at this moment. Do your best to quiet that urge to interpret or to present as “cultured” and just look. As a facilitator, help folks to slow down and look. I gently remind folks that we’re only at the first question, if they’re diving into meaning or if they ask a question about what the painting ‘means’ I’ll circle back to the first question, what do you see? One person saw a creeping shadow on the rock in El Greco’s Agony in the Garden. A young congregant saw a tidal wave in the angel’s appearance.  

2. Then we ask “What do you feel?’ 

Sometimes people are challenged by this question, and it’s hard for me to answer honestly too, when what I am feeling is the stress and excitement of facilitation and reading the room. We keep at this question though because the encounters with these pieces are so powerful. Looking at The Crucifixion one person said, “I feel anguish, confronted by the anguish.” A woman felt a deep love for Mary because she too experienced a son’s death. “I see Mary looking up and saying ‘now you have him.’”

3. “What is God saying to you?” is the next question. 

It’s an astonishingly intimate question to be asked in a public place surrounded by a group. “God is telling me to look at Mary and act like her by saying, ‘it’s all in your hands,’” replied another. “I see the sun coming, and I’m going to choose hope. God’s not finished.” Whenever someone dares to answer this question I feel like responding with “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

4. Lastly, we ask “What is God inviting you to do?” 

“Trust in him.” 

“Pay attention, do not let the crowd distract me from Jesus.” someone else said, bothered by the cluttered movement in this medieval crucifixion scene. 

These are just a sampling of the reflections of congregants who joined this year’s Good Friday trip to the Toledo Museum of Art. Pastor Brenda and I plan to gather more people to pray together and to experience the Museum in this distinctive way. We also plan to invite our congregants to select pieces for us to contemplate, centering alternative visions of the Museum. 

I hope to expand these tours to anyone who wants to slow down and attend to that quiet, curious part of themselves that encounters art. Multiple studies have shown that the average amount of time that a person looks at art is 28 seconds. The mode in the most recent data was 10 seconds. Perhaps the church might love our neighbors by enabling them to slow down for an hour outside of Sunday morning, and just look. What would you do with a museum next door? Visio Divina has invited the people of Glenwood, Grace, and other neighbors in the Northwestern Ohio Synod of the ELCA to see what’s there in front of us and pray. 

I have discovered what is truly spiritual in a new way as well, as a truly outstanding painting just grabs me in a way that had never happened before my repeated visits to one great art museum. The art does its work on me, taking me to southern France or to northern China, in what have become encounters beyond what I had known or understood. The Spirit has found ways to work in me through this art and in this museum, and I pray that in this particular way, the people of God at Glenwood Lutheran might share a particular way of encountering God which arises from our place.  

(Below is the worksheet we used)

Encountering the Divine through Visual Art: Visio Divina

Here are some steps to slow down and pray in the museum.

Place yourself before a piece of art.

Take a few deep breaths as you gaze at this piece.

Avoid the temptation of reading the signage immediately.

What is going on between you and this piece?

Here are the four questions of Visio Divina:  

(1) What do you see?  

(2) What does it make you feel?  

(3) What is God saying to you?

(4) What is God inviting you to do?

May God bless your contemplation.