Virtual Book Tour: Guest post at Holy Ordinary – Learning to Trust What Shimmers

For today's stop on the Virtual Book Tour, I am delighted to share a guest post I wrote for Brent Bill on Learning to Trust What Shimmers.

Our habitual ways of perceiving the world, which help us navigate things like stopping at a red light or stop sign, also stand in the way of seeing the world in fresh and new ways.

In my book Eyes of the Heart: Photography as a Christian Contemplative Practice, I find inspiration in the ancient practice of lectio divina, or sacred reading. In lectio, we read scripture and listen for what word or phrase is shimmering. This practice is always in service of contemplative vision in daily life. Lectio invites us to slowly see more and more of the world as a sacred text, ripe with possibility for meaning. We can expand our contemplative practice to include a kind of visio divina, or sacred seeing, where we gaze on a painting or photograph we love and look for something that shimmers – perhaps a symbol, a color, a brushstroke, the play of light and shadow. And in that shimmering we know there is a gift for us, even if we don’t fully understand its meaning in the moment.