Visio Divina in a Worship Service
We often practice visio divina as part of our contemplative Centering Prayer By Video sessions, but visio divina can also be effectively used in regular church services online.
The Rev. Amy Fallon, an Episcopal pastor from Trinity Kirksville, shared how visio divina can be incorporated into a worship service on Zoom:
“I thought I might share how I have been incorporating vision divina into Sunday worship. We are experiencing a huge surge in new COVID cases where I am, so we are not even going into church to livestream services. My music director and I have designed a "from the couch" worship service for Advent 1 - 3 that has a contemplative Taizé-like feel. We use only the first reading from the Propers and all the music and images focus on the themes in the reading.
We spend five minutes in silent contemplation of the image that is chosen for the week. I ask three of the questions from the ones you have in your book, and the last one is always "Where do you see God in this image?" We come back together and I send everyone to break-out rooms to share on their experience. Then we come back together and we have look at the image again for two or three minutes. This time there is some music underlying the image, and people can look at it with all the ideas from sharing in their head.
We tried it for the first time last week and people REALLY liked it. Thank you so much for teaching me about this new ways of using imagery in worship!”
See Amy’s slide show below for an outline of worship incorporating visio divina.
