“If you stare at a painting long enough, you begin to see things you never saw before,” Tim says. We’re standing before the painting The Lamentation of Christ, by Rogier Van Der Weyden that hangs in the Uffizi Museum in Florence, Italy. With an open drawing notebook in one hand and a pencil in the other, Tim is sketching a reproduction of the painting. Standing at his side, I nod my head in agreement. While others mill around us, stopping to look at the painting and glancing over at what Tim is drawing, my eyes travel again over the painting, now seeing details that I had not noticed in the first half hour of looking. Taking time to carefully see again and again, I notice the two tiny figures on the far left traveling a road taking them to  the center image of the painting and then back away again. 

We’ve returned now from our epic month-long trip in Europe, including almost two weeks in Florence and two day-long trips to the Uffizi. This morning I’m at home and reading the daily meditation I receive by email from The Center For Action and Contemplation. I’m thinking back to those hours we spent looking at Van Der Weyden’s painting.

“Franciscan Lectio is a practice in which you begin to actualize your connectedness with everything—your inherent and inherited union with the Divine…. Eventually a new light comes on as we are brought into unity. We open our hearts to the conversion that is part of the habit and practice of Lectio—a conversion through reading the sacred cosmos: the Christ that is in everyone and every thing.”

I have engaged in the practice of Lectio in reading Holy Scriptures. But Franciscan Lectio is a practice of seeing everything in the light, not only the words of Scripture. “We read the Word slowly—in one verse, one creature, one face, one journey, one song—as one cosmic story unfolding with grace as our guide.” _{Dan Riley, Introduction to Franciscan Lectio: Reading the World through the Living Word (Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2022), 15, 16, 18.}

We were practicing Franciscan Lectio in the Uffizi that day, just three weeks earlier. It was so much what I desired for the trip—to immerse myself in beauty. I wanted it for us together, this practice of bringing our selves to this other place and open our spirits to the great beauty of these ancient paintings. I wanted the love to wash over me as I stood and saw the light and the unity. Forty years earlier, we had made a similar extended six-week trip through the same places for the first time. Haarlem, Amsterdam, Basel, Colmar, Florence, Padua, Sienna, and Paris. I wanted to make the pilgrimage again before our health obstructed the privilege to travel, to walk the city streets, to stop at the paintings, to see, with grace as our guide.

Those two small figures on the left-hand side of Van der Weyden’s painting are walking away from the center scene. At the center, loved ones are gathered around the dead body of Jesus before a tomb carved out of the hill. The two figures, are they coming or going? I experience myself with them as I look. Either way, the road leads around the hill, back through the center and around again, beyond the hill. One time through and the dead body is being buried. The next time through the body will be gone. Grief and joy, around and around, walking together.