A dark figure sits on the ground at the bottom of the page. Next to him is a golden moth.
He faces away from the reader and looks ahead at a circle of light, in which stands a smaller figure – a feature to add depth and distance between them. Illuminated in gold, the figure inside the circle beckons the darker figure to come towards him.
This is how Donald Jackson and his team of scribes and illuminators illustrated the Raising of Lazarus for the Saint John’s Bible. An official replica of the Bible, known as the Heritage edition, has now been at the Franciscan Renewal Center for 10 years, inspiring many – including the docents that give tours to visitors.
“This is one of my favorite ones. Whenever I hear this Gospel of the Raising of Lazarus,
immediately, the image flashes in my mind,” says Marge Woods, the lead docent for the Bible at the Renewal Center, commonly known as the Casa. “What they wanted to do is they wanted to capture people’s near-death experience with that tunnel of light.”
Reminiscent of the early Bible manuscripts that were copied by hand, Jackson – who had served as the official scribe and calligrapher for the British Royal Family – had his team follow the medieval method of creating the pages out of vellum, a material made from animal skins, typically calves. The thickness of the pages required the team to compile the Bible into seven separate volumes.
“With the vellum, you have one piece of skin, and they had to scrape it, they had to wash it, they had to stretch it, and that piece would be four pages,” said Woods.
The scribes and illuminators hand-copied the Bible from the New Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition, much like the monks of the early Church, writing in a medieval-inspired font, using turkey, swan and goose feathers.
“I’m amazed at the genius of the human mind, the creativity of somebody — the scribes, the illuminators — I marvel at the gifts of that creativity to bring this alive,” said Franciscan
Fr. Page Polk, rector of the Casa’s attached Our Lady of the Angels Conventual Church. “It’s something I could never do.”
The Benedictines at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minn., commissioned Jackson to create the Bible in 1998 to mark the school’s (at the time) upcoming 150th anniversary. The overall project took 13 years to complete. Despite using ancient techniques and styles, much of the artwork depicts modern subjects, such as a DNA strand or the twin towers.
“He always had the dream, he wanted to create his own Bible by hand,” said Woods. “He wanted to make a Bible for the 21st century. It’s very ancient methods but it’s very contemporary imagery.”
As an example, Woods turns to the beginning of the Gospel of John, pointing out an image based on a photograph of a dying star taken by the Hubble Telescope.
“What’s happening here is he has Jesus stepping out, coming for us,” she says. “This is the photograph of a dying star, so it becomes a black hole. That star died two billion years ago, and we’re still receiving the light from that star that died.”
Although not the original, the Heritage Edition replicas themselves are rare – only 299 exist – and required intense labor to photograph the original pages, bind the volumes and have them embossed. The edition housed at the Casa is the 88th to be produced.
“It took six years for the Heritage Edition because you had people who were creating the paper itself, which was the American cotton. Then, it had to be very special paper because it had to become as close as possible to the original manuscript, the vellum calf skin,” she said.
The Casa obtained the Heritage Edition through a group of Saint John’s alumni and benefactors who raised the money to bring it to the Valley.
“They wanted to give to the Casa with one of the 299 sets here with the understanding that we would make sure that we used it in a way that served our mission and that also served the community at large; that this was for anyone who wanted to come and engage with it and have a personal experience with it,” said Patricia Lee, communications director for the Casa. “We’re serving the Bible’s mission, and it’s helping us to serve ours.”
Fr. Polk noted that the Bible helps serve the Casa’s mission to offer spiritual growth, healing and transformation that leads into service.
“These wonderful volumes of the Saint John’s Bible give us both in word and illumination the strength and a springboard for spiritual growth,” said Fr. Polk. “The words and the illuminations in the Saint John’s Bible tell us the stories of our ancestors in faith, tell us of Jesus, the early Church.
“When we’re transformed and we’re strengthened and we’re growing spiritually inside, that lays the groundwork for us to try to be of service to other people,” he added.
Woods became familiar with the Saint John’s Bible when the Phoenix Art Museum – where she worked as a docent – hosted the original while it was on tour 2007-2008. She had been a docent since 1972. When the Heritage Edition came to the Valley in 2014, she attended an all-day workshop organized by the university.
“I’ve given my whole life to this over the last 10 years,” she said. “There’s a lot of elements in the art but our response to the art and how you respond when you see something like this, the response is the really important thing. It’s a ‘wow’ moment because you see people really, really get involved in it, and it touches your soul.”
At least one volume of the Saint John’s Bible Heritage Edition remains on display in the Casa’s lobby, and Woods and her team of docents are also available to provide tours to groups of visitors or bring the edition out to the broader community.
“I like to just let them absorb it and let them take it in because it is a really personal thing, and then we can go back and read some of the verbiage that inspired that particular illumination,” said Woods. “I get different personal experiences people have had or why it reminds them of a particular thing. There’s a general beauty that they recognize.”
In the same way that Lectio Divina helps to meditate on the Word of God, Woods described the Saint John’s Bible as a type of “Visio Divina” that provides artwork to meditate on. As a lector at Our Lady of Angels, she finds the illuminations help her whenever she prepares to proclaim the Word at Mass, saying that those images immediately come to her mind.
“I’m always breathless. It’s something you can’t look at and not remember it later on. It stays with your memory,” she said.
