If you are a musician and you want to use your talent for the Lord, you
can perform in church or compose sacred music. If you are a show-off by nature,
clown ministry awaits you. If your gift is hospitality, there is always a need
for someone to oversee your church's coffee fellowship, and host funeral
dinners.
However, what if your talent is calligraphy? You might wish to
"calligrify" for the Lord, but what openings are there in the church
for that skill today (beyond turning out nice VBS graduation certificates)? The
invention of the printing press more than 500 years ago pretty well put scriptoriums
out of business.
There are openings in the secular world. Donald Jackson, one of the
world's foremost calligraphers, holds the post of Senior Scribe to Her Majesty
Queen Elizabeth's Crown Office at the House of Lords. However, he had a yen to
use his gift in God's service as well. Back in 1970, he told Barbara Walters
that he had a dream to handwrite the entire Bible. It was not until the late
1990s, however, that he was given an opportunity to do so, and then it took
some 12 years to complete, and that with help of a team of artists, Scripture
scholars and theologians.
The opportunity came by way of a commission from Minnesota's St. John's
Abbey and University. They contracted Jackson to create a 2-foot-tall,
3-foot-wide volume, to be known as St. John's Bible.
Jackson and his team completed the project in May of 2011, consisting of
1,150 calfskin vellum pages of handwritten text using an ancient ink recipe and
quills made from goose and swan feathers. The pages also include numerous
gorgeous illuminations, colored with hand-ground pigments and gold leaf. When
bound, the Bible will weigh 165 pounds.
Although the materials and processes used to create this volume were
modeled on the work of monks in scriptoriums hundreds of years ago, the St.
John's Bible reflects its 21st-century milieu. The text itself is that of the
New Revised Standard Version (Catholic Edition), and the illuminations include
such images as a satellite view of Earth, DNA sequencing, the Twin Towers,
scenes of the Cambodian genocide by the Khmer Rouge and others from our time.
Actual pages from the Bible are now on display in various museums, and a
very limited number of full-sized replicas are being prepared. The sale of
those will help offset the $8 million cost of creating the St. John's Bible.
Jackson, 73 when the project was completed,
calls this Bible his "Sistine Chapel." He said his goal was the same
as that of the monks of old, "to make these words look important, feel
important."
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