Donald Jackson has been called the world’s foremost calligrapher. St John’s University in Collegeville, Minneapolis commissioned him to handwrite and illustrate the entire Bible. Don’t feel sorry for the guy! He claimed it was his dream job. He started the project in 1998 and finished it in May 2011. That’s thirteen years of copying 1,110-pus pages with quill and ink. Before the invention of the Gutenberg press in 1440, all Bibles were copied this way and monks at Benedictine monasteries did most of the heavy lifting. It was painstaking, tedious work.
Thomas Haemmerlein (1380-1471), better known as Thomas a Kempis (after his native town Kempen, Germany), copied the entire Bible by hand into Latin four times. Four times! Somehow, he also found time to write one of the definitive works on the Christian life, The Imitation of Christ. He was given the assignment at his Dutch monastery to write a manual for novice monks. He wrote four booklets of instruction and stated his purpose in the first book, “We must imitate Christ’s life and his ways…Let it be the most important thing we do.” He singled out humility as the most important Christian virtue. “If you are to learn something that will help you,” he wrote, “learn to see yourself as God sees you and not as you see yourself in the distorted mirror of your own self-importance.”
The Imitation of Christ is one of the most-sold and most-translated books in human history. John Wesley called it the best summary of the Christian life he had ever read. One quote attributed to Kempis is a personal favorite: “Without the way, there is no going; without the truth, there is no knowing; without the life, there is no living.”
Today’s prayer is an excerpt from The Imitation of Christ: