I entered Pacific Lutheran University in 2007 as a first-generation college student who grew up void of a faith tradition. I never really struggled with my lack of religious identity.

As recent as six months before graduating high school, it didn’t cross my mind that I’d attend PLU. I was a Spanaway native who always assumed the “L” excluded me from consideration.

Then I toured campus and stayed overnight. I learned PLU’s middle name wasn’t a label, but rather a philosophy — a philosophy that energized me. I didn’t have to be Lutheran. The Lutheran in PLU means “come as you are, leave a better version of yourself.”

I returned to the university in similar fashion earlier this year. An unexpected vocational shift landed me in charge of a magazine showing others the value of Lutheran higher education — the commitment to big questions, inclusion and thinking within and beyond yourself that fundamentally changed who I am.

I still don’t identify with a faith tradition, and yet I’m here writing a story about an illuminated, handwritten Bible that inspired me from the moment I first examined its pages in Collegeville, Minnesota.

The Saint John’s Bible captivates me for the same reasons I was pulled to PLU. It’s beautiful. It’s accepting. It’s a vehicle for bringing people together to ignite collective spiritual imagination, to reflect on what matters most in the world.

My journey with PLU is not a journey of faith or lack thereof. It is, instead, a journey of embracing the values of Lutheran education. I am a champion of those values for the same reasons I am a champion of The Saint John’s Bible.

My story about the Bible describes its creation, purpose and connection with those who interact with it. The stories that follow embody the intersection of the book’s primary themes — hospitality, transformation and justice for all people — with the core tenets of Lutheran education. Each themed story is paired with an illumination from The Saint John’s Bible, as well as a related Martin Luther quote.

So, while I’ve never been profoundly affected by any religious traditions, I continue to embrace PLU’s middle name religiously. Once you learn more about the values that prop up the middle name, I believe you’ll embrace it, too.

“I refuse to believe we can’t find common ground here. We have to heal the divides in our country. Not just on guns. But on race. Immigration. And more. That starts with listening to each other. Hearing each other. Trying, as best we can, to walk in each other’s shoes. So let’s put ourselves in the shoes of young black and Latino men and women who face the effects of systemic racism, and are made to feel like their lives are disposable.”

Clinton’s words echo the goal of PLU’s Listen campaign — confronting the important question, “what happens after laying out the welcome mat?”

CREATING A SENSE OF BELONGING

The difference between welcoming and belonging is distinct. It’s the difference between being invited into someone’s home and feeling comfortable enough to walk into the kitchen and pour a glass of water, in the words of Rose McKenney, PLU’s chair of geosciences.

Wallace said welcoming invites students to come to campus. Belonging means checking up on students after they’re invited to come to campus.

“PLU could do a little bit more outreach,” Wallace said. “PLU could have staff and faculty check up on students a little bit more often.”

Belonging is about all students from all walks of life feeling ownership over their spaces on campus, said Angie Hambrick, PLU’s assistant vice president for diversity, justice and sustainability.

She said students of color at PLU are “hypervisible” and sometimes they want and need to be in a space where they are like everyone else. It’s how they recharge, she added, in order to bear some of the big questions about social justice that they have no choice but to confront on a daily basis.

PLU is having an ongoing conversation about trying to create more of these spaces, Hambrick said. In addition, Taiwo said PLU must hire more staff and faculty of color who understand students’ struggles.

“To truly feel that I belong or students belong, it isn’t just welcome to PLU,” she said. “It is ‘welcome, we’ve carved a space for you.’”

Kiana Norman-Slack ’17 echoed Taiwo, stressing that PLU must have professors who can facilitate discussions about race in the classroom.

“Multicultural sensitivity is a big thing to possess as faculty,” Norman-Slack said. “PLU is predominantly white, so it’s harder to have these discussions when there’s only one or a few people of color in the classroom.”

Jes Takla, director of residential programs, said it’s important to use students’ first names to build a sense of belonging. Authentic listening must be the goal.

FACING MICROAGGRESSIONS

Many people from diverse backgrounds at PLU recognize the systemic challenges that minority groups face in society and on the university’s campus. They also recognize the need for change.

Confronting microaggressions remains a primary challenge. Microaggressions are subtle, often unintentional, comments or actions directed at a minority or marginalized group that may cause offense or reinforce harmful stereotypes. Some examples from the mouths of PLU students, faculty and staff include:

“You’re pretty for a black woman.”

“You don’t look or sound Hispanic.”

“You look like a girl.”

“What are you?”

Wallace says he always reminds himself that microaggressions aren’t intentional.

“When I respond to microaggressions, I try to educate,” he said. “A lot of times, people aren’t trying to send microaggressions on purpose.”

Still, the impact is there, Hambrick says. She describes microaggressions as “death by 1,000 papercuts.”

“The intent doesn’t diminish the impact,” she said.

Hambrick said microaggressions exist in all spaces on PLU’s campus, just as they do in all spaces off campus, most prominently around race and gender identity. For example, the refusal to use preferred pronouns when talking to transgender students.

The silver lining at PLU is the university’s commitment to caring for others, Hambrick said.

PLU has always touted a mission of inclusion; the next step is making real progress toward modeling the type of inclusion it describes in its mission, Hambrick said. In other words, moving from a campus that welcomes diversity to a campus that creates an authentic sense of belonging for all students, regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation or gender identity.

Tyler Dobies ’16 said it is difficult to face microaggressions every day. As a person of color at PLU, Dobies felt as though he had to raise his hand to be heard in class discussions, despite fellow white students “speaking out of turn, half raising their hands or interrupting people.”

“That’s not to say they’re rude people,” Dobies said. “But I think that they’ve grown up with the idea that everyone who speaks will be heard, but that everyone does not include everyone. It only includes a certain group of people.”

While it made college more challenging, Dobies says he tried to avoid letting it dictate his student experience.

“I don’t go home after class and mope. Not because I don’t feel bad,” he said. “I have to set aside those feelings so I can continue to learn and grow.”

Still, Dobies said people must not remain silent and allow microaggressions to continue.

“If we don’t take the time to educate,” he said, “it won’t necessarily get better.”

Hambrick said the university is trying to take proactive steps to get ahead of national conversations surrounding social justice. That shift in philosophy creates an intentional, proactive approach to improving students’ sense of belonging, particularly those who have felt marginalized in the past.

Wallace welcomes the messiness. He says if the learning feels forced one day, he saves the conversation for another day.

“I don’t like to give up on people and I don’t like to give up on things,” Wallace said. “It all goes back to listening. Growth requires you to listen.”

Jonathan Adams ’16 has worked hard to help improve the university’s approach to inclusion. Among other efforts, he was heavily involved with a video project as part of the Listen campaign, documenting people’s raw feelings about confronting microaggressions and how to overcome them.

Adams said this campaign is PLU’s chance to get it right.

“This is it,” he said. “Nobody’s asking for perfection. It’s asking for active acknowledgment. We need to actualize our ‘now what?’”

Moore was one of 23 artists who worked on 160 illuminations throughout the book, the first handwritten Bible since the invention of the printing press in the 15th century.

The 1,165-page manuscript, which has yet to be bound, and its authentic reproductions are massive — seven volumes, 2 feet tall and 3 feet wide when open. It takes 14 people to carry the whole thing into a church.

So, I couldn’t carry it. But I can tell its story. For me, the story mirrors Pacific Lutheran University’s mission — a deep commitment to liberal arts learning, care for others and social justice.

The Rev. Michael Patella, who led the Committee on Illumination and Text that guided the theological thinking of the project, said it best on that hot summer day in Minnesota: “Faith and reason are not at odds.”

Gazing at the book feels like looking into history that hasn’t become history yet.

The art bursts with life. Butterflies and other insects, based on species native to Wales and Collegeville where the book was conceived, look as though they were plucked from nature and adhered to the pages. The detail is stunning. Inspecting the original pages with a magnifying glass in the Saint John’s University archive feels more like looking at colorful fossils in stone than paintings of bugs in a book.

Light glistens on the gold leaf, dancing around the illuminations with every slight pivot. The sparkling accents throughout the book represent the presence of the divine.

Women and marginalized people can see their faces in the artwork. Science, anthropology, history, multiple faiths and more stand on equal ground, from the subtle use of DNA strands in the illuminations to the recurring use of Hebrew and Arabic text throughout the book.

For the illumination “Genealogy of Jesus,” Moore said it was an “extraordinary stroke of genius” to depict a menorah as Jesus’ family tree. “Those spiritual traditions often have more in common than things that divide us,” she said.

I always come back to the first illumination in The Saint John’s Bible when people ask why I was in Collegeville learning about a Bible; it summarizes the book’s narrative in a neat little package.

The story: Creation.

The task: creating an image of the story without making anyone mad.

No easy feat, but it seems the artists got it right.

Seven panels denote the seven days it took for God’s creation. The image juxtaposes light and dark, chaos and order, all peppered with the familiar gold leaf, symbolizing the divine.

What is most striking, though, is the incorporation of multiple disciplines: satellite imagery of the Ganges Delta; prominent rock paintings that include one of the oldest depictions of a woman on the planet, a huntress from Nigeria; and fractals, geometric shapes that encompass never-ending patterns.

“That’s just the first page, folks!” exclaimed Tim Ternes, director of The Saint John’s Bible program. But he didn’t need to underscore the significance; the book already had my full attention.

Then comes the illumination “Adam and Eve.” It is an image that helps me reconcile my long-held criticisms of Eve’s depiction in the Bible, a story I’ve always interpreted as placing the fall of humankind on a woman’s back. The pair in the illumination look androgynous (intentionally, I later learned) and have painted faces, inspired by photographs of the Karo tribe of the Omo River in Ethiopia — a beautiful nod to current anthropological theories that humankind evolved from our predecessors there.

For the first time, I saw an image of the beginning of humankind that made sense to me, an image that didn’t ignore what I’ve learned from textbooks. More importantly, it made me believe someone who looks different than me could see themselves in the story, too.

The Book of Psalms adds another layer of enchantment. A computer program recorded visual patterns of sound waves, drawn from audio recordings of psalms, chanting and sacred music from various religious traditions. Those visuals transform into a marriage of fluttering lines that dance on the pages, illuminated with gold trimmings and vibrant colors.

The sound waves of psalms run horizontal; those of the other traditions — Islamic, Jewish, Native American and more — run vertical. Together, they create an inclusive tapestry of sound that you see rather than hear.

The idea is to honor the physics of sound, which reverberates through the universe forever. For me, thinking about sacred music from all religious traditions coming together to represent the infinite nature of sound is a beautiful ode to universality. It’s unclear where the psalms end and the sacred music from other traditions begins. That’s poetic.

Donald Jackson, the official scribe for the queen of England, wanted to create a handwritten Bible since he was a boy.

In 1981, Jackson visited Saint John’s Abbey for the first time and knew right away that its partner university could be a contender to commission his lifelong dream. And eventually, it was. “Immediately he said to himself ‘these guys get it,’” Ternes said.

I understand the reaction. The church itself embodies artistic vision, with striking architecture that includes a breathtaking floor-to-ceiling wall of stained-glass cells that resemble a beehive.

A separate, equally meticulous process involved unprecedented printing techniques. The paper was carefully chosen to mimic the feel and weight of vellum. The transparency between pages was re-created with care, and the binding and embossing was done by hand.

Jackson penned the final word in 2011. After all was said and done, only nine corrections were made in the entire book. Not bad when accounting for the potential for human error with a project of that scope.

Even the Bible’s mistakes were beautiful, treated as artistic opportunities rather than errors, an homage to humanity’s imperfections.

PLU welcomed the Gospels and Acts volume, as well as several framed illumination prints, Sept. 15 to begin its year with The Saint John’s Bible. The event included a presentation by Moore, the illuminator from Vashon Island.

Moore said the potential for an endless audience was the biggest draw for her participation in the project — an audience too broad to measure.

“We’re imagining an audience that’s unimaginable,” she said. “It can be very personal and hopefully universal.”

It’s clear that Moore and I aren’t alone in our deep connection to the The Saint John’s Bible.

When the volume arrived ahead of its debut at PLU’s library, where it will be displayed for a year, a group of eager professors and administrators gathered around the book. They thumbed through all of it (with squeaky clean hands, of course).

Every page sparked gasps, followed by awestruck silence. Each person leaned in closer, carefully examining every detail. They chuckled at the whimsically marked mistakes and marveled at the texture of the gold leaf.

Moore says many people have told her that the book keeps bringing them back. I understand the sentiment. I’ve yet to grow tired of looking at it.

“Can you ever see everything there is to see?” I asked Moore.

“We can’t predict that,” she said.

And that’s how The Saint John’s Bible will live forever, in spirit, well beyond its 2,000-year shelf life.

“We hope it will be something that will last,” Moore said.