The Golden Ass

"…Lectio Divina. This is the practice, whether individually or in smallish groups, for spending prayerful time with a particular passage….The important thing is that symbolically and practically what this says is that we are trying to be still before the word of God, to listen to what the Spirit is saying to the church and to ourselves, and not least to listen for what the Spirit may be saying through one another. And in all this we are embodying and celebrating in advance the new creation to which scripture points and which the Spirit brings into reality.” - N.T. Wright (SEE LINK)

“The Bible is not a textbook. Nor is it a manual to be studied, mastered, and mechanically applied. Instead, pastor and author Eugene Peterson believes we should listen to the Word of God and reflect upon it like poetry till it infiltrates the soul…he draws upon the ancient practice of lectio divina as a way for leaders to humbly listen to Scripture and experience transformation ...the practice allows busy pastors to slow down and listen once again to God…” - from a Christianity Today article featuring an interview with Eugene Peterson on Lectio Divina (SEE LINK HERE).

Here begins a short, two-part blog series intended as a quick introduction to an ancient form of prayer called "Lectio Divina," which translates in Latin to "Divine Reading." CLICK HERE for a link to Part 2 of this blog series.

GOD'S DIVINE KNOWING

But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. 5 For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” 6 So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. 7 Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.
8 And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.
- Genesis 2

According to Christian scriptures, the beginning of the world is communal fellowship between God and humanity in an inchoate world where God gives his royal, representative image – that’s us - the mission to multiply and spread his presence through us and to cultivate, tend to, and protect His good creation project, towards God’s end or goal of bringing His creative order to bear upon all of creation.

The first problem we encounter in and of the story of this world as humans occurs when we reach out and grasp for ourselves a forbidden fruit of a tree of knowledge that grows at and from the center of our universe. One of the ways those same scriptures give us to address that problem is to engage in and practice speech that both doesn’t originate in and with ourselves and also isn’t ordered to our own ends or goals. We call it prayer.

As moderns, the first problem we encounter in and of the modern world is when we step back and presume our very existing to be known through a speculative view that encompasses the entirety of the universe with the eye of the mind, with our own thinking. (This is why everything modern is systematic: the word system comes from the Greek word for “all”)



One of the ways Christian tradition has handed down to us to address that problem – from long prior to modernity - is to practice a form of encounter in which we don’t read the scriptures so much as they read us. We call it “Divine Reading,” or as it’s more commonly known: Lectio Divina. It is traditionally practiced as a form of prayer. It’s been said of Lectio Divina that, with it, we come not to master the text but to be mastered by it. We don’t go to grasp and enclose. Rather, we come to listen and receive.

Thus, Lectio Divina is not intended as a means to becoming a spiritual giant. It asks us to bow and submit. The idea is to bow and submit before the very presence of God embodied in and through His spoken Word. This traditionally occurs through four, or sometimes five, “movements.” They are referred to as “Lectio” (reading), “Meditatio” (meditating or pondering), “Oratio” (praying or responding), and “Contemplatio” (contemplating). Sometimes there is a fifth movement or step: “action.” The above video gives a very good and concise explanation of the basic idea and four movements of Lectio Divina.

"Seek in reading and you will find in meditation; knock in prayer and it will be opened to you in contemplation.” – St. John of the Cross on the four movements of Lectio Divina.

HUMAN KNOWING

The second problem of modern knowing – a problem in this case not shared by ancients – is that, in our speculative mode from the eye of the mind of the whole of reality, humanity and the world are bifurcated. Our being is bifurcated between, on the one hand, the speculative eye doing the seeing and, on the other, the objects being seen (whether objects of the human self and identity or objects in and of the world). When human history built this problem upon the well cultivated soil of humanity’s urge to grasp knowledge for ourselves rather than entrusting ourselves to our Master who knows and fashions us, God came to be imagined more readily, easily, and primarily as an external object of our speculative knowledge rather than as the One “in whom we live and move and have our being.” As G.K. Chesterton says: "For the moment we have a view of the universe, we possess it."

Modern modes of studying and teaching such as inductive bible studies and expository preaching can and should clearly be helpful. They have their place. But, they also tend to perpetuate this second modern problem of humanity’s attempts to know God. Lacking presumptuousness, Lectio Divina is not a better or singular way to know God. Just like expository preaching or teaching, Lectio Divina is one (kind of) attempt to get out of our own way of a God who is in passionate pursuit of knowing us. It is not meant to replace other forms of prayer or study but to be an element of a woven tapestry of seeking God that constitutes our life.

“In the ancient world, one read to be persuaded to live in a particular way, in contrast to modern practices of reading where one typically reads to be informed.” – K. Jo-Ann Badley and Ken Badley, Slow Reading, Reading Along Lectio Lines, LINK HERE

This reading “to be informed” implies precisely the above noted speculative distance. Our modus operandi is predominantly from a kind of disenchanted and dispassionate disengagement, a place of fundamental dis-interest.

So, the most basic reason for Lectio Divina as compared to other forms of prayer or study is to stop talking and listen, to stop conceptualizing by grasping our minds around God as an object of our own knowledge and to open ourselves in awe and reverence to the presence and work a God of divine mystery who has, in His loving Grace, made Himself known in the flesh of His Son. Christ is the redemption and re-making of a humanity bifurcated after an original grasping, a grasping which is now a particularly modern grasping towards the enclosure of the mind around a system of thought that disengages us from ourselves, the world, and God.

The Son has fulfilled the promise of God being “all in all.” In other words, because of and in Jesus Christ, “God is everywhere”. Jesus is the fulfillment of His original goal in the script for the world, and we are extensions of his body WITHIN the world. But we tend to read and pray the scriptures as though that’s not the case. This is because, like the very Earth itself, we tend to place ourselves in relation to God as a distant object of the speculative knowing of our own mind.

Lectio Divina is an ancient tradition of prayer handed down through many generations that helps us to address these two problems of knowing. Rather than grasping for ourselves, we do seek in “meditatio”, but the idea is to wait on the movement of the spirit to illuminate rather than to grasp for ourselves. We do speak in “oratio,” but it is in response to the speech of the Word. We don’t DO anything in “contemplation.” We die to our own striving and speaking and thus open like a seed to the presence of God through the Spirit in silent stillness.

One common way of explaining Lectio Divina, then, is that we don’t study and analyze the ways in which scripture teaches us that Jesus Christ is our peace. Rather, with Lectio Divina, we assume that the Word is alive and active through the scriptures. We thus actively encounter and engage the peace of Christ through the Word as articulated in scripture and thus formed in and through us. We don’t study and analyze the story. We enter it, become it, and embody it.

As moderns, contrary to the "entering" and "embodying" of the movements of the living Word in Lectio Divina, our speculative disengagement is required for and built into a presumed "neutral objectivity" that we hold so dear. Also as moderns, then, any "movement" out of that dis-interest and back inside the actuality of living or praying can have a strong tendency to appear to us as something that is too "subjective." Before modern dis-interest was a thing, however, ancient practitioners of Lectio Divina taught the importance of avoiding error in "meditatio" by and through its being preceded and accompanied by "lectio" (or reading) of scripture. In that sense, Lectio Divina and modern expository preaching or teaching and inductive bible studies are attempts at articulated orders towards the same end.

Rather than seeking to know God the way we study a long dead and dissected frog as an object of our own knowledge, however, Lectio Divina - or “divine reading” - helps us to engage the Living Word who is the breath of Life. Rather than treating the scriptures as a textbook to be analyzed, we come expectantly before the passionately-loving Face of God mediated through the gift of the scriptures. We don’t do this “to be informed.” In Lectio Divina, we instead approach God in order to be transformed into the image of the Son, the Son who is both the redemption and remaking of humanity into its original, good wholeness and also into the One in whom we “live and move and have our being.”

"Interviewer: What have you discovered, or what insight was revealed to you, about yourself that you may not have had if you did not respond to this call?

Intervieweee: I discovered that the more transparent I become in describing my inner spiritual experience, the more prisoners respond. It’s as if my deepest secret longings are not unique to me, or unique at all. These subtle interior wounds are no different from prisoners’ own deepest longings. My sense of abandonment, estrangement from God, aloneness in the universe matches theirs. What started as self-revealing disclosures ends in a community of relationships that I never expected."

- from: Teaching Centering Prayer to the Incarcerated (SEE LINK HERE)