The Golden Ass

And God spoke all these words, saying, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.
“You shall have no other gods before me.
“You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. – Exodus 20: 1-4

Be still, and know that I am God. – Psalm 46: 10

"We live in a noisy world – and for teenagers who have grown up with mobiles, Facebook and Twitter, a permanent iPod plugged in, to sit in silent stillness can be a revelation. As 28-year-old Johan Vaneeken, from Holland, tells me: 'There are not many places or times in our Western civilisation to be quiet, to be yourself and contemplative – that's very hard to do at home. So I think it's very important there's a place like this.'"
- an atheist reporting on why thousands of young people flock to the Taize community every summer, LINK HERE.

In Part 1 [SEE LINK] of a short blog series on Lectio Divina, I discussed how God originally intended his good creation project to be towards knowing fellowship and relationships with humans and to make Himself known through this royal, representative image of Himself. This God-ordered project of His for which humans were sent on a mission to cooperate with God in completing was interrupted by humanity’s taking and grasping knowledge for ourselves from the center of the universe.

In our particularly modern human history, this additionally became a problem of humans centering their being and identity around our minds and, from there, speculatively grasping by enclosing our minds around a system of thought and thus tending strongly to relate to God as a distant, foreign object of our own speculative knowledge rather as the One “in whom we live, move, and have our being.”

Also, then, in Part 1, I discussed how Lectio Divina is one way to cultivate and train us into relating to God as though He’s the one doing the knowing rather than ourselves (see, for example 1 Cor. 13: 8-13, or Col. 2: 3).

Here in Part 2, I will attempt to articulate how Lectio Divina is one way to help train us into way of relating to work in a similar way as to knowledge.

HUMANS WORKING

And to Adam he said,
“Because you have listened to the voice of your wife
and have eaten of the tree
of which I commanded you,
‘You shall not eat of it,’
cursed is the ground because of you;
in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life;
18 thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you;
and you shall eat the plants of the field.
19 By the sweat of your face
you shall eat bread,
till you return to the ground,
for out of it you were taken;
for you are dust,
and to dust you shall return.”
- Genesis 3

In the beginning of the script for the world, God and man worked together in fellowship and communion towards God’s ordered ends. One of the first problems that arose after the original grasping is that working of the ground – from which we now come and to which we now return - would occur “by the sweat of our brow.” We are humans for whom one of the fundamental urges is to urgently, unendingly, and compulsively reach out and grasp after our images of reality until we have fully and completely finished our project of creating our world using the fruit we took for ourselves from the center of the universe. We presume as though that were possible, anything other than a vain and futile, Babylonian fantasy.

One of God’s solutions to that problem in that scriptural story is Sabbath rest. This requires trust that God is always present and at work, even – and especially - when we stop and be still.

As moderns, characterized by our thinking about the entirety of the world all at once (as discussed in part 1 SEE LINK), the ancient problem of work quickly became our now taken-for-granted frenetic pace of life that far exceeds the natural rhythms, sensations, and perceptions of the human body with its limits and mortality. Also appropriate to the modern world’s essential character of the mind’s encompassing the whole of said world, this unnatural pace has always been naturally doubled with modern imperialism and colonialism. This doubling is part of why we, as moderns, predominately suffer through lives of anxiously desperate striving to keep up with the “powers of this world" whose tools are death and alienation.

The Temptation of St Anthony, engraving by Martin Shongauer, c. 1470-1475

Lectio Divina is a way to tap into a different history from the one dictated to us by those powers with which we are generally tempted and trained to strive to imitate and with which we are compelled to compete. As discussed by Henri Nouwen in The Way of The Heart, one of the original Northern African Desert Fathers, St. Anthony, was born into wealth. When Anthony heard the Word spoken into his soul during Lectio Divina (twice), he sold all of his wealth and gave it away to the needy. He then entered a life of prayer in the wilderness.

For more basic information on the nature, idea, history, as well as on the “how to” of Lecito Divina, CLICK HERE.

Lectio Divina is one of the ways that originated from long before the dawn of modernity that Christian tradition has handed down to us to address what has now become a problem of the frenetic, mechanical, and anxious pace of modern life in order to identify with and trust in the “powers” of our modern world.

"Silence is the only phenomenon today that is 'useless'. It does not fit into the world of profit and utility; it simply is...Silence stands outside the world of profit and utility; it cannot be exploited for profit...It is 'unproductive'. Therefore it is regarded as valueless...Silence gives to things inside it something of the power of autonomous being. The autonomous being in things is strengthened in silence. That which is developable and exploitable in things vanishes when they are in silence." - Max Picard, The World of Silence.

For this reason, theologian Sarah Coakley leads a prison ministry whose central feature is contemplative prayer. It's very freeing for the inmates, and the prison guards don't know what to do with that.

One of the most basic and original facts of the kind of mystical prayer from which Lectio Divina arose was that it began when Desert Fathers such as St. Anthony were suspicious of and saw the danger in the union between the Catholic Church and the enslaving power of the Roman Empire. They saw and felt in their bones how such powers formed and shaped their desires and thoughts. Their response was to – like Jesus - be exiled to the wilderness of the desert, where they came face to face with such temptations of power, productivity, and profit. They sought to be formed by a different and greater power.

Some moderns, rather than being worried that Lectio Divina is "too subjective" (see Part 1) tend more towards being suspicious of what they perceive as closed-minded, disengaged speculations of the mind as itself a form of exile. And, these moderns, rather than being suspicious of personal forces getting in the way of the production or appearance of "objective" truth, are more weary of the death and alienation wielded by our "powers" towards productivity and profit. These people will likely tend to see Lectio Divina as too harsh, set, formulaic, or rigid. What it may help those tempted in that direction to realize, however, is that the "movements" of Lectio Divina are those of the Spirit. They are not impersonal gears in a machine. Lectio Divina is not a capitalist, industrial factory with smokestacks. A more appropriate image for Lectio Divina than liturgical factories with smokestacks is the person of Jesus. "Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom."

GOD’S DIVINE WORKING

The center and climax of Lectio Divina is the free(ing) gift of rest in the presence of God. Note St. Anthony's expression in the above engraving. To quote "Father Josh" from the video in Part 1 (LINK TO VIDEO HERE): “We simply spend time looking at Him and letting Him look at us…[it’s] a time where we gaze at Him and He gazes at us.” As we rest in stillness of “centering prayer” before the Face of God, we give ourselves over to what we trust is a wellspring of healing, creative waters from the Spirit at the true center of all of existence, a center that we accept as being something – or more accurately the One - who we cannot begin to even fathom what it means to reach out and grasp. “Do not cling to me, Mary…”

The first commandments are about proper worship and against idolatry, against worship of created images. Lectio Divina is traditionally likened to the gift of a awe and wonder-filled, worshipful, God-honoring communion feast with the Uncreated. In “contemplatio” – as part of God’s transformation of his people into His image through the presence, power, and Word of the Master Wordsmith - our false images of God are put through the gift of a cleansing and purifying fire.

“In the modern world language is far from…worlds of silence. It springs from noise and vanishes in noise. Silence today is no longer an autonomous world of its own; it is simply the place into which noise has not yet penetrated. It is a mere interruption of the continuity of noise, like a technical hitch in the noise-machine – that is what silence is today: the momentary breakdown of noise. We no longer have definite silence and definite language, but simply words that are being spoken and words that have not yet been spoken – but these are present, too, standing around like tools that are not being used; they stand waiting there menacingly or boringly.” – Max Picard, The World of Silence (p. 40)

Lectio Divina, then, is not a noisy, technocratic method that we work to conjure for ourselves our fantasy world. Nor do we control it and our words as a tool to create a powerful prayer experience or to feel exciting emotions. The four movements of Lectio Divina, rather, are one means of cultivating a re-union of the creative, powerful movement of words with their beginnings in silent stillness.

It’s an attempt to get out of our own way for a moment to allow God’s work of Creation to re-occur in our bodies, desires, souls, and minds. This occurs in and through the whole of our being so that – counter to the “powers of the world” - we may participate with God in His re-Creation project.

Notably, the Desert Fathers who exiled themselves from Roman influence did return to “society.” People were then drawn to them, because they were able to present a new, more whole and healthy image of humanity and the world.

[Prayer] brings together the sense of awe at the transcendence of the God who made the world, with the sense of intimacy that this same God wants to be in personal touch with his human creatures.

This … is what we find in the Psalms and elsewhere in the Jewish scriptures; and it is this that comes to full expression … in and through Jesus. For the Christian, prayer is simultaneously the adoration and wonder of contemplating, and thanking, God the creator and redeemer, and the awareness of an intimate and loving relationship bubbling up from within, which shapes the character and the content of prayer so that it reaches out to embrace the suffering world – and all kinds of particular needs and problems within it – and finds that it embodies the presence and healing love of Jesus himself as it does so.

- N.T. Wright

P.S. – for some transformative gifts of sights and insights given during Lectio Divina in my life, see the following links. I didn't put all those there with the intention that my reader both read all 10 of these, necessarily. I just put those here so that you one might, if they so choose, use however many of them they want to get a more particular and concrete idea of what the actual happening of Lectio Divina is like, as compared to my talking about or explaining it from a distance:

1. Sit, and Listen to Me: on Mark 3 and the passionate, all-consuming, fiery gaze of Jesus, LINK HERE
2. Luke 7, where Jesus relationally honors both the “sinful woman” and the sinful Pharisee at the same time, LINK HERE
3. On the relational humility of God where Jesus turns water to wine in John 2: 1-11 - LNK HERE.
4. On The Beatitudes as a patriarchal blessing and naming of the people of God who take up their cross and follow Jesus - LINK HERE.
5. On Mark 10: 17-31, where both Jesus (and Peter and the church) and the rich young ruler embody different parts of the story of Abraham - LINK HERE.

6. A lesson on trust, generosity, humility and pride from the poor widow in Mark 12: 38-44 (this one only partially involved Lectio Divina) - LINK HERE.
7. Less directly Lectio Divina but a similar insight given in prayerful consideration of and over a passage: On our hallowing of a humble God in The Lord's Prayer - LINK HERE.
8. Psalm 46: 1-7 on loving faithfulness through trust in the presence and work of the Spirit in The Creating of The Nations - LINK HERE
9. An insight given in prayerful reflection in Psalm 37 on the humility required for understanding our place in the world - LINK HERE
10. An exploration of the gift of security in trust in the authority of Jesus - Temptations to Quarrels Bred In A Loveless Desert: On Luke 4 - LINK HERE.

P.P.S. - For a more detailed and academic treatment of Lectio Divina, if one so chooses, SEE THIS LINK to "Lectio Divina: The Great Spiritual Practice."