Unless You Make My Word Your Home: Part I

Thanks to Dawn Hardison for this report of the conference given by Sister Genevieve at the November 10, 2013 General Meeting.  The conference was quite long, so the report is here published in four posts.

Sr. Genevieve continued the past couple of conferences on Biblical prayer centered around Exodus 3, with a different text today, one that is important to her.  It is from John 8.31-32.
            “If you make my word your home, you will truly be my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”  John 8: 31-32 (Jerusalem Bible)

Sr. Genevieve asked:  What qualities do you want in your home?  We want our homes to more than temporary quarters, more than a motel room.  The word home conveys more than the word “house”.  It conveys a whole set of relationships.  It’s not just a shell for an isolated individual, even if we live alone or prefer to have a lot of alone time.  A home is not just an impersonal shell – one size fits all.  It reflects something about us, supports what we would like to be, we, individually, we, as family groupings, or however your household is arranged.  It reflects our values.

When is it that you want to go home?  When you don’t fit in somewhere, if you’re in the hospital, after work, if you’re lonely, if you’re tired.   We have lots of times when we would like to be at home – it isn’t always possible.  And we have lots of things that we mean by home; it may be your present home, or a home in your past, or, in a moment of nostalgia, your family home.  We have particular times when we want to go home – I think also when we are frightened or in threatening circumstances – just get me home!

So let’s think about how our relationship with the Bible fits those notions of the qualities of home and when we want to go home.  If we truly make God’s word our home, what qualities will we look for when we go there?  Will we look for warmth?  Will we look for welcome?  Will we look for hospitality, genuineness, respect  or laughter?  We can find all those things in our relationship with God’s word, but we have to work at it a little bit, because we are not quite used to thinking about that in terms of words on a page or in terms of words spoken by somebody we can’t see, or words that come from times and places long ago and far away.   So we might not feel very much at ease there when we start out. 

How do you become more at ease in a home?  How does your home become welcoming?  You put in personal touches.  “Oh, no!” you say, “We can’t do that with the Bible.  We can’t re-write the Bible!”  But in fact that’s what we do after a fashion with Lectio Divina.  We reflect on the scriptures, and some verses – lots of different verses over time -come to have particular meanings for us that they might not have for somebody else.  They might be associated with some particular time, events, or challenges in our lives. 

Sr. Genevieve mentioned that when she was a novice in her first community she lost her temper (she regrets to say) with a senior sister.  She was subsequently sitting in the chapel, basking in her justified anger with this person – who luckily for her didn’t just reach right around and sock her.  They had to read the scriptures for 15 minutes before Vespers every night, so Sr. Genevieve took out her assigned passage, and God having the sense of humor that God has, the passage assigned to her was “Love is patient.  Love is kind.” Sr. G. really wanted to just crawl under her chair.  There really was no escaping that.  That passage has had a particular significance for her ever since.  

Or, recently she has been giving conferences to various of her assigned communities on Psalm 23 (The Lord is my Shepherd) which she memorized when she was 10 years old.  She was in a Catholic boarding school and the Sister said they had to memorize something from the Bible.  So she memorized Psalm 23, and at that time she was not a Catholic, and so she memorized it in the King James Version,  which is still embedded in her mind.  She can understand the other ones, but what she thinks of is that one. 

So she was giving a conference to the brand new postulants, who were clearly wondering “how can we have one class, never mind more than one on this Psalm. She went through a lot of it in detail with references to what it could mean, what the text actually says, how it’s a map of the spiritual life, how it says more than you think it says.  For example, in the opening part, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want, He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, He leadeth me beside still waters, He restoreth my soul,”  which suggests that the sheep is coming from somewhere else that had led it to need to be restored.  Well, they spent either two or three classes on this, and at the end they were sitting there with their mouths open, thinking “this simple little Psalm!”.  And she said “You know, this is not the way I thought of it when I was ten years old!”

So, over time, the Bible passages become deeper and deeper and deeper, and richer and richer.  Some of them may never speak to us.  There is no rule that every word of scripture has to speak to us.  But the ones that really do speak to us, either as challenges, or as insights, or as something inviting us into a deeper life with Christ, those have a meaning for us that they might not have for anybody else.  So they’re our home in a very particular sense.  And we know we are in our home, not somebody else’s home when we are dealing with that. 

And of course, every time we pray the scriptures, we are entering into a deeper relationship with Christ, the Word of God made flesh.  So all of the relational qualities we are looking for in our home, we should hope to find in our relationship with Christ. Including laughter.  It’s not all solemnity and dust and ashes.  There can be a lot of joy.  There can be a lot of laughter.  I’m convinced that God has a sense of humor. 

So you can find everything that you’d want in a home relationship in the word.  But how does that happen?  You have to take lots of time.  Home doesn’t become a home the day you move in.  You have to go there often.  You have to find the places in your home that welcome you.  You need to find the passages that speak to you when you’re tired, when you’re lonely.  For example, if you’re tired there are passages like Psalm 62 – My rest is in God alone, a whole reflection on rest.  Or come to me all you who Labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest from Matthew 11:28.  This is a great passage for after work.

As we spend time with the scriptures we begin to find places that we want to go to at times when we have special needs for our home, when we’re lonely, when we’re frightened, when we’re down.  There’s a very interesting author, one of the desert fathers.  The desert fathers were the early Christian monks, many of them but not all of them hermits, who didn’t have a whole lot of resources, no big library.  But they did have the scriptures.  They sometimes had some other kind of venerable texts.  But they spent a lot of time reading the pages of their own lives and what they found in their hearts, and what they found in there.  So they are great teachers of wisdom.  You sometimes have to get past their imagery a little bit, but they are great teachers of wisdom. 

This particular teacher, Evagrius of Ponticus, who examined those movements of the heart that later came to be known as the seven deadly sins.  As he reflected on those, he wasn’t concerned about them as sins, he saw them as temptations.  These are the ways evil messes with us and tries to draw us in.  Pride, greed, lust, vanity – there is a whole list.   But this became kind of a common monastic theme for reflection, because these people were all alone.  They didn’t have a whole lot of protection against the darker side that comes up.  They couldn’t flip on the TV or go visit the neighbors.  (They did sometimes go visit the neighbors, but they were encouraged not to do that as a way of getting out of confronting these things.) 

Evagrius wrote a book called Talking Back.  It finally has become available in English.  I’m not going to encourage you to buy it, it’s rather expensive.  You have to apply the principles to yourself and we will talk about this in some future conference.  For each of those movements, like anger, for example, he draws up a whole list of Biblical texts you can talk back to the demon of anger with, to fight it off. 

For instance, one of the movements that is not listed (and I find that very interesting, among these eight thoughts or passions) is fear.  Perhaps they were not as afraid as we are now.  But when I am afraid, there are Biblical texts I talk back to my fear.  “The Lord is my light and salvation.  Of whom shall I be afraid?”  And you needn’t worry if they are not exact quotations.  We all kind of adapt the words.  Learned Christian writers have always done that.  So over time you acquire a library of texts for making yourself at home, for talking back to the more negative sides of your life, for finding your meaning, for keeping yourself connected with Christ, because you know how hard that is when the day is unfolding. 

How do we get those libraries?  How do we make the scriptures our home?  For one thing, I would strongly recommend to you, if you are not doing this already, go there at regular times, whether you feel like it or not.  If you don’t feel like it that’s the time you most probably need to go.  So set yourself a regular schedule for Lectio Divina. and a regular schedule for praying whatever part of Hours you pray.  Don’t get scrupulous about it, but try to find times you’ll usually be able to hold yourself to. Those of you who are not Oblates yet can move into that.  Because you go home at set times, don’t you?  Not necessarily at the same time every day, but at the end of work, or whatever is your day off, you go there. Home becomes home by our going there, and expecting to go there.  Going home from work becomes a wonderful expectation “I’m leaving that behind and I’m going home now”. 

The same develops with Scripture so that after a while the day doesn’t feel right if your time of prayer is in the morning and you don’t start off with that.  Or if your time of prayer is in the evening, your day doesn’t feel right if you don’t finish up with that.  And sometimes you can’t, just like sometimes you can’t go home when you want to.  But the habit of going home to the Scripture creates in us the kind of familiarity that lets us develop a whole vocabulary, and it develops over a whole lifetime.  Passages that might have meant something to you when you were younger kind of lose their flavor and something new comes to the fore. 

The two Benedictine practices that particularly assist this process of going home is first of all the daily hours – those have a regular rhythm.  Whatever book you are using usually will require you to pray texts that you might not have chosen for yourself.  And sometimes those are the very best ones.  Because the divine sense of humor picked them, when you did not. 

Secondly, daily Lectio Divina, or regular Lectio Divina if you are not able to do it every day.  Spend time immersing yourself in the scripture.  And if Lectio is unfamiliar we will talk about that later.    But particularly I would like to suggest to you the four phases of Lectio.  Be careful! These are not four rules.  The four phases of Lectio are first of all lectio, which means reading – you have to start by reading.  The second is meditatio, which seems to translate easily into meditation, and it does, but that actually has two different meanings.  The one that is more common and that appeals to people is thinking about the text, or meditating.  But the original meaning was to simply repeat the text over and over and over again.  Murmuring it to yourself, so that basically monks were expected all day long to have this library of texts in their head, maybe the text they read for lectio this morning, and just keep repeating it.  And it will make its meaning known if you do that. 

Sr. Genevieve has begun to do that again recently, and has discovered it’s the best way to get back from all the distracted places she wanders into.  She’s come to rename it “what is my default thought? What thought will I default to today.”  Not too long ago it was “In the beginning was the Word” and then she brooded about the fact that in all beginnings there is the Word.  So when she would find herself wandering around the house thinking destructive thoughts like “Why is she doing that?” she began to work harder to go to her default text.  And it’s amazing how calming that can be.  It keeps you calm and focused, and then you can go on.  

Just think about doing that, taking something short – a phrase, a sentence, or even a picture or an image from the Biblical story, or even a feeling from it – however you work in your interior life.  Carry it around with you, pull it out real often during the day, and see if that doesn’t help feeling at home. 

Copyright 2013  Abbey of St. Walburga