Hurry, hurry, hurry!
Sometime it feels as if this is a shared mantra, driving many of us to get
too much done in too short a time. Even
contemplative nuns face this pressure at times!
What is unfortunate is that it can creep into our practice of lectio as an unwelcome stranger cracking
an invisible whip.
A better mantra would be: take your time, take your time,
take your time—or rather take God’s time, which is rumored to open a door into
eternity! When it comes to the frequent
choice between the tortoise and the hare, even the ancient Greek fabulist knew that
wisdom put its money on the tortoise. (If you don’t happen to have a copy of Aesop’s
Fables in your library, you can download one for free at Project Gutenberg. If this link does not work, just go to www.gutenberg.org.)
In a quirky book on the Liturgy of the Hours entitled Crossing: Reclaiming the Landscapes of Our
Lives, English Benedictine monk Mark Barrett introduced me to the practice
of slow reading by describing the experience of a World War II POW who had only
one book available to him. He
disciplined himself to read very slowly to make the book last, but he
discovered in the process that slow reading led him to deep reading, which was
its own gift. And I do mean slow reading, with much rereading and
savoring. With books abounding all
around us, and all the books of our very large Bible available to us, we are
under no deadline except the ones we give ourselves. But reading to deadline, any deadline, works
for our loss, not our gain.
Consider taking a
single psalm—perhaps one as short as Psalm 1 or Psalm 23—and putting it through
a very patient inner juicer that seeks to extract every drop of meaning, every
hint of reference to our real daily experience, every glimmer of insight into
our relationships with those we love and those we don’t, every tiny invitation
to pursue a connection with another phrase in a different psalm -- all with the
patient inspiration of the Holy Spirit as our reading companion. Consider setting a different kind of
deadline: I will NOT finish this psalm
till the end of two weeks of daily lectio.
And be prepared to discover with surprise that two weeks aren’t quite
long enough! Suddenly a text as long as the Beatitudes--with 100 stories of
different people we know or have read about behind each one--seems like a
six-month’s work!
Each of has to find our own best pace, but the discipline of
“slow and steady wins the race,” as
Aesop put it, is an invaluable tool for genuinely contemplative lectio.
Try it! You might
like it! Or you might hate it, but if
you don’t try, you’ll never know!
_____
Reference:
Mark Barrett, OSB. Crossing:
Reclaiming the Landscapes of Our Lives.
Harrisburg PA: Morehouse Publishing, 2001.
©2021 Abbey
of St. Walburga
