Think Slow: Lectio Divina Revisited

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