Lent's Best Weapon

 

The question asked by Lent is often read as, “What will you give up this year?”  St. Benedict focuses on this question when he directs us: “let each one deny himself some food, drink, sleep, needless talking and idle jesting” (RB 49:7).  Most of us have memories of caffeine free, sugar free, or snack free Lent, with accompanying withdrawal pains—not all of them physical!  Refusing our own stubborn self-will whatever its little heart desires, even craves, is a salutary exercise, open to expansion into other areas of life such as habits of judgement, criticism, and complaint.  And, of course, their often-hidden companion, gossip.

 However, I would like to suggest a different image for self-denial.  We do not have to look very far or very deep to discover the issue of “too-muchness” in our lives and in the world around us: too much food and drink, too much money, too much “stuff,” too much activity, too much of everything except time!  Lurking behind all this too-muchness is the specter of unchosen deprivation: too little food and drink in countless places at home and abroad, too little money for necessities, too little clothing, too little shelter, too little education, too little employment.  Lent does not forget these harsh realities:  one of the strong traditional practices of the season is alms-giving in all its forms. 

 However, for many of us “too-muchness” deafens us to the sufferings of those who have too little.  Lent sharpens our attention on what hinders generosity at its root: the tiny world of me and my personal too-muchness in all its forms.  For Benedictines, devoted to and defined by the Scriptures as we are, St. Paul points to a powerful tool for addressing correction imbalance in ourselves, before we try to take on the world’s problem and our own contribution to them.  After reminding us that the real battle in which the cosmos is immersed is not with flesh and blood but with the powers of evil that so often manipulate humanity to its mutual destruction.  The monastic tradition, since all the way back in its desert days, has always taken that battle very seriously.    And so must we.  St. Paul proposes a list of armor and weapons that is well worth pondering in this season (Ephesians 6:10-17, to which I would add vs.18), but among them is one that particularly strikes my attention: “the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God” (Ephesians 6:17).

 The Letter to the Hebrews adds: “the word of God is living and effective, sharper than any two-edged sword” (Heb 4:12). Further, it penetrates “between soul and spirit, joints and marrow, and [and is] able to discern reflections and thoughts of the heart” (also v. 12),  Surely at one time or another, all of us, in the course of our lectio or praying of the Hours have had the experience of being cut to the heart by a word, a phrase, an image, a story from this bottomless well of life that is always at our fingertips.  As we travel through Lent, we can make ample use of this very powerful weapon, not of our own design but of God’s, to cut through the layers of our life, exposing various cherished bits of too-muchness, and, deeper, exposing what needs or desires drive us to accumulate them.  We may sometimes want to make use of those needs and desires as excuses—hark back to Adam and Eve in the garden, hiding in the bushes and defending their “little” dietary transgression by all sorts of finger-pointing (Gn 3)!  It can be very enlightening and empowering to uncover the deeper reasons for our too-muchness in our past, but translating reasons into excuses is just finding a better set of bushes to hide in.  The Sword will free us by cutting away all the bushes, if can find the courage to see ourselves naked, stripped of all our subterfuges, disguises and, yes, excuses.

 This Sword comes with no instruction manual.  There is only one real instruction we need in the process of our Lenten conversion from slavery in all its varied and sometimes subtle forms to the freedom of the Spirit.  It’s the one St. Benedict himself puts in our hands: “Listen!”  Not, of course, with the ears attached to the sides of our head, but with “the ears of the heart”.   While sharp objects are not generally recommended for dealing with wax-deafened ears, the Sword that is God’s Word cannot be bettered as a remedy against self-chosen deafness! 

Try it!  You might not like it—I often don’t! —but you will certainly come to hear more and more clearly St. Benedict’s encouraging words: “What, dear brothers and sisters, is more delightful than this voice of the Lord calling to us? See how the Lord in his love shows us the way of life…. Do not be daunted immediately by fear and run away from the road that leads to salvation. It is bound to be narrow at the outset. But as we progress in this way of life and in faith, we shall run on the path of God’s commandments, our hearts overflowing with the inexpressible delight of love"  (RB Prologue 19-20.48-49).

Oh, and when you take up this sword in the form of your Bible or book of Hours, remember that it is “living and active” because the Word is not primarily a book.   The Word of God is a Person, the Person we are called to prefer above all else:  Jesus Christ (see John 1:1-14).  

©2022, Abbey of St. Walburga

 

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

 

 

 

Lectio Divina: Think Small!

 Think of St. Benedict in his tower at Monte Cassino.  Think of the library of codices to which he had access. (If you weren’t born knowing this, the codex was a stack of pages bound together at the left side, like modern books, as opposed to the scrolls that preceded it.  And no, I wasn’t born knowing that either!) Most likely, the library shelves held single books of the Bible separately bound and single works of the early Christian writers because a whole Bible or a collection, say, of all the sermons of St. John Chrysostom, would have been physically unmanageable. Think of reading laboriously hand written texts, before the advent of the Carolingian miniscule provided clear spaces between words, lower case letters, and other improvements made for legibility.  Think of reading by daylight coming through very small window openings.  Think of reading by the light of small wicks floating in olive oil.  Look at the books on your shelf or stacked by your chair or on the nightstand by your bed, or available on your phone or e-reader.  Different worlds!  And most of us would not prefer to return to St. Benedict’s!

 We have been well trained by our consumer culture to believe that more is better, large is valuable, and new is preferable to old.  So when we take out our Bibles, Old and New Testaments handily bound together and perhaps supplemented with other useful aids, we may think thoughts like, “I’d like to read the Book of the Prophet Isaiah from beginning to end for my lectio this year.”  If we’re organizers, we might plan to read a set number of chapters a day for and perhaps assign a set amount of time for the task—say, finishing the whole book in a year.  (Don’t laugh: I did that one year, though I didn’t set a twelve-month time limit.  Just as well.  By the end of the second year I had finished Chapter 31 out of the 66.  I wasn’t getting any younger, so I switched to the nice little Gospel according to Mark!)  We might persevere—as I did not—but then we might start looking at the Table of Contents and thinking this book is taking too long and maybe we should try something new, maybe a book we have not read.  (This is not including the times when we might be lured to put aside the Bible altogether and try that latest spiritual bestseller touted by Amazon!)   And we might find ourselves discouraged by all we have not read.

 St. Benedict would have been baffled.  As we read his Rule, we might begin to notice the number of small gems, single phrases or verses, he quotes, apparently from memory as scholars have not always been able to track down what Latin version he used.  Many of them have been lifted from their original context in the Bible, like jewels taken from a bracelet and turned over and over to catch the light reflected from different facets and treasured for what they offered, regardless of their original context.  An example for us might be one of my favorite verses: “Your word is a lamp for my feet and a light for my path,” lifted out the extraordinarily long Psalm 119 and treasured for itself alone.  Like many verses, it gathers others to itself from altogether different settings:  “I am the light of the world,” and “the one who follows me will not walk in darkness,” and “the light that cannot be extinguished,” and “you are the light of the world.”  And those never get old. 

 What St. Benedict’s tradition teaches us is that oft-repeated bit of advice:  when you are reading for lectio, word count is unimportant, pages covered irrelevant, books checked off our list in their entirety not the point.  When a single line, or a single word, reaches out from the page and jabs you in the ribs, stop and pay attention!  Turn it over and over in your mind (or, better, your heart) for as long as it yields its juice.  Return to it again later when it calls out to you.  Carry it around in the pocket of your mind to pull out and re-examine later in the day. If that’s a matter of a day, or a week, or a lifetime, think of it as gift and don’t worry about achievement.  In the library of the Reign of God they don’t put stickers on our library card for every book we finish.  And they don’t give out prizes at the end of the summer for those whose cards boast the most stars!

 When you sit down to do lectio, think “slow,” think “small,” think “deep.”  And consider do-overs a rich blessing!

Copyright 2021, Abbey of St. Walburga

Lectio Divina 1

As you can see, this is the first post to be added after a long interval, for which I apologize.  Circumstances beyond my control have changed, so I hope to post much more regularly from now on. 

This is the first in a series of posts on Lectio Divina, the style of prayerful reading of Scripture characteristic of Benedictine prayer.  

What is lectio divina?

Lectio has also been called by the more modern name “slow reading.”  Stories are told of people in situations where they had no access to reading material beyond the book or two currently in their possession. So they read what they had very, very slowly, pausing to chew over each word or sentence before going on to the next one.  And when they had finished, they started over at the beginning.  That’s a bit hard to imagine in a society where reading material overflows shelves, libraries, and web markets to the point that we finally have to admit we will never, ever finish the list of books we want to or think we should read.  It’s not true for everyone of course, but it’s truer for more people now than has ever before been the case.

Early generations of Christian and monastic readers couldn’t have imagined such a plethora of reading materials.  They couldn’t even have imagined the plethora of Bibles we have readily available.  They had to rely on handwritten texts that were few, expensive and fragile.  Or, more often, they had to rely on their own memories to rerun scriptural passages they had heard read in church.  But what they had available, they read and re-read and pondered and drew out deep nourishment for the hungry heart.  They also left us the legacy of lectio divina that developed over time.

Lectio is “slow reading” focused on Scripture or other spiritual classics.  It follows a pattern practiced for centuries before it was finally recorded by a Carthusian monk named Guigo in the twelfth century.  The pattern is very simple:  after you’ve chosen a text (more about that in a later  post), you simply read it.  Perhaps you read a whole passage to start with, perhaps not.  Then you read it again very, very slowly.   (Gather up everything you’ve ever learned about speed reading and lock in a closet in the back of your mind.)  You read your chosen text over and over again, pausing to chew over each word or phrase or sentence before going on to the next one. Early authors compared it with cows chewing their cud.  At some moment in this very patient process, God (sometimes disguised as an anonymous inner inspiration) will likely interrupt with an insight, a thought, a connection that invites you to stop and think about it.  Out of your reading and pondering, you find yourself turning to God in prayer, which may be simple conversation or quiet awareness.  Sometimes the quiet awareness will take over and keep you still in God’s presence for a while, briefly or longer.

That is the general pattern, but it has a thousand exceptions.  It’s a pattern drawn from long years of Christian practice by lay people, clerics, and monastics.  It’s a pattern—not a rule! Sometimes you may find yourself reading—slowly, though!—without any interruption or inspiration at all until the time you’ve set aside comes to an end.  Sometimes a few words will send you off into a long reflection or conversation with God, so that there is no recognizable boundary between reflection and prayer.  Sometimes, you’ll go back and forth among the pieces of the pattern over and over again.  Or sometimes, you’ll be seized by silence right at the start.  Or you’ll be silent for a time and then be drawn to read….You get the picture!  It’s a personal interaction between you and God, not a controlled set of obligatory steps!

The pieces of the pattern came to be identified and named:  lectio (which means reading), meditatio (which means meditation, but more on that in a minute), oratio (prayer) and contemplatio (silent presence).  “Meditatio” requires a little historical footnote.  Originally, it didn’t mean thinking about a text.  It meant reciting it over and over and over in your mind, squeezing the juice out of it simply by reciting it and letting it do its own work.  That could be done during one’s prayer session or while one went about simple manual labor. You might call it getting the text “by heart.”  Meditatio later came to mean reflection, asking the text questions or thinking about the questions the text is asking you.  It can still mean either or both!

There is also a fifth piece of the pattern that is taken for granted but not named.  It’s the takeaway, as we might call it now.  The Word of God doesn’t actually sit still once our prayer time is over.  It tends to come back and tap us on the shoulder from time to time, maybe often, maybe not, as we go about our day.  In other words, the conversation begun in lectio continues.  And the monastic tradition encourages readers to let it, or, better, encourage it!     

Next time: Why lectio?

© 2020 Abbey of St. Walburga