Deepening Your Spiritual Roots
Listening and Discerning God's Voice
in Our Lives through the Practice of
Lectio Divina
This is a reprint of something that I created for our church community to encourage and empower folks to deepen their spirituality and mature their faith through a regular experience and discipline of reading scripture...not as an intellectual excerise, but as a spiritual experience and practice. Lectio Divina is an ancient form of meditation and scripture reading that is meant to empower us to turn "off" our head and to think and listen with our hearts and lives to what God is doing around us, in us and inviting us to let God do through us.
What is Lectio Divina?
The Bible is the Word of God which is always alive and active, always new. Lectio Divina is a traditional way of praying the Scriptures so that the Word of God may penetrate our hearts and that we may grow in an intimate relationship with the Lord. "Lectio Divina", a Latin term, means "divine reading" and describes a way of reading the Scriptures whereby we gradually let go of our own agenda and open ourselves to what God wants to say to us. In the 12th century, a Carthusian monk called Guigo, described the stages which he saw as essential to the practice of Lectio Divina. These are:
lectio (reading) where we read the Word of God, slowly and reflectively so that it sinks into us. Any passage of Scripture can be used for this way of prayer but the passage should not be too long.
meditatio (reflection) where we think about the text we have chosen and ruminate upon it so that we take from it what God wants to give us.
oratio (response) where we leave our thinking aside and simply let our hearts speak to God. This response is inspired by our reflection on the Word of God.
contemplatio (rest) where we let go not only of our own ideas, plans and meditations but also of our holy words and thoughts. We simply rest in the Word of God. We listen at the deepest level of our being to God who speaks within us with a still small voice. As we listen, we are gradually transformed from within. Obviously this transformation will have a profound effect on the way we actually live and the way we live is the test of the authenticity of our prayer. We must take what we read in the Word of God into our daily lives.
The practice of Lectio Divina as a way of praying the Scriptures has been a fruitful source of growing in relationship with Christ for many centuries and in our own day is being rediscovered by many individuals and groups. The Word of God is alive and active and will transform each of us if we open ourselves to receive what God wants to give us.
God is still speaking…we often have a hard time listening and/or recognizing God’s Voice. For the past month we’ve been talking and reflecting upon hearing God’s voice in Scripture, relationships, events in our lives and our community life together. It can be difficult to discern God’s Will for and with us in the midst of the many voices that we hear in our daily life. Some of these competing voices/wills include: the media, our culture, our daily to-do-list, our family, our selfish desires, our well-meant intentions that are too stubborn to conform to God’s timing, our doubt in God, and even our self-doubt, disbelief that God would speak to me, ever need me, or choose to work through me.
I want to offer you a challenge of practicing Lectio Divina on a weekly basis this summer in view of deepening and/or discovering your own personal faith spirituality. Below is a list of scriptures from Luke for the summer months. They’re the scriptures that we’ll listen to each Sunday in Worship at Fruitvale Presbyterian Church. Take 15-30 minutes each week to reflect, pray and listen your way through these scriptures. You can try this spiritual practice using the following 3 lectio divina-based questions each time you pray through a scripture:
What word/phrase/image grabs your attention as you read the scriptures?
Where does this words touch your life – or our life as a church community – today?
How is the Spirit of God inviting you to change, or act through this scripture?
Three gospels in the New Testament offer similar portraits of the life of Jesus; Luke is the third of them. Its author, traditionally Luke the physician who accompanied Paul on some of his missionary journeys, draws on three sources: Mark (via Matthew), a collection of sayings (known as Q for Quelle, German for source) and his own source. It is a gospel that emphasizes God's love for the poor, the disadvantaged, minorities, outcasts, sinners and lepers. Women play a more prominent part than in the other gospels. Luke never uses Semitic words; this is one argument for thinking that he wrote primarily for Gentiles.
Throughout June, July & August we’re reading sections from Luke that scholars repeatedly call a “mini-school of discipleship.” They contain many parables, stories, and teachings meant to invite us to deeper, maturing faith.
The Gospel according to Luke in
July 15 Luke 10:25-37
July 22 Luke 10:38-42
July 29 Luke 11:1-13
August 5 Luke 12:13-21
August 12 Luke 12:32-40
August 19 Luke 12:49-56
August 26 Luke 13:10-17
If you have questions, comments or want to talk over your discoveries email me at mcclainmonte@sbcglobal.net or leave messages on the blog itself to encourage and empower others in their faith journeys...
If you have questions, comments or want to talk over your discoveries email me at mcclainmonte@sbcglobal.net or leave messages on the blog itself to encourage and empower others in their faith journeys...
Another great link I know of provides you with a daily experience of Lectio Divina and Centering Prayer. Here's the link to Sacred Space - an online Jesuit resource from Ireland...fantastic! [HERE]
Blessings - Monte
2 comments:
I like this exercise. I think it takes practice though. And I see now I was not supposed to read all the scriptures tonight. What is it called when you pray for guidance and God speaks to you through others? That happens to me. Sometimes I think the Bible is very negative. I know. That is blasphemy. Sorry. And I sometimes get lost in parables.
Hey Corn Dog,
Again thoughtful. Lectio Divina is great...challenging though. It's a real discipline, a practice to develop, deepen and mature. Some mystics say that you can only really do LD in community, that you need to hear the comments, insights, and vision of others in order to hear God's Spirit speak more clearly. Maybe that's what you're talking about. You just focus on one passage - not too long - with the goal not so much of analyzing or understanding it bu rather of listening to and through it.
I think that God is speaking to us through each other often. The Spirit of God makes community/relationships happen, creating a relational web or vortex in which we live, move and have our being for multiple reasons.
The Bible does have many negative messages, seemingly very violent and destructive. The challenge is reading,understanding and listening for the Word of God underneath the stories from worldviews and cultures that seem so foreign and distant to us today.
Getting lost in the parables is easy - in fact it's the point. Jesus teaches in parables to get us to lose ourselves, to step out of our perspective (I know this wasn't what you meant...) The mystery and grace/gift of the parables is that is listening to and through them we are opened to a transformation...it's more of a process of change and redepemption than an effort to understand. It's like when you have those "ah-ha" moments...that's what the parables are meant to birth and do within us.
Hope this helps. Keep practicing the Lectio Divina. I love the Sacred Space page...it's really helpful for me in the midst of the busyness, enabling me to slow down and be centered even just for 5 mintues.
Courage and Peace
Monte
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