Tag: contemplative practice

• Contemplating Calm Awareness

  The contemplative psychiatrist, spiritual director, and author Gerald May wrote in his book Will and Spirit: A Contemplative Psychology:

  Water is a commonly used metaphor for consciousness and awareness in both Oriental and Western traditions. Sometimes consciousness is seen as a vast ocean, constant and unruffled in its depths, and awareness as its more variable surface, sometimes tossed about by winds and currents, sometimes still and calm… In the East, and especially in Zen, awareness is often likened to clear water in a bowl. In this analogy, the water ideally reflects all there is around it, clearly and without distortion. A favorite Zen example is that of water reflecting the moon with total accuracy. This “clear mind” of Zen is the pure and immediate awareness that we have called intuition. It does not really “perceive” or “take in” anything, but impeccably reflects all that exists within its field.

  May goes on to point out that two problems can arise that can impede the clarity of the water’s reflection. First, the water might be turbulent: think of how a reflection is broken when a rock is dropped into a pool. Water that has been stirred up cannot accurately reflect with clarity until it settles back down. The second problem is if the water itself is dirty or filled with silt. Here, even if the surface is smooth, the cloudy quality of the muddied water prevents it from truly reflecting the moon (or whatever it is that it might be mirroring).

  

  For contemplatives, this represents two qualities that we might seek when we enter silence. The first is calmness and the second is awareness. When we can maximize calm awareness, we are able to truly “reflect” the light in our minds and hearts that comes from the Spirit.

  Turbulent water, in the bowl analogy, represents life that is stirred up by emotions and attachments. For many of us, this is our default setting. We are an excitable species, prone to powerful feelings such as jealousy, envy or rage. Even relatively “minor” emotions such as annoyance, self-consciousness or low-level angst can feel like a kind of inner turbulence.

  It’s important not to assume, from this analogy, that emotions are therefore “wrong.” That can be its own kind of subtle dualism that can lead to thinking spirit = good and body= bad. It’s better to approach this is the spirit of Ecclesiastes 3: “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.” Emotional and feeling-responses to our relationships and environment certainly have their place, but there are times when we attain greater clarity by discovering a way to be non-attached or non-grasping toward such inner turbulence. Like stirred up water, the “solution” to turbulent feelings is to find enough interior space to allow the emotions to gently calm down of their own accord. Resistance is not generally helpful — getting irritated at ourselves for feeling irritated generally just makes the inner stirred-up-ness worse rather than better.

  As for the sediment that can keep water from being clear, that represents ways in which we dull our awareness. If stirred up water has too much energy, muddy water has too little. We can be lethargic or sleepy from not getting enough sleep, eating too much, not enough exercise, or simply feeling overwhelmed by how over-stimulated or distracted our live may seem. Many of us are chronically fatigued for medical reasons, but we might also suffer from ongoing sleep deprivation. Boredom or feelings of powerlessness or  hopelessness might also contribute to this kind of dulled awareness.

  Cleaning and Calming Our Inner Oceans

  The truth is, as May puts is, “More often than not in normal daily life, the water is both muddied and turbulent. Most of the time we live with awareness that is to some extent dulled as well as restricted.” In other words, this problem of being overly agitated and/or simultaneously dull and lethargic is something many people struggle with in our society.

  So, if you find that your “inner bowl of water” is anything but calm and clear, resist any temptation to feel ashamed or to blame yourself. This is the default setting of our society.

  Now, if your inner angst or torpor is caused by a medical condition, addiction, or a mental health issue, then please turn to the appropriate kinds of caregivers to help you address your concerns. Once again: no shame! When situations arise, we need to turn to those who can help us.

  Assuming you aren’t struggling with an addiction or some other health concern, what can be done to move from agitated lethargy to calm awareness?

  Speaking from the contemplative tradition, I believe there are three steps that can yield tremendous benefit. First, we need to establish or strengthen a daily discipline of silent prayer; then, we need to be gentle with our distractions and “bad prayer days,” and finally, we need to persevere, for both calmness and awareness yield their richest fruit over time.

  1. Establish (or strengthen) a daily practice of silent prayer. It’s been said that 90% of life is simply showing up, and this is certainly true of contemplative discipline. Making a commitment to prayerfully be still and silent in the presence of God, as a daily practice, is the single most important step on the path to calm awareness. Most contemplative teachers and traditions recommend praying twice daily, ideally for 20 to 30 minutes per session. Many people struggle with this ideal — like any other good habit, starting small is usually helpful. If you can’t swing 20 minutes a day, commit to 10. If twice a day is too difficult, try for at least once a day. Contemplation’s rewards are cumulative (see #3 below); but that hardly matters if we never start. So begin already! And if you’ve already begun, then see if you can stretch your practice a bit: maybe now is the time to go for 20 minutes each time you pray, and/or to open your practice to twice a day rather than just once. Contemplative prayer is a gift you give both to God and to yourself. Be generous in the giving.
  2. Be gentle when you experience distractions, sleepiness, or other less-than-perfect times of prayer. No one is perfect. That not only explains bad days at work and fights in an otherwise loving marriage, but it also should guide us in how we experience prayer. Some days will be better than others. Some days we just feel distracted and out of sorts. Other days we might be sluggish and sleepy. It’s important to recognize that imperfections are par for the course and that we will grow faster through encouragement than through criticism. If you have a “bad prayer day,” encourage yourself to try again later (or tomorrow). When you get lost in distractions, take time to breathe deeply and remind yourself that you seek both calm and attention. If you’re sleepy, take a moment to yawn deeply (get your lungs full of oxygen), stand up if you need to, maybe sing a verse of your favorite song. You can monitor your energy level, and calm yourself when you’re agitated or energize yourself when you’re lethargic. And if nothing works, you have another chance in 12 hours. Which leads to the final step:
  3. Keep on keepin’ on: Persevere, for the fruit of silent prayer emerges over time. Perseverance is considered a virtue for good reason. “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” and neither do we master contemplative practice in just a short time. It’s humbling to accept the fact that something as simple as silent prayer takes time for us to get the knack of; and yet, that’s just the way it is. Think of the psychological process of habituation: how we learn to ignore stimuli that doesn’t not benefit or threaten us. For example, I live less than a mile from a train track; when we first moved into this house, the train would wake me up in the middle of the night; now it no longer does, even though it still runs at all hours. I’ve become habituated to the sound. Likewise, over time we learn to be less distressed by both useless distractions and sluggish sleepiness when we pray. As our prayer becomes more and more undistracted, we begin to experience calm attentiveness more and more effortlessly.

  A Final Point to Remember

  As a type of prayer, contemplative practice is different from other forms of meditation. We don’t just do this to master a technique, but rather to deepen a relationship. We seek the calm, attentive stillness of interior silence so that we may lovingly enjoy the presence of a compassionate God. Being awake and alert while resting in a vast, oceanic calmness is a profoundly glorious way to “be still and know” the presence of the limitless, boundless God whose Holy Spirit has been given to us in our hearts (Romans 5:5). But it’s important to remember that this is not a race or a contest. God loves us, just as unconditionally, even when our prayer seems to be distracted or torpid. Keeping our gaze ultimately on the lavishness of God’s love rather than the quality of our performance is itself a devotional practice — a trusting way to highlight the very beauty we hope our stillness might reflect.

  April 24, 2020

  attentiveness, calm, contemplative practice, contemplative prayer, contemplative spirituality, Gerald G. May, silence, silent prayer, Will and Spirit

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• Ora et Labora and Right Livelihood: Some Notes Toward a Contemplative Spirituality of Work

  Most of us spend a lot of time working — so what is the spirituality of work? And how does work impact, or integrate with, our spiritual practice?

  The motto of Benedictine monasticism is Ora et Labora. It’s Latin for, “Prayer and Work” or “Prayer and Labor.” I love how the ora is actually found within labora, suggesting that prayer is (or can/should be) a part of work.

  Compare this to the noble eightfold path of Buddhism: the Buddha’s prescription for how to balance one’s life in the interest of finding liberation from suffering. One of the key eight disciplines is “Right Livelihood” — suggesting that having a mindful, conscious, ethical relationship with one’s work is an important part of liberation.

  I imagine for many people it might be easy to ignore or under-emphasize the question of how spirituality impacts work (and vice versa). Perhaps it’s too easy to create a firewall between our lives at work and our spiritual practice.

  Most of us recognize how not to mix work and spirituality. For example, too many workplaces have that  annoying guy down in the accounting department who will talk your ear off about Jesus if you let him — the one who always wants to know if you’ve been saved or not. Thanks to overzealous folks like that, we’ve learned that bringing religion, or even spirituality, into the workplace is bad form (and frowned upon by H.R.). So we keep these two aspects of our lives separated.

  But is that always skillful? Could there be a spirituality of work that does not succumb to the annoying-displays-of-religiosity, but instead is holistic, mindful, compassionate, and wise?

  You Work More Than You Realize

  For most of us, there are at least 81,000 reasons why we need a healthy relationship between spirituality and work.

  Consider this statistic. If you work from age 21 to age 65, let’s say 40 hours a week, with (on average) ten holidays, and twenty personal (vacation/sick) days each year; then over the course of your lifetime you will invest more than ten thousand days — or 81,000 hours in work.

  And realistically, many of us work more than that — because we don’t always have (or take) that many holidays and personal days each year; plus many people work significant amounts of overtime, or have to juggle two jobs to make ends meet. And not everyone wants to (or can afford to) retire at 65. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that some of us will log in over 100,000 hours of work in a single lifetime.

  Mary Oliver famously asked,

  Tell me, what is it you plan to do
  with your one wild and precious life?

  Whether we like it or not, many of us devote a good chunk of our lives to work. So if we take our spiritual lives seriously, it’s important that we find a meaningful spiritual understanding of the work we have chosen (or have been given) to do.

  A Healthy Spirituality-of-Work Begins with a Healthy Spirituality

  Maybe the reason why it’s too easy to erect a firewall between work and spirituality is because we’ve seen too many examples (like the guy in the accounting department that I mentioned above) of people who bring their spirituality (or their religion) to work in clearly unhealthy ways. Perhaps the first thing we need to do is be clear about is the difference between healthy and unhealthy spirituality.

  Unhealthy spirituality has poor boundaries. It wants to control others, and it insists that there is only one “right” way to be spiritual (or religious). It can be arrogant, it typically involves naive or fundamentalistic belief systems, and it tends to be judgmental and moralistic, rather than compassionate and understanding. This is the kind of spirituality that has, quite sensibly, made most people allergic to any displays of religiosity or spirituality in the secular workplace.

  A healthy spirituality, by contract, is a spirituality which seeks to understand rather than to control. It’s a spirituality that begins with a recognition that every human being is imperfect and has a shadow side, but also that every human being is capable of incredible imagination, creativity, and compassion. So it is a spirituality that seeks to affirm what is good more than it fusses over correcting what is not. It understands that in a diverse and secular workplace, spirituality often needs to be handled with discretion and respect for others. It’s a spirituality that accepts differences in belief and practice, and so it seeks to affirm what people share in common rather than just highlighting was sets us apart. Most importantly, it chooses compassion over competition, never seeking to win points at the expense of others but rather trying to find ways to help everyone to “win.”

  Another important quality of a healthy spirituality is that it almost always has a contemplative dimension to it. Therefore, I believe that a truly creative spirituality of work will likewise be contemplative in nature.

  I believe that in most of the world’s religions, you can find examples of both healthy and unhealthy types of spirituality, because these are human characteristics, not just expressions of religious teachings.

  So the first thing I would say: if we want a healthy spirituality-of-work, we need to begin by cultivating a healthy spirituality in general terms. Without the foundation of a spirituality grounded in contemplation, compassion and care, the likelihood of fostering a truly creative approach to the spirituality of work will likely get nowhere.

  What Would a Healthy Spirituality of Work Look Like?

  Looking at the broader picture, I’d like to suggest seven principles worth considering as we seek to foster a truly dynamic relationship between our inner lives and our work.

  1. A healthy spirituality of work understands that work is an integral part of life as a whole. Just as you cannot separate “spirituality” from the rest of life in a holistic way, likewise, work must be understood in a similar holistic way. If we have an unhealthy relationship with work, it will affect life in general. If we are aggressive and hyper-competitive in the workplace, those qualities will impact other areas of life. If we allow ourselves to behave unethically or without compassion in the workplace, we can be sure that this will impact other relationships as well, including the relationships we hold the most dear: with family and close friends. So the first key to a healthy spirituality of work is recognizing that we must find ways to be authentic about who we truly are: at work, as well as in our times of meditation and contemplation.
  2. A creative spirituality of work fosters inner growth and personal development, but also honors ordinary tasks. Many jobs, from cleaning the house to performing one specific task on an assembly line, may seem to be tedious and mundane — hardly a means to expressing personal growth or creativity. But even the most humdrum job can be improved upon, so there’s always room for some sort of positive change. Meanwhile, the fact that labor can be repetitive drudgery is not necessarily a bad thing, for all of human life has a cyclical quality to it. Cleaning, maintaining, repairing — some tasks by nature are “quotidian.” A spirituality of work acknowledges this, and finds meaning and purpose even in the most repetitive task. All work is valuable, no matter how creative or how commonplace any given job might be.
  3. A positive spirituality of work understands that spiritual virtues and values: such as hope, compassion, forgiveness, cooperation, among others — belong in the workplace as much as they belong in the home, at our place of worship, or in our recreational life. Life is built on relationships, every human being deserves to be treated with dignity and respect. We need to relate to coworkers, supervisors and employees, mentors and trainees, competitors and contractors, vendors and customers. While the purpose of work is not just to play fun and games, by nature these relationships will be formal and sometimes adversarial. A spirituality of work will acknowledge that work-based relationships have their own inherent value, and deserve to be based on an ethical understanding that people matter more than money or things.
  4. A meaningful spirituality of work recognizes that we need a purpose for work beyond just earning an income. Spiritually meaningful work has to be of service, and has to make a difference in people’s lives in a truly positive way. All work has an element of self-interest to it: I show up at the office every day because I need the income and the satisfaction of using my skills effectively. But if we stop with self-serving reasons for work, we cut ourselves off from much that can be truly rewarding. How does my work make a difference in the lives of others? How does it contribute to the common good? How will it make the world a better place, especially for my children? Such questions can help us discern the true value of our profession.
  5. A compassionate spirituality of work recognizes that the challenges of the marketplace — fierce competition, relentless urgency, and lack of customer loyalty — must be met with spiritual values that seek to elevate, rather than debase, our professional relationships. Work takes effort, and success requires discipline and demanding performance; it’s not easy, and it can be stressful and at times discouraging. A spirituality of work faces the challenges of our professional lives with confidence and industriousness, but also recognizes that when work seems meaningless or soulless, that sometimes we have to renew or labor with values that are bigger than the demands of the marketplace. Work is only one part of life, and so the values that govern life as a whole sometimes need to inform our work, to keep it meaningful.
  6. A joyful spirituality of work understands that hard work ennobles our humanity, but alienating or soul-crushing work is a problem that needs to be addressed. St. Benedict encouraged a life of both prayer and work because he recognized that even the hardest or dullest work can be occasions for prayer, if a person is so spiritually oriented. But likewise, even the most exciting or rewarding work can be soul-deadening if it occurs in a hostile environment or if the worker’s overall life is unbalanced. Part of any effort of labor is a willingness to discern what works about the work — and what doesn’t. The days of loyalty to the big corporation are over (the big corporations are rarely loyal to their workers!). So each laborer must be willing to make changes when necessary to keep their working lives spiritually rewarding.
  7. A contemplative spirituality of work recognizes that labor and prayer, or work and contemplation, ought to support each other. In the middle ages, monastic writers would sometimes talk about the difference between the “active” life (devoted to work) and the “contemplative” life (devoted to prayer, usually involving live in a monastery or convent). Nowadays, even monks and nuns recognize that they have to work just as much as anyone else, which is why so many religious communities brew legendary beer or make irresistible bread or cheese or candy. The split between prayer and work is fictitious: the most prayerful person still needs the dignity of labor, and the hardest worker still needs time for rest, reflection and renewal. In many professions, workers who wish to excel need to bring a contemplative mindfulness to their work.

  Perhaps you have other thoughts about how to effectively integrate spirituality and work. Whether practical ideas (having a meditation room in the office) or more theoretical, I think this is a conversation we all need to be having regularly. Making the effort to ensure that our work is spiritually meaningful will make a positive difference in our lives as a whole.

  Photo credit: Andrew Neel on Unsplash

  December 18, 2019

  contemplative practice, Labor, ora et labora, Right Livelihood, spirituality, St. Benedict, Work

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• Four Questions about Centering Prayer and Other Forms of Contemplative Practice

  I received the following email from a reader. I’m editing it slightly for the purpose of clarity, but otherwise posting it in its entirety.

  My question hovers around how centering prayer and Cynthia Bourgeault’s expression of it sits in tension with Orthodox traditions of the Jesus Prayer. Bourgeault figures centering prayer as a unique and innovative method of contemplation that represents something new. I’m an Episcopal priest and new is really not my thing. I’m interested in recovery of the ancient traditions of the church — ressourcement as de Lubac, Danielou et all would say — and I wonder about this trumpeting of innovation. Is there really a new method of connecting with God or is this just a new articulation?

  More specifically, I wonder about this hard and fast distinction between so-called concentrative methods and receptive methods — intention vs attention. Centering prayer has made serious hay over this distinction and I wonder if it actually exists. Having done lots of centering prayer intensives, I must say that from my perceptive many people doing centering prayer are spacing out, going to sleep, in the name of contemplation. A little concentrative attention seems to called for — both to recognize what is coming up and to let it go.  I’ve been doing intensive contemplative practice for 25 years and it just doesn’t jell with my experience. I wonder what you think about this “methods fetish” approach to contemplation. It’s about relationship with God in Christ through the Holy Spirit after all!

  Perhaps what it boils down to is a question about letting everything be as it is and the invocation of the name. I find these exist on a continuum. As Theophane says we beat our wings sometimes and sometimes we glide in the silence of resting in God. Both schools of centering prayer and Christian meditation, inspired by Dom Main, seem to instrumentalize what can’t be spoken of or performed as technique — relationship with Christ. I worry that in making contemplation approachable we turn it into a technique and then begin to quibble over the merits of whatever school we are aligned with. That the quibbling also results in book sales/website hits is another more cynical concern of mine.

  My personal experience is that the prayer word changes — it starts as an object of attention, but then becomes the background — awareness itself in which all things arise as awareness. The prayer word dilates from concentrative to receptive and so-called objects of attention are seen are also arisings of awareness/God itself. It’s simply nonsense to say that the Jesus Prayer or mantra practice is the equivalent of whack a mole. It’s silly, dismissive, and belies a kind of “my method is better than yours” rivalry that is totally opposed to the nature of prayer and God’s unconditional love for us.

  My worry is that relationship with the risen Christ gets reduced to a method…. “Concentrative = bad” and “receptive = good.” Bourgeault seems to push this notion and it reduces prayer to technique and not relationship with Christ. I know this is not the intention, but I am concerned that in her “methods fetish” relationship gets reduced to something we do rather that the fruit of full surrender and something God does in us — even if that means using a concentrative technique.

  Broader concerns about the place of repentance and resting in God just as we are as well, but that is enough for now.

  There’s a lot here! Speaking directly to my priest friend: I appreciate your nuanced question — really a series of questions — and there’s no way I can respond to it fully in a single blog post. Unfortunately, your question arrived right as we entered into lent, which for me (like for priests) is a time when my schedule is full. So it might take me a few weeks to get to every topic you mention. I beg your patience, but I so appreciate the questions and I think it will be interesting and hopefully useful for us to explore these topics on this blog.

  To summarize, here’s what I see you’re asking:

  • Question One: Is Centering Prayer “Something Old” or “Something New”?
  • Question Two: Understanding Intention and Attention in Contemplative Prayer
  • Question Three: Prayer as Method, Prayer as Technique
  • Question Four: Rest and Repentance on the Contemplative Journey

  We’ve got four weeks between now and Easter, so I’ll try to respond to each of these on a weekly basis.

  But just a few thoughts now…

  First, perhaps most important, I certainly cannot speak for Cynthia Bourgeault. I’m assuming your questions are inspired by her recent book The Heart of Centering Prayer. Bourgeault freely admits, “I do a few things distinctly differently here from the standard methodology of a Contemplative Outreach introductory workshop.” And while I have read The Heart of Centering Prayer, I’m much more familiar with the “standard methodology” so my answer will reflect my experience rather than any attempt to defend (or attack) Bourgeault’s position.

  Which leads to a related point: obviously I can only speak about centering prayer — or any other contemplative practice — out of my own experience, both as a practitioner and as a retreat leader.

  Finally — perhaps most important — I think it’s important to evaluate centering prayer or any other practice in light of “best practices” — I don’t really care for that term, but I don’t know of a better way to put it. In other words, I’m less concerned about what other people do with centering prayer — whether they appear to be spacing out or falling asleep — and am more concerned with how the practice supports me in my faith journey. But having said this, I recognize that the reader who wrote in is a priest, and so may be expressing some pastoral concern here.

  So that’s another question: how do we support one another to make sure that we are practicing the method well? “Do not judge” is a good rule of thumb for the ordinary practitioner — focus on your own prayer life rather than worrying about the person next to you who seems to be nodding off. But for clergy or spiritual directors or centering prayer group leaders, that’s a more meaningful question, since others have entrusted us to their spiritual care. I’ll try to keep this subtle but important distinction in the back of my mind as I address the above four questions. But in general, it seems to me that if people in leadership positions are taking good care of their own practice, then they are in a better position to offer constructive feedback to others who may need that kind of support.

  If you’re reading this and have any initial thoughts in response to my reader’s email or the above questions, please feel free to post a comment here. Otherwise, stay tuned — we’ll take a closer look at each of these questions in the weeks to come.

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  Update: Here are links to the subsequent posts where I respond to these questions:

  • Is Centering Prayer “Something Old” or “Something New”?
  • Understanding Intention and Attention in Contemplative Prayer
  • Prayer as Method, Prayer as Technique
  • Rest and Repentance on the Contemplative Journey

  March 22, 2019

  attention, Centering prayer, contemplative practice, contemplative prayer, Cynthia Bourgeault, intention, method, technique

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• Lectio Divina

  Some Christians will tell you that the heart of Christian spirituality is reading the Bible. Others will say that the key to mystical intimacy with God is not filling your mind with words, but bathing it in silence.

  The ancient Benedictine practice of lectio divina is the nexus where these two very different spiritual practices come together.

  Lectio divina is a Latin term that literally means “sacred reading.” It is a method of reading — a way of approaching the experience of encountering a text, that enables a person to open the reading process up to the presence of God.

  The written word is a tool, and like all tools, it serves as a means to an end. We read to learn, to gather information, to be entertained, to stay in touch with our best friend from high school or with a blogger from halfway around the world whom we’ve never met in person. Indeed, the ability to read is a profound blessing — one that we typically use to make our lives better.

  What this means, though, is that reading is essentially an exercise in which we maintain (or seek to expand) control over our lives. We read to attain something we may not otherwise have: more knowledge, more pleasure, more mastery, more skill, more data, more fun, more love and social contact.

  Lectio divina turns all of this on its head.

  

  Lectio divina involves reading a passage from the Bible or some other sacred text (such as a work by one of the saints or mystics) as an act of prayer. Rather than a means of gathering information, it is a practice for formation — spiritual formation, in which the reader seeks to be formed by the Spirit of God. Lectio divina does not involve study or scholarship, but rather consists of a slow, meditative, heart-felt encounter with the words of the text.

  Traditionally, lectio is the first of a four-part process of spiritual practice:

  • Lectio — prayerful, slow, heart-centered reading of a sacred text;
  • Meditatio — deliberate pondering of the message in the text;
  • Oratio — responding to God’s message with honest, sincere prayer;
  • Contemplatio — allowing the prayer to dissolve into wordless, thoughtless contemplation, or simply resting in the Divine presence.

  Lectio is a subversive activity, subversive because it invites us to surrender our willfulness and control to the leadings and promptings of the Holy Spirit. Thus, it runs counter to the mainstream values of our Type-A culture. In the intentional slowness of the lectio experience, we are reminded that Christian spirituality emphasizes God’s action and our response. Thus, lectio is a practice in which we learn to discern God’s presence, hidden in the sacred text and in the subtle stirrings of our hearts and minds; and in dicerning the Divine presence, we are called to recognize the deeply relational nature of Christian mysticism: it’s not so much about finding the “God within” (although we learn to recognize the presence of God within us) as about learning to celebrate the mystery of encountering the God who is both intimately one with us and wholly transcendent and other.

  How to do Lectio Divina

  All you need to engage in the practice of lectio divina is a text to read (ideally the Bible or a writing of one of the great mystics), enough time to read it slowly and deliberately, and, ideally, a quiet place where you feel comfortable reading and praying. To allow for not only lectio but the subsequent steps or meditatio, oratio, and contemplatio, allow at least 20 minutes (although half an hour to an hour is ideal). It’s critical not to rush — lectio can be a powerful and transformational practice even when only reading a single sentence or two! Remember, the goal behind lectio is not amassing knowledge or information (you can always supplement your lectio practice with other time set aside for more academic spiritual reading), but rather simply creating the space where God may encounter you via the medium of the sacred word.

  Read a sentence, or a few — up to a paragraph or two. Then slowly re-read the passage, and perhaps even read it again a third or fourth time, as slowly as possible. Instead of analyzing the text, keep an open mind. Let the text read you. Be open to discerning a particular word or phrase that speaks to you with particular meaning or relevance. When you encounter such a word or phrase, stop reading! That is your signal to move on to the reflective, “meditatio” stage of the practice. In meditatio, ponder thoughtfully about what this particular word or phrase means to you, and how God could be using this word to communicate with you. Eventually, you may feel inspired to engage in your own verbal, prayerful response to God’s word: this is the oratio stage. Pray honestly, simply, sincerely. Remember, you pray not to make a good impression, but to simply be intimate with the One who loves you. Eventually the words will drop away; at this point allow the wordless silence to embrace you as you simply sit in God’s presence.

  Congratulations — you now have tasted the riches of this venerable spiritual practice. Make time regularly to engage in this slow but rewarding form of prayer.

  For Further Reading

  • Enzo Bianchi, Praying the Word: An Introduction to Lectio Divina
  • Michael Casey, Sacred Reading: The Ancient Art of Lectio Divina
  • Michel de Verteuil, Let All the Peoples Praise Him: Lectio Divina and the Psalms
  • Mary C. Earle, Broken Body, Healing Spirit: Lectio Divina and Living with Illness
  • David Foster, Reading with God: Lectio Divina
  • Thelma Hall, Too Deep for Words: Rediscovering Lectio Divina
  • Stephen Hough, The Bible as Prayer: A Handbook for Lectio Divina
  • Tony Jones, Divine Intervention: Encountering God Through the Ancient Practice of Lectio Divina
  • Mariano Magrassi, Praying the Bible: An Introduction to Lectio Divina
  • Mario Masini, Lectio Divina: An Ancient Prayer that is Ever New
  • Silvester O’Flynn, Come and See: Lectio Divina With John’s Gospel
  • M. Basil Pennington, Lectio Divina: Renewing the Ancient Practice of Praying the Scriptures
  • Eugene H. Peterson, Eat this Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading
  • Ghislaine Salvail, At the Crossroads of Scripture: An Introduction to Lectio Divina
  • Karl A. Schultz, How to Pray With the Bible: The Ancient Prayer Form of Lectio Divina Made Simple
  • Martin L. Smith, The Word is Very Near You: A Guide to Praying with Scripture

  August 6, 2007

  Contemplation, contemplative practice, Lectio Divina

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