One more essential ingredient for the true experience of lectio is a disposition of faithfulness to the practice... To attain a total open listening for the Divine we need to dip again and again into the divine reading of lectio divina.
For our lectio to reach its full receptivity is a thing of love. It is the sensitivity of lovers that enables us to intuit more fully what he Divine Lover is seeking to convey to us through his Words of Love. Again, so obviously, we are here in a wondrous spiral. The more our love receives the intuitions of love, the more we get to know the Lover through our lectio, the more we love. This is why fidelity to lectio makes it ever more delightful -- a lover exploring ever more intimately the Beloved. And we not only get to know the love and the Lover more, we get to know ourselves more as we come to see ourselves, as it were, in the eyes of the Beloved.
As powerful as all this is, there is still another whole dimension that takes us far beyond this place, infinitely so. This is the action of the Holy Spirit through the gifts. As our spirit enters into a unity of spirit with the Divine Spirit of Love, we are brought into that experience of God that no eye has seen, no ear has heard -- an experience that has not even entered into the loftiest concept of the human mind. Ultimately this word lectio describes a communication of love -- a contemplative experience.
This is certainly much more than "reading." It is lectio divina -- divine reading: reading the way the Father "reads" the Word within the embrace that is Holy Spirit.
From Lectio Divina, Renewing the Ancient Practice of Praying the Scriptures
by M. Basis Pennington
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