Saturday, June 18, 2011

Lectio Helps - Openness


While an insensitivity to this need will make it difficult for us to be faithful in our regular practice of lectio, one of the things that can most undermine our actual practice of lectio is a subtle or not-so-subtle boredom that seems to say:  "I've heard all this before."  It is precisely the alert listening for a Real Presence -- our openness to all that is possible in this moment -- that forestalls this.  I am not simply reading a book I have read so often before.  I am meeting a Person, a Divine Person, the God who loves me and who has a wondrous plan for me.

Our familiarity does tend to take away the shock that the Bible, especially the Hebrew Bible, should be for Christians.  Coming to know the God and Father of infinite love and compassion, patience, and mercy, the Prodigal Father revealed by Jesus Christ, the revelation of God that we find in the early unfolding of salvation history is certainly not what we would expect.  At least not at first thought.  It takes a bit of insight to see the God of Love lovingly adapting himself to a very primitive people, meeting them where they are and leading them to take the next small step in faith and trust that can lead to the high moments of friendship and love that do constantly break through.  One of the lessons for us to learn here is this way of Divine Love.  God made us.  We know the greatest thing he has given us is our freedom, because herein lies our power to love, the source of our merit and our potential to enter into the communion of Divine Life.  He does not want to overwhelm or impair this freedom.  So he gently leads us, bit by bit, into the intuitions of Divine Love.  No matter what the words are that we read as communications of his love, or how many times we have encountered them before, there is an opportunity for the love to expand and at the same time fill our listening for the Divine each and every time we meet our God of love in our lectio.

From Lectio Divina, Renewing the Ancient Practice of Praying the Scriptures
by M. Basil Pennington

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