Lectio II
LECTIO: HANDS ON
WHAT LECTIO IS NOT:
Lectio is not study.
It is not the accumulation and marshalling of information.
It does not feed the same faculties as study,
Or accomplish the same thing.
One can begin lectio without study.
BUT
Lectio is friends with study.
Study, however modest, will enrich lectio and sometimes help it along.
Lectio is not reading, even “spiritual reading.”
It’s a different skill, with a different aim.
BUT
Reading, like study, is a friend of lectio.
Lectio is not moral effort.
It is not the act of becoming a better person,
Although in the course of it, we may become so.
Lectio is not a third person endeavor.
It is not really about something
Or even someone.
We do not see from outside the message.
WHAT LECTIO IS:
Lectio is prayer,
The prayer of the book,
The prayer of the text.
Lectio is encounter,
With someone to meet, accept, be immersed in.
Even more, it is that someone waiting to be met,
That someone in the act of radical self-disclosure,
A heart bared and poised against my heart.
Lectio is a person asking to be received, known, accepted,
But on terms I may not always be comfortable with.
Lectio is someone waiting for my response,
my self-disclosure,
my trust,
my giving in return.
Lectio is my own self-disclosure.
In lectio, I am revealed to myself
And to the Other I have encountered
And by whom I am intimately embraced.
In the darkness of this someone,
In the nature of this relationship
I am known, I am willing to be known,
I am willing to know.
Lectio is a stance before and within mystery.
I cannot grasp and hold it.
I can only accede to it.
Lectio is experience.
IMAGES:
Often, I can best enter an experience, find my way among pitfalls, by means of images.
Here are some.
Food.
This is very traditional, a favorite with monastic writers. It is useful in two ways.
First, the act of doing lectio can be hard and dry and unsatisfying.
It can demand patience
Not only with needing to learn how,
But also with the effect on it of our moods and reactions to circumstance.
This effect is part of the process. It is necessary.
It can also feel like an obstacle to the process.
The image of chewing, masticating, gnawing, ripping at the bone
Can help immensely when we have to treat the word just like that.
This is a corrective to an extreme of subjectivity:
The word is something to contend with,
It is out there, it resists, demands.
It is not brought into being from how I feel.
But the other part of the image is that of assimilation.
What we eat becomes who we are.
And so it is with the word.
We absorb it. It turns itself into us.
This is a corrective to an extreme of objectivity—learning something out there.
It does not end up out there. It ends up as us.
The River
This is a very helpful image for the practicality of lectio,
And can lessen our tension with it.
Lectio is not a straight highway from here to there.
It is more like a river.
Think of a river beginning in the mountains,
And weaving its way along, something like the messy, meandering Colorado, wandering and cutting its way through the Grand Canyon.
A river does not run like a modern city street.
It curls around,
It meets obstacles and pools out on either side.
It rests, breaks forth, and struggles and proceeds unpredictably.
It is sluggish and rapid. It has its daily way of acting.
Lectio is like that.
We do not have to cover a certain amount of text.
Often we stay with a few words.
We have different ways of relating to it.
We can take months on a paragraph,
Or use a different text each day.
We are ready to pool out, overflow the banks, rest, take our time.
We are not intent on going somewhere.
We will get where we are going, not by going, but by being met along the way,
Carried by the current.
And the current is the life of Christ within us.
CONDITIONS UNDER WHICH WE DO OUR LECTIO
The physical conditions can be anything. We can be:
Tired, burnt out,
Wrought up
Anxious
Excited over something
Full of plans for some project
Guilt-ridden
Peaceful
Hungry
Fresh and inventive
The relational situation can likewise be anything:
Feeling supported
encouraged
Or dysfunctional
Disappointed
Self-rejecting
Excited at the prospect of knowing God better
We can be experiencing:
The inadequacy of someone we rely on
Our own inadequacy
A situation of co-dependence
Being caught up in someone else’s needs
Pressure from any one of the stages of our own development
Or the stages of another’s development
We are always in some set of circumstance:
Much of which we blame for not being able to succeed in this project.
We bring our sets of ingrained attitudes:
Images of God
Of oneself
Of others in our life
What is currently being asked of us
IN OTHER WORDS
Lectio enfolds the real, current human person.
We come to it as unvarnished as we can manage.
We are not trying to achieve or succeed. We are trying to let ourselves be.
We are trying not to make up a person who will be acceptable to God.
We are willing to start out feeling unacceptable if that is where we are.
We are laying our reality, our now in the heart of someone we are getting to know,
And who, we believe, wants us to let ourselves be known.