LECTIO WITHOUT THE LATIN

Transcription

1 LECTIO WITHOUT THE LATIN JULY 10, 2017 My prayer today is that I will be able to love and lift you a little so you can love and lift all you ve been given. We are in our second week of the LOVE The Word with Mary series. I am loving this for so many reasons. First of all, I have had to reorder the journals twice! I ve sold out twice and that makes me so excited because I know, then, that you and I are going to be getting into the Scriptures more than ever before. I know that you are making this journey with me. I get so excited just imagining how you re using the journals. In fact, I wish you would send me some pictures on Facebook and Instagram. Tag me or #LoveTheWord. Send me some pictures of how you re using it because I am so thrilled to know that so many of you are just beginning a Scripture habit. I promise that throughout this series I am going to walk you through all you need to know about how to LOVE The Word with Mary. She really is the one who is guiding us. She s the one who loved the Word perfectly. Loves not even past tense she loves the Word perfectly so we are going to follow her. In the introduction I sort of gave you an outline of what we are trying to accomplish. This week we are going to talk about what Lectio Divina is so that we can do away with the Latin words Lectio Divina. Then we are going to actually look at the steps of the process. We have L Listening. We are going to learn how to listen together to the Scriptures and we are going to use the story of Jonah in the Bible. That s a very short little book but it s a perfect illustration. As much as a Mary s whole life it illustrates the process so we are going to use that. Jesus himself used that to talk about himself and his mission. So that is L L is for Listen. O is for Observe. We are going to look at the patterns of our lives and try to hear God speak through them. He s going to teach us how. Mary is going to hold our hands and she is going to direct us where to look. We are going to watch her and we are going do what she does. We are observing her and in doing so we are observing our own lives and how the Holy Spirit is speaking to us through the readings. Then we have V, which is either Visualize or Verbalize. Verbalize is really what we are doing, because we are praying, but oftentimes prayer can also as we discussed last week in hitting the high spots of the shows in order can be creative. And it really should be creative in the sense that we procreate through prayer, spiritually speaking. But it can also be procreative in the way that we express ourselves through the things that we craft and make. That can be parenting our children, it can be literally as in painting or crafting. Maybe you sew, maybe you re a sculptor, maybe you re a potter, whatever your creative expression is. Each of us has one. Maybe it s music. Everyone has a creative expression. Mine is verbal. I talk so much my dad used to call me the Mouth of the South! So Verbalize and Visualize are V. E is Entrust. Ultimately everything God speaks to us about, however we need to make an adjustment to His voice and His direction, we do that. And we do that in His presence and then we entrust the total outcome of all of it to Him. All of it ultimately is grace. We can t get grace in and of ourselves. It is a gift. In fact the word grace implies and even says in the definition of the word charis is a gift. Grace is a gift. We entrust everything that He has given us back to Him. And so our whole lives become that offering. After we have covered all of the steps of the LOVE The Word process we are going to look at how to LOVE The Word at mass. I know you ve probably heard of mass journaling but if you haven t we are going to talk about that and learn how to do it. I m going to walk you through how to do it. Then we are going to look at LOVE The Word in the lectionary. How do we use the daily readings to listen to God in this way? Listening, Observing, Verbalizing, and Entrusting. How do we use LOVE The Word in the lectionary? 1 P a g e

2 Then LOVE gives birth to the Word in the world. This last show will be sort of a recap. As we allow our mother of listening to guide us through her method, we discern how practically and beautifully she illustrates the traditional steps of Lectio Divina. And I hope that by the time we get through all of the shows and the series you ll be able to see that very plainly. She LOVEs the Word of God so that it comes alive within her and it is born into the world. She guides us in how to do the same thing. To LOVE the Word like Mary, to listen well, to allow its reign in us, and to offer the fruit of our listening to those who are still struggling to hear it requires a fullness of grace. Like our Mother of Listening, God is always calling us to do what in the world s eyes is impossible. Just like the Holy Spirit said, you are going to have a child, a son, and yet she had never known a man and would not know a man! But instead of saying I can t, with her we can reply Be it done to me according to Thy word. Ultimately it s all about the word. We LOVE the Word and the word is a person. We get to know Him. Dear One, a lot of times your spiritual life is so boring and so dry and so unsatisfying is because you haven t learned to LOVE the Word the way Mary loves the Word. St. Jerome said that Ignorance of Scriptures is ignorance of Christ. What we are doing is we are getting to know Him better. I promise you that you are going to find your spiritual life on fire in learning this process. That is my goal. That is my prayer. All of my prayers, every single morning in morning prayer, that is my prayer. Knowing that we are going to do this show together for the week, knowing that you have the Mary journal and if you don t have the Mary journal that you ve printed it off. And you get a free page every week with the show! You get a free page and you can just print it out so you don t even have to buy anything you can just print it out every week. I don t even know how to tell you how profoundly it affects me to know that you are going to be more deeply in the Scriptures and more deeply loving the word by following Mary in this way. It is my privilege my distinct privilege to kind of hold your hand on the way of sanctity in this way. Today what I d like to do, then, is talk about Lectio Divina. But before I do that I should say thank you to my newest Friends of the Show. I always want to stick it in the middle, you know. I don t want for people to pick up the very first part of the show and hear me say thank you. But I want to thank my newest ones: Cecilia, Janet, Neil, Mary Jo, and Sandy. Thank you so much for your contributions. Thank you for your prayers. Your little presents are in the mail. I just wanted to shout you out. We are going to talk now about Lectio Divina. LOVE the Word is Lectio Divina without the Latin. I actually started to do this differently, to present it to you differently, but what I discovered is my book that is coming out with Deacon Harold in August it should be available by August 17 but you can actually preorder it now. If you are on Facebook there is a coupon, a picture there of the book and a couple of links and it s also in your for this week. You get a link to a free chapter of the book like we did with Fearless and you also get a preorder discount of 30%. What you ll get is the introduction and the first chapter of the book. In the first chapter what we did was go through the process of Lectio Divina. In that whole book all of the chapters end with a LOVE the Word exercise. I begin in this book walking you through other ways to use the process. I m just trying to familiarize everybody with using the acronym LOVE. It s much more simple than the Lectio Divina and all of the Latin words. I hope it s easier for you. I think it is. It s certainly easier for me even though I know it really well. The Latin is just hard. It doesn t roll off the tongue very easily. What I am going to do today, then, is walk you through that very first chapter. As I said, you can download that yourself and have it. And of course if you buy the book you ll have the whole book. The book is about how to read and study the Bible. It is and this is a big church word a hermeneutics sort of book. What that means is it teaches you how to interpret the Bible. Of course we do that with the 2 P a g e

3 mind of the Church, and Deacon and I talk about that throughout the book, but it s the Who of the Bible, the What of the Bible, the Where of the Bible, the When of the Bible, the How of the Old Testament, the How of the New Testament, the Why of the Bible, which voice is His, and the Word is a person. In that chapter Deacon and I tell you the secret to our own practice of both Lectio Divina or LOVE the Word and also Bible study. So we give you sort of hints and tricks in that very last chapter. What I like about this is that when I first began studying the Bible I got ahold of a book that kind of went through this stuff for me. It was actually in classes I was in seminary and it was seminary classes that introduced me to this principle. It s very Thomas Acquinas-like and I take this approach in the LOVE the Word exercises at least once a month that I offer you in your . Lectio Divina are the Latin church-y words for getting in the Bible in a prayerful sort of way. I have to just share with you that my own faith was mostly inherited. It was very cerebral and pretty much minimal until I began a relationship with Jesus in daily prayer and in the Scriptures. I ve told you this many times, but I am not a cradle Catholic. I grew up as a Southern Baptist. As non-catholics we didn t have any sacraments so the only way to get in contact with God was through Bible reading and study. I tried it. I had been taught that it had to be a daily discipline so I tried it first thing in the morning. I yawned and slept through the whole 30-minute sunrise Bible reading, but I did it long enough that I was rattled almost to the core when God met me there one morning. My mentors had all assured me that He would do that if I would prove myself serious by persevering and showing up every day. They always told me He ll show up if you will. You have to be disciplined. Like I said, I slept through it but He showed up! And it was like this precious terror. I mean, I was reading the text of the Scriptures and it seemed to come alive and leap off the page and kind of burn its way into my heart. I was reading You will know the Truth and the Truth will make you free. That s out of John 8:32. Instead of this sort of detached reading of it you will know the Truth and the Truth will make you free, suddenly it was I AM the Truth, Sonja Corbitt, and you shall be set free. I remember getting the shivers. You can imagine, then, my surprise when, years later as I became Catholic, I discovered that as a matter of fact that our Baptist daily quiet time in the Bible was not a clever Protestant invention. It was actually one that the Church has prescribed and taught and practiced for thousands of years. Church history calls is Lectio Divina. That s Latin for Lectio meaning reading and Divina meaning divine. We don t really know how or when the actual designation divine reading came about. It s kind of lost, we don t really know exactly, but it indicated even then this particular way of reading the Bible that was different from studying or even the regular liturgical readings. In this approach a person lets go of her own agenda in reading and opens herself up to what God wants to say. You almost have to do that deliberately in this process. It almost helps to begin with as you re building the habit to always say, in the very beginning Come Holy Spirit because it invites Him in. actually, just the sitting down invites Him in but the actual verbal invitation gets you in the zone of receiving. I m here to receive something from God. It helps you automatically start scanning for His voice. I don t know why it s different. Something happens and there is a connection made because consciously and deliberately saying Come Holy Spirit, I m here to hear from you. Something happens there and your more aware of when He actually is speaking. What you ll discover is He s been speaking all along, you just haven t been listening. That s the miracle of it. We re not going to the Bible with an agenda. We re not going there to dig up information or to learn something necessarily. We probably will, especially about ourselves, but we re not going to the Bible for information or for study. The term for that is exposition. We are not trying to extract something out of it, we re going to get in touch with God. We are going to experience God there. You sort of have to do that intentionally. You have to sit down with that intention. But in the beginning when Lectio Divina started being practiced literacy was not very common. The printing press hadn t been invented. That was not done until around 1500 AD. People did not have copies of the Bible for themselves. They were copied by monks. They were very, 3 P a g e

4 very expensive. They were usually illuminated, decorated beautifully. I have an illuminated manuscript -- it s not actually an illuminated manuscript, it s a book reproduction of one but it is contemporary. I ll make a scan of a page and include it in the for you because it s absolutely beautiful. You ll know as soon as you see it when I mean if you ve never seen one before. That s why they were so expensive. First of all, they didn t even have paper in the way that we know it today. They had vellum, and either they had parchments that were made out of grasses, which is how paper is made now, but they also used animal skins. I actually tried to do that one time as a school project for homeschool. That was my plan for the craft project for the whole year. We were going to work on it and we were going to make an illuminated page of a manuscript. What ended up happening was a neighbor had a racoon get into their chicken coop and murder all her chickens. So they killed this racoon and she had this carcass. And she knew that I was looking for the skin of the animal. (I know this sounds gross but it was very cool, actually!) She gave us the carcass of this racoon and my stepdad helped me gut and skin the thing. I intended on making a vellum but the skin was too small, and I knew especially once it drew up - because once it dries it shrinks and I knew that once it drew up it was going to be even smaller. What we ended up doing that year was instead of making a page of an illuminated manuscript we ended up making a coonskin hat, which my son actually still has. I might actually post a picture because it was cool. And I am telling you that thing is warm! It was gross but it was fascinating too we had an anatomy lesson and all of that. But I was able to learn this whole process. I really had to do most of it for him because he was pretty young. I think he was 10 or 11 at the time. Anyway, the point of all of that was to say that they did not have paper in the way that we know it. So to just have one sheet of vellum to copy a single page of the Scriptures would have taken enormous amounts of time, and then to copy it word for word. We take all of this so much for granted but it took such a long time for the monks to make the paper, make the ink, sit down and copy it, and then decorate it. A lot of time Catholics, by militant anti-catholics, are accused of withholding the Bible from the people back in the Middle Ages. It wasn t that at all, not in the sense that the Church didn t want people to read it, although that may have happened. When we are accused of having chained the Bibles to the ambo (or the pulpit if you are non-catholic), that actually happened but it was because they were so expensive. In a church, if it was left open, they did chain it down because it was so expensive. Bibles, then, were very expensive and they were very rare. People didn t have individual copies, and even if they had they didn t know how to read. There was not literacy in the way we know it now. Lectio Divina, then, began some time in early Benedictine monastic tradition. The monks would gather in daily chapel to listen as a fellow member of the Benedictines, a fellow monk, would read from a copy of the Bible that they held in community. It probably would have been just one copy for the whole community. This was back in the early 300 and 400s, it s that early. They would gather in chapel and they would listen to the Scriptures as somebody read it out. Through that exercise they knew and were taught to consider what they were hearing as a direct communication from God. They were supposed to listen to it with their hearts as though God was actually speaking to them. That s where the practice began. Later on the 12 th century there was a Carthusian monk. Carthusians are another order. Benedictines are an order, Carthusians are an order. They are very contemplative. There was a monk called Guigo who formally wrote down and recorded those stages of practicing Lectio Divina. Those are traditional to this day and they are fundamental to the monastic practice and discipleship in the scripture readings, and also in the meditation and the prayer that constitute traditional Lectio Divina. Even from that far back it has been practiced and in about the 12 th century is when it was actually written down as a process. I think that was actually called The Ladder of Monks and it is from this letter that Guigo wrote on the contemplative life. He said that the stages of Lectio Divina are the 4 rungs that lead from Heaven to earth. I like that imagery a lot. I also really like what 4 P a g e

5 John of the Cross said. He said Seek in reading and you will find in meditation. Knock in prayer and it will be opened to you in contemplation. That s really what we are doing throughout this process. We are trying to get in touch with God directly so that he can speak directly to us and we can know that we have been directly spoken to by Him. That s very, very powerful. What I love about the Bible and why it is so important that we are in it is that God doesn t just say something to us, pat our hand, and send us on. When he says Fear Not to us through the Scriptures we are not afraid anymore. Even today the stages that Guigo outlined for us remain the foundation of prayer using the Scriptures or in the Scriptures. That practice of Lectio Divina is done throughout the church and it has been for thousands of years, all the way from the beginning. It s not something that the non-catholics thought up. That s really all they have in the way of getting in touch with God personally. They don t have sacraments so they are not able to receive that grace in that way, but they do have the Bible. I can tell you from experience that the Bible will take you a very, very long way toward unity with God. When I say that I mean specifically in the way that John of the Cross and the other doctors of prayer teach the stages of prayer, which I am not going to get into. But we, the Church, Christians who use the Scriptures in this way, were using it to promote this communication with God. We are trying to increase our knowledge of Him and of His word. The Church has, of course, known and taught it for centuries. The Bible comes alive for us when we begin approaching it as God s word to us specifically, as direct communication to us about our individual lives and the circumstances surrounding us. We re going to look at how to Observe and how to interpret what we hear in another show but it s enough to point it out. I love this quote too it might be from the Catechism -- which says For in the sacred books the Father who is in heaven meets his children with great love and speaks with them. The force and power in the word of God is so great that it stands as the support and energy of the whole church; the strength of faith for her sons, the food of the soul, and the pure and everlasting source of the spiritual life. I love that. Here is another quote from the Catechism [CCC ]. I talk about this all the time. In just about every single talk I give I quote this in one way or another. For this reason the Church has always venerated the Scriptures as she venerates the Lord s body. She never ceases to present to the faithful the bread of life taken from the one table of God s word and Christ s body. In Sacred Scripture the Church constantly finds her nourishment and her strength for she welcomes it not as a word but what it really is: The Word of God. In the sacred books the Father who is in heaven comes lovingly to meet his children and talks with them. The idea here is the one table. The one table of the Lord, Dear One, is both the Eucharist and the Scriptures. If you don t have both of those breads from the table then you re missing the table! You are malnourished in half of what constitutes spiritual nourishment. We don t want that to happen. I have to say that in my entire life I have found nothing so consistently transformative and creative, meaning in a life-giving way, than the process of Lectio Divina, this regular encounter with God in my daily scripture practice. He knows me more deeply than I know myself. His all-seeing eyes penetrate completely, with absolute freshness and clarity, through the layers of my schedule and my circumstances and my past and my soul and my pretenses and my psyche. I don t know I hope you re curious enough to begin trying it. Let s just do that. We re going to start looking at the mechanics of how to do the Lectio process. We re just going to hit the high spots today. We are going to look at each of the steps in turn in detail. The very first stage is Lectio, or Listening. Lectio is reading. We are listening by reading the Word of God. We are going to read it slowly and we are going to read it reflectively so that it sinks into us. Before you start, select your passage. Any text can be used but it shouldn t be too long somewhere between 10 and 15 verses at the most. You don t want a whole lot for this. This is a prayerful kind of 5 P a g e

6 approach so you want it to be kind of short. It s easier if you choose a passage from one of the Gospels simply because they are offered to us in a narrative kind of way. They are very story like and they are easy to understand because of that. They also talk specifically about Jesus and his mission and all that occurred with Him. They are the logical place to start. Because it connects us through the Word of God to the whole universal Church on any given day, I specifically suggest the gospel reading for the mass of the day as it is offered to us through the lectionary and the mass readings of the church. You can find those in lots of places. You can find it in a print resource like Magnificat, Our Daily Bread, or The Word Among Us. You can get it online at or I like the Laudate app. You can get that on your phone and it s free. You can also get ibreviary. I use that right now. I just like the way it looks. You can get the daily readings and mass readings on both of those apps. I also like That is a very prayerful Jesuit website. I used to use that a lot even as a non-catholic because it shows you the steps but it doesn t really say that s what they are. So I didn t know that s what I was doing. I was doing Lectio Divina as it s been practiced traditionally even with the Latin steps, though they didn t use those words. That s what I was doing the whole time I was using it. I liked that a lot. You want to go to a quiet place. You want to recall that you are going to read the Word of God. And this step is important I mentioned it before you have to ask the Holy Spirit to speak to you. There will come a time that it so much of a habit you won have to do that anymore but we have to condition ourselves for receiving from Him and seeking to hear from Him. If we are not intentional about that we won t hear Him. We can read and read and read the Bible you can read the whole Bible front to back and never get a thing from it. It s not likely, but if you re just reading it to check something off of a list then you are not going to receive the transformation and hear the voice of God the way you will by approaching it like this. You want to read the passage very slowly and with your full attention. Maybe you want to read it aloud. Obviously you ll want to be by yourself so you don t look silly to other people, but more than that you don t want to be disturbed. This is your time with God. You and Him, one on one. And it s a private time because He s going to say private things to you. Possibly you want to hear yourself say the words. Sometimes that really does help. Maybe you want to emphasize each word. I do this sometimes because it s very helpful to get the whole richness of one verse. YOU will know the truth and the truth will make you free. You WILL know the truth and the truth will make you free. You will KNOW the truth and the truth will make you free. You will know THE truth and the truth will make you free. You will know the TRUTH and the truth will make you free. So you can see how you would do that. And that s just one verse. If you try this tip and you continue emphasizing every word in the passage until you ve stressed them all you can see how slowly and meditatively Lectio Divina is met to be practiced. Just with one verse you could spend 10 or 15 minutes just on that. 6 P a g e

7 The second state is Meditatio. Meditatio means meditation or reflection, and that s kind of obvious from the sound of it. That s where we are thinking about the text we ve chosen and we re ruminating on it so that we can receive from it what God wants to give us. This step can be done you can actually leave your scripture reading and walk off and do something. Maybe you want to do a load of laundry and you fold several loads of laundry and you re meditating or you re ruminating on what you ve read. What does this say to me? What is God saying? What stands out? You re meditating on it and that s a whole step all by itself. So we re thinking about the text that we ve chosen and we re kind of mulling it over in our minds. When you ve finished you want to go back and kind of recall if maybe some word or phrase stood out. Maybe something touched your heart. Maybe it was one word. Maybe it was a phrase. Maybe you were curious about something. That happened to me just this morning. The reading was on Abraham and Isaac and two things stood out that I really hadn t considered before. One was that Isaac s new wife Rachel helped ease the grief that he experienced from losing his mother Sarah. I just thought that was the sweetest thing. I had never considered that before but it was very plainly stated in the reading. And there was one other thing that was repeated: When Abraham sent his servant to find Isaac a wife he said it twice: Do not let my son go back to where he came from. Because the servant asked What s going to happen if the woman won t follow me? And Abraham said Don t let him go back there. He didn t want Isaac to go back to where he came from. My attention was drawn to that and so I just sat there with it for a few minutes. And I was thinking I wonder why he was so adamant because the place where he came from, Ur, was really no different than the Canaanites in terms of pagan worship or anything like that, so it wasn t due to any consecration or anything. But I came to realize it was because the land that Abraham was in was the land of the promise and he wanted to make sure that Isaac never went away from the land of the promise because he wanted Isaac to receive the promise. Isn t that cool? Abraham said twice Don t let him go back there. He wanted him to stay. That s an example of how you might be reading something and your curiosity is piqued or something just stood out and your attention is drawn back to it. You want to pause there and think about it because that is God getting your attention. So we talked about ruminating on a word or phrase that your attention was drawn to. You want to savor that. You want to think about the insight. Maybe it s a question. Maybe it s a feeling. But go back then and read the passage again because it will have a fuller meaning for you. Then pause again and note what happens. That s the reason I gave you the journal. You ve got your scripture passage. Maybe you just want to put the reference there: John 8:32. Then you go to the next step which is maybe writing out a particular verse that has drawn your attention. Then in the next steps you re going to explain, or at least write down, what you think God is saying. This is where you ll make that note. This is what I m sensing or what I m seeing or what I m receiving. Notice it s not something audible. It s not something you actually hear, it s more of a quiet comprehension. It s an understanding or a thought that sort of seems to come from inside and outside of you at the same time. It s not actually an audible voice. You re not actually listening for this voice from heaven to thunder like we see in the Bible. Although it did happen for them. You might also go to Adoration and do that very thing. As I sit I like to journal this part because it kind of helps me. First of all it s like a written prayer to God, but the writing it helps me purge maybe my anxieties or fear or anger or whatever. It helps me focus, to recollect myself. The church word for that focus is recollect. It helps me apply the reading to my life. It helps me to see it in black and white. It gives me evidence that God is really moving and directing because I have it written down. You don t have to journal though. It s not a traditional part of Lectio Divina and it s not necessary. You don t have to do it all. We just do what works. In fact, I think it was Teresa of Avila who said We pray as we can not as we ought. We do what works. If journaling doesn t work for you then don t do it. The point of meditatio or meditation is that we are making the words our own. We are identifying ourselves in it. What is God 7 P a g e

8 saying directly to me? We just do what works in hearing and obeying God. If journaling doesn t work for you then dump it but if it does then jump in. Then we go to oratio, or verbalizing. Oratio you get the word oral. It is the third stage and it is a response stage where we start to talk to God about what we ve read and what we ve meditated on. Maybe you want to write out a prayer. Lord, this is what I think you re saying. If you want to dialogue with Him, maybe you see him as God the Father or maybe you are more comfortable with him as Jesus the Son, whatever, you just simply follow the prompting of your heart. Don t question the subtlety of it. You don t have to worry about doing it right. You don t have to do it the way you think you are supposed to do it. That s actually why I gave you the acronym LOVE because it keeps you from this restrictive thought process of Am I doing the steps right? and remembering the Latin and all of that. I was just trying to make it more simple. Everybody knows how to love and that s really all we are doing. Practice makes perfect. It s exactly like the cultivation of any other habit. Maybe in the beginning you have to refer to each stage in the LOVE the Word process but later, and in not very long at all, it becomes very familiar and comfortable. In fact, I would say that Loving the Word on a daily basis using the LOVE acronym is necessary to my sanity. It keeps me grounded. It keeps me humble. The Word of God is the crucible of self-knowledge. That s what happens, especially in the meditatio stage and the oratio stage, or the Observing and the Verbalizing. What is happening in these stages is we are gaining insights into ourselves and in doing so we are humbled. We see ourselves clearly because God is showing us ourselves throughout the word. You will probably be excited and convicted by what you hear. Maybe you imagine yourself hugging him. Maybe you imagine you have face planted at his feet in worship or repentance. Maybe both. It doesn t matter what the response is, it s correct. Even your negative responses. Maybe God is speaking to you about unforgiveness in an area and it draws up all kinds of ugliness for you. That s okay. That s the point. The point is this self knowledge so that God can begin the transformation. The transformation, Dear One, is healing. He wants to heal us but He is unable to do that a lot of times because we are not hearing his voice. We can t see reality clearly. The Word of God is living and powerful, sharper than any two-edge sword the Bible says. That is why it s so incisive. It gets in there. It tells us the truth. Jesus said If you abide in my Word you will know the truth and the truth will set you free. That is why I am offering this process to you. I want you to have that experience even though it is a bittersweet pain. It s like suffering. You experience the suffering and you hurt. There s pain in it. There s pain in seeing yourself for who you really are, but it is a thrill too because you know that God is actually there. He is speaking to you! Sometimes I get the shivers. I have described as feeling like God has walked through me. There is nothing better in the whole world and I just want to share that with you. I want you to have that experience. I want you to sense Him and feel Him and experience Him in a way that sets you on fire. I m serious. I m not exaggerating. It will change you. It s a good thing. Even your negative emotions are a good thing. He s a big God. He can handle all that ugly. In fact, because it s a relationship we are cultivating, intimacy with God is not even possible it s completely impossible without an absolute honesty in prayer. The Bible says so. Whatever God is saying to you through the reading, however you respond, you take what you receive in the Word of God, you take it into your life and you allow it to change you. Otherwise we are deceived. We have deceived ourselves into believing that we have followed God simply because we ve sat there and read the Bible some. It says in James 1:22-25 Be doers of the Word and not hearers only, deceiving yourself. For if anyone is a hearer of the Word and not a doer He is like a man who observes his natural face in a mirror, for he observes himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. But he who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer that forgets but a doer that acts, he shall be blessed in this doing. That s a promise, Dear One. That s how powerful it is. For me the oratio stage or the verbalization stage usually involves some sort of purpose of amendment. It s an 8 P a g e

9 action plan. So I ll either add or eliminate some sort of behavior or action. Whatever God has spoken to me about I ll begin doing it right away. I like to write it down so I don t forget. Maybe I need to confess. Maybe I need to avoid some sin that he has just brought to my attention. Maybe I need to make a gift or a sacrifice. Maybe I need to erect a boundary or make an apology. Whatever it is some specific action to change or a habit or a way of responding. Whatever it is, it goes there. Then you move to the contemplatio stage. All of this sort of runs together. When you get the hang of it it will just sort of happen and you don t have to think about these stages. Contemplatio is the Entrusting stage. It s the E- Entrust. Once we ve decided on an action with God s help and in His presence then, usually if He has spoken to us and we have sensed Him there we are overwhelmed. We re overwhelmed with His tenderness, His patience, His mercy, His forgiveness, His generosity. This is the final stage of Lectio Divina contemplatio or rest. We leave the reading behind. We re not thinking. We re not talking. We re not planning. We re just letting our hearts rest and trust in Him. This is where we listen to His voice, we allow that voice to change us, and we just sit in His presence. It s very simple. Just sit there and enjoy. Or whatever is happening. We re trying not to speak. We re resisting words. You want to be still and thankful in His peace and His love. It s natural. It s an automatic response to hearing God and to being in his presence. This is where we hear His voice and allow it to change us. We are resisting speech. Try very hard. This is hard for me but just remain silent and rest in Him. This is where we don t sense it, we don t feel it we don t sense or feel anything of God unless He allows us to feel something. Just because you don t feel anything happening doesn t mean it s not happening. That s actually a trap that we all fall into. I m going to talk in next weeks show about the stages of prayer and what happens when we get into that dry space. It happens to everybody but first you got to begin. You ve got to have a habit first before you can get to the dry space. That will naturally come too. That s a stage. It s normal. It really has to happen, in fact, because what is happening is what happens in this Entrustment stage of prayer. God is doing the work. We don t feel Him, we don t sense Him, we don t even know He is there. We re just resting in his presence purposely. We re just being quiet and he is doing the work. There are things that happen that we can t even understand much less get to. We have to resist that speech and just try to be still in His presence. That transformation leaves an effect on the way we actually live, or it should. As we read in James, if something is not changing in us after a practice of Lectio Divina of more than 30 days, we are in big trouble. You have to stick with it for a while because He s not going to show up if you just off the cuff decide Okay I m going to try it for two or three days and then Oh well, nothing s happening and then you leave. That s not what this is. We have to make a discipline. We ll talk about that next week. I m LOVE-ing the Word and I hope you are too. 9 P a g e