“What great blessings God grants to a soul when He prepares it to love the practice of prayer.” – St. Teresa of Avila
Dear Friends,
I hope that you are well in the midst of this week. We will continue our visits about the Myers-Briggs instrument, temperament, and prayer this week. Last week we took a short look at four primary “types” of temperament: SJ {Ignatian}, NF {Augustinian}, NT {Thomistic}, SP {Franciscan}. However we did not get to our material about Lectio Divina and Centering Prayer; both of which are great helps to those who seek to know God more deeply through praying. Once we have covered these two forms of prayer – Lectio Divina and Centering Prayer – we will then take a deeper dive into each of these four temperaments; as well as look at some exercises that work with the strengths and natural giftedness of each these four temperaments. Hopefully this will give some us a “hand hold” on what kinds of prayerful activity, thought, and meditation work with the natural tendencies of our personalities, as well as may open us to the possibility of developing our weaker attributes.
I have included some links to “THE LADDER OF FOUR RUNGS,” Guigo II, the Carthusian, on contemplation; and a more contemporary description of Lectio Divina.
I am also including links to two videos of Father Thomas Keating giving a description of Centering Prayer, which many have found helpful.
An extensive video library of Father Thomas Keating giving talks on prayer, life, and religion may be found here with approximately 30 videos:
Guidelines of Centering Prayer
(as stated by Thomas Keating, founder of the Contemplative Outreach Network)
- Choose a sacred word as the symbol of your intention to consent to God’s presence and action within.
- Sitting comfortably and with eyes closed, settle briefly and silently introduce the sacred word as the symbol of your consent to God’s presence and action within.
- When engaged with your thoughts, return ever-so-gently to the sacred word.
- At the end of the prayer period, remain in silence with eyes closed for a couple of minutes.
I also have included notes from a retreat that I lead a few years ago using the work of Michael Casey and his thoughts on Lectio Divina in a wonderful book called “Toward God.” I hope that you find them useful.
Blessings and Godspeed,
Alston
Lectio Divina Retreat – Michael Casey
Rule of St. B. developed in the sixth century – provision made for reading several hours a day. There was really no place for light reading, or superfluous, internal experience in that books were scarce and valuable; and we might say that this entire project of monastic living was undertaken in order to prop up, to maintain, the possibility of inner development.
Books were valuable, like gems, and that is one reason that were decorated with precious stones and fine art. The simple production of ink and paper, a very laborious task, also made anything in written form an invitation to higher efforts.
Because the production of a book was such a social investment – anything being read was assumed to be worth reading – again, no light reading.
Reading also assumed a communal aspect in that the few number of books meant that most had been read and reread by most members of the community. The scarcity of commentaries meant that an individual or community would exegete the text mano a mano, without the gymnastics of visiting many points of veiw and cobbling together a response.
Reading sometimes three or four hours a day – Benedict envisaged Lectio as a means of spiritual renewal and energy. Not so much the acquisition of knowledge as the maintenance and growth of spiritual relationship to God.
The act of reading was the Word upon the page seeking the Word that is imprinted in the soul as imago dei. All lectio has a certain eschatological quality that the mere gathering of information lacks.
REMAINING WITH THE ONE BOOK:
Lectio is a kind of surrender – a conscious undertaking of not controlling the process by which the Word is forming the Kingdom within us. It is also an invitation to go deeper than a superficial/flyover approach – it is counter cultural – in our culture experts in a field are lured onto TV and asked to summarize their life’s work into a five minute cameo segment; a sign of the foolishness of popular media.
Most of us are like children who need their food cut up for them; take small bits of scripture and try to understand them as smaller bites.
“Wanting to grasp everything immediately is the best way to comprehend nothing.”
We are impatient for mastery, rather than letting this new/ancient sort of reading master us. In some sense the medium is the message. The way we go about this reading is as significant as what is read. Often a slower, longer, dimmer approach contains far more gravitas, and is more conducive to relationship with God than and speedier alternative.
Enlightenment comes not in increasing intensity and entertainment quality. That is a hard message in a culture of immediate gratification and excitement. Excitement over the inner quest is not the same thing as taking the quest. Just as reading delightful books about prayer is not the same thing as praying. This is not a pious form of entertainment.
Seeking this affective understanding of the Gospels assumes that we mean to have our lives reshaped by the Gospels. The intention of reshaping our lives should also add gravitas to our reading; what if we were reading the Gospels as though we were reading a book of cures to cancer, addition, or brain surgery.
We will resist any invitation to change the trajectory of our life’s course. {page 10}
Contrary forms of reading scripture:
Bible as medicine chest – we arrive with a list of maladies, and open the bible as the source of cures. Not so much relational as utilitarian.
Cutting the Bible – Letting it fall open where it will, and essentially reading as proof texting, or reading without any larger sense of context.
Grazing – this is the modern malady. Simply having a passing association with the text. Read some, skip some, essentially form an abridgement of readings that reflect our personal preferences.
Liturgical Reading – loss of freshness due to over exposure. Especially dangerous for those of us who turn to the Bible for professional reasons. Often a desire for a “two for” one approach; we also lose the attrait of personal preference, and some of the elan that comes with being on our own journey.
Text in Sequence –
Our selection of a book to live and walk by should create a sense of adventure. This was St. B. admonition, that we take one book over time, and learn to live with it the way we might with a person. Allowing ourselves to be broken down and redirected by the revelation contained therein, rather than imposing our preferences upon it.
In some sense it is very much like being lead by another person, in that the text has been offered by a prophet or an apostle, someone, somewhere, committed a particular vision and message to remembrance, and we are effected as much by coming to know and hear this voice, as we are by what is written on the page.
Page 15 – William of St. Thierry.
No friendship is possible without deep listening. In the process we are changed. We must choose carefully. In making a selection and committing to it – we are in a sense determining our future, because it is from this vantage point that we seek to create a map from which to walk in a Kingdom and country that is already all God’s territory.
Lectio as a school of virtue:
Fidelity comes in making a commitment that is unlike other commitments that we are invited to make regarding avocations and activities in today’s world.
External difficulties- noise, weather, interruptions, lack of material. Leisure and Recreational difficulties- Work- Family- all of these require some time and attention beyond our control and can effect lectio work in our daily lives.
Overexposure to words – I FIND THIS VERY IMPORTANT- we live in a sea of verbiage, and everyone that is speaking or writing is convinced that what they are saying is the most important thing. Those of us in the habit of active listening can find ourselves actively listening to absolute garbage; some discernment is necessary. There is also an anti-intellectualism alive in our culture, such that any communication beyond a kindergarten level of discourse is considered elitist and unnecessary – thus the admonition to preachers to say it simply the way Jesus did. Perhaps we should say it simply the way that Paul did.
Lack of training – there is also a real problem with a simply lack of coordinates. Folks are hell bent on having their spiritual experience, yet they are willing to set out with a woefully inadequate amount of background knowledge. In the early Church, a grounding in catechetical instruction was assumed. It was deemed necessary before moving to mystagogy – mystical encounters. In many respects each of us would rather have our ice cream before our meat and potatoes.
NOWDAYS MANY FOLKS BELIEVE THEY MUST SEARCH OUTSIDE OF THE CHURCH FOR THE MYSTAGOGICAL EXPERIECE OF GOD FOR IT TO BE AUTHENTIC.
Casey points out that often initial enthusiasm dries because folks become blocked in their search for more and deeper companionship in the life of prayer and lectio, but they do not know where to go, so they stop with a feeling of frustration or self-satisfaction.
BOREDOM- stuck in first gear. Restless. Negligence- laziness, acedia, FANTASY. Something like the TV remote control of the soul. We fail to take the steps necessary that lead to a better future. Acedia is a simple refusal to have spiritual values permeate our lives in such a way that change or commitment might be possible. We are restless, we cannot read, we cannot settle on some path because it seems that some other better alternative is always haunting us.
Fantasy is exponential with electronic media – in fact – it is what it feeds upon. Recreational reading, TV watching, internet surfing are certainly more fun at times than sitting down with the big book and allowing our imaginations and minds to be filled with God.
Newman quote in footnotes.
The bottom line is that these activities subvert our ability to concentrate and focus and commit the unseen parts of ourselves to something that will invite and ultimately demand our complete attention.
Duty – The use of religion to actually keep a living experience of God at a distance. We can pay complete attention to details of worship and devotion, while allowing the content to remain untouched and unfocused, all the while convincing ourselves that we are doing what God wants.
HONOR GOD WITH OUR LIPS WHILE HE IS FAR FROM OUR HEARTS.
ASSIDUITY: intention, constancy, continuation, perseverance.
Make time – don’t find time. Story of Mary Hall and thoughts from Einstein. Accept responsibility for my own time and stop allowing myself to be a plaything for external contingencies. Take the time and the trouble to set priorities in my life – that will mean taking up some things, and letting some things go. Pressing forward in some things, and letting other things drop. Baron Von Hugel to his niece – let things drop off of you like dead skin.
Without a solid commitment of time – Lectio is pointless – and it is pointless to make a game of spiritual journeys. “Good excuses may absolve us from moral blame – they will do nothing to help us move toward the goal that we have set for ourselves.”
If we respond only to demands we will only come to feel frustrated that we are not more creative in dealing with things that really matter.[page 21}
Unimportant demands squeeze out important matters of the heart and soul. “I consider that Lectio is an important component of the mature and active years of the spiritual life.”
REGULAR, REPETITION, PERSEVERANCE
REVERENCE
Reverence is that aspect of recognizing with awe, stillness, attention, that we are in the presence of the living God. When God is absent, human words and logic seem overwhelming and convincing; reverence is that remembrance of another aspect in reality that might make all of our selective lack of attention dissipate into a new place of recognition.
“Apophasis” or the Eastern concept of negation – the depth of knowing God is affirmed or accepted by conceding how little we know of God’s reality. Coming into presence is a matter of evaporating all secondary characteristics that might prevent or veil the emptiness of the world that is filled with the reality of His otherness. All of this should leave us prone in a place of humility and reverence.
“We recognize the limitations of an existence without God and we want to provide as many openings as possible for God to enter our life and to influence our living of it.”
Silence and listening – sitting at the Lord’s feet – teacher speaks, we listen.
Environment – setting for contemplative attitude – reverence for the book itself, as well as candles, icons, etc.
Reverence for the message of Scripture itself – recognizing that it is a place of latent power. We cherish the word and ponder it in our hearts.
Reverence implies praxis – practicing what we discover in our reading. “Abandonment of narcissistic controls,” by allowing ourselves to be called, confronted, and challenged.
COMPUNCTION
Compunction is an engagement of our affect and our feeling aspect. Compunction is a piercing of surface sentimentality and romantic religious notions, and a stirring of the deeper parts of what we might think of as our hearts.
“St. Athanasius – a mirror in which may be seen the movements of one’s own soul.” Lectio is something that will help us understand the currents of our deeper selves as they come into contact with the deeper realities of God.
Page 30 – “What we feel in compunction is the fact that our whole being responds to the comfort and challenge of being addressed at a level that is commonly ignored.”
Compunction is something like a paint box of emotions. Sometimes we will be filled with a brightness and light, other times with desolation and shadows; the point is that we are feeling anything at all, rather than the arid rationalization that so often characterizes our religious lives.
Like any marriage or friendship, feeling of any kind is better than a blank slate. Constant immersion in Lectio is one means of keeping a finger on the pulse of the beating heart of our faith.
In Compunction we recognize that we are living in a state of starvation, and that we are in need of being touched. Therefore we must risk some kind of vulnerability. The great emptiness, the wounds, the pain, that many souls have encountered in life is the ground upon which Lectio begins to build as a medicine and as food at the lowest levels of our recognition of being.
For some, the feeling of being touched with medicine causes a recoil, a tenderness, what I call third degree burn victims. Lectio at this level is very much like feeling the touch of the healing physician who is Christ.
Heal the past, fill us with the energy and intensity for an uncertain future. At some level we must feel and know that there is a treasure waiting, and a treasure now, for which we make amendments in our present life, and for which we count upon for a certain hope.
Lectio is a way of the touchstone – touching in this reality that something that both precedes us and waits for us.
As Casey points us – it is not so much more information that is needed – but rather more will and motivation. Compunction can give us a taste of something that will give us motivation when we have a temptation to give up.
Compunction is a matter of the desires of our hearts being touched, and therefore the compass of our hearts tuned to heaven.
The gift of Scripture is an invitation to motivation – to be wooed in our encounters to greater and greater levels of commitment and motivation.
“To have the courage to expose ourselves to influences we need to be convinced the outcome will be to our ultimate advantage.” There is no need to fear Lectio and prayer, given that are certain that the outcomes toward which they point are for our ultimate good and healing and peace. We need not come with reluctance.
Compunction is about moving our relationship with our Creator from something purely abstract, purely based upon information and ideas, into the place of friendship, warmth, tears, laughter, smiles, and ultimately love. Lectio is not merely and intellectual pursuit – ultimately it will touch and call upon us completely.
CHAPTER TWO:
Schola Caritas – School of Charity. Schola Christi – Scriptures are the School of Christ. Throughout Scripture there is one “Revealer,” Christ is what we find when we open the scriptures.
The teacher is provided when the teacher is needed – FOUR ASPECTS OF THE SCHOOL OF CHRIST.
The disciple follows in four ways: page 37
FOLLOWING, IMITATION, LIKENESS, PARTICIPATION
Following is simply letting what the teacher says begin to shape who and what we are in fact. At some level we abandon our own understanding, and perhaps undertake a more or less counterintuitive approach. We surrender our own compass.
Casey mentions – “Love your enemies.” And so the disciple tries to do so. “Have no care for the morrow.”
IMITATION – Imitation at its worst is a kind of mimicry or pantomiming of the teacher. It is common enough in other areas of the culture – where we try to dress, speak, manner ourselves in the pattern of one who seems to be something of an icon. Taking the posture of the teacher is a kind flattery and giving of one’s self to the new path. Act as Christ acted. Jesus in his life is the pattern that we should seek to imitate.
LIKENESS – This is the imago dei moving from a posture to something that might be considered more internal. It is a matter of being. We move beyond simple differences of behavioral particularity to become something transformed – don’t simple act in love and kindness – be love and kindness. “An icon of Christ for seekers of truth, a servant to those in need, a friend to the lonely, and even as Saint Paul says, a source of scandal to those on the way to perdition.”
PARTICIPATION- Christ is at work within us, moreso than we ourselves. It is the mystical incarnation of the spirit of Christ that works through us. We shed personal peculiarity and limitation to have Christ live and shine through us.
Through these four stages and points of contact we more deeply interiorize the life of Christ. The price we pay is to forfeit our egoism for his presence dwelling in us; when He is there, there is no more room. “Entering into the subjectivity of Jesus Christ is the goal of Christian life.”
As minds and hearts are reshaped into the image of Christ we are able to be available to others has channels of a real and sometimes foreign grace in the world. Lectio is the school in which we learn how to be Christ. Remembering that Christianity is a life not a learning, a person not a book.
CHRIST IN SCRIPTURE/CHURCH IN SCRIPTURE – We meet Christ in the scriptures, and they were written by the Church for just such purpose. Without a community of faith there would be no scripture. “It is the product of the Church’s inspired industry.” It was in the Church that the Scriptures grew, were edited, and were preserved, as some instrument through which we could know the risen Christ. When we have the Bible we have the Church as well; and both were given as gifts so that we might have some grasp of the reality before us. They are the means that we come into contact with the divine initiative taken on our behalf. THE SCRIPTURES AND THE CHURCH DO NOT MERELY INFORM US ABOUT GOD; THEY PROVIDE THE MEANS BY WHICH WE BECOME PART OF WHAT WE READ ABOUT.
In Lectio we become part of the mystery of the Word meeting the Word through the power of the Holy Spirit. They are both instruments of the ongoing revelation. Lectio is a means by which we participate in the lives of faith that have preceded us, and one entrance into the communion of saints. It is a kind of sacramental ladder – Guigo II. Ladder of the Four Rungs.
It is not enough simply to have copies of the Bible lying around as though through osmosis or surrounding ourselves with the statement of revelation would ever be the same thing as participating in the that sacramental revelation.
Pg 43 – Casey mentions the image of the fathers of Mary being the seed bearer par excellence of the Word of God that comes to bear the fruition. Something is to be born within us. Scripture also humbles us as Mary was humbled. There are no definitive masters of Scripture – it is too large, and that toward which it points is too large. We must surrender to the greater mystery toward which it points. We will never master more than a part of the whole.
Scripture is actually a reduction of the revelation to a condition that we might ascertain. It is an “abbreviation” as Casey points out. It is only one movement of the larger symphony. Its abbreviation into a concretized form is actually a scandal to some, as was Jesus’ own humanity.
The Carpenter's Nail 