Praying Lectio Divina

Praying Lectio Divina

 “Lectio Divina means Divine Reading. It is a prayerful way to read scripture or any spiritual writing.
 Read -- Read Deeply
 Read a scripture passage slowly and hear deeply the sound and meaning of every word. Imagine that God is speaking to you through these words. Listen attentively to see which word or phrase catches your attention and speaks to you and your life.
 Meditate – Think, imagine Deeply
Take what caught your attention from your reading and think deeply about it using your imagination. Imagine what  it meant to those at that time who first heard it? Why is this important to you and your tradition and your experience and your life today? What about it particularly moves you.
Pray -- Pray from the Heart
If your heart is moved or your emotions touched, go with the feelings and offer what you are feeling to God in prayer.
 Contemplate -- Rest
Fall into the love of God and the love from God that was generated. Rest in the silence. Just be.
Finally, memorize or copy the thought that moved you and try to remember it from time to time during the day.
Journal if possible about what happened during the prayer.”

Modified from the Community of Reconciliation at Washington National Cathedral and the Friends of St. Benedict

 Lectio Divina is an ancient Benedictine practice of reading the scriptures, which similar to centering prayer cultivates contemplative prayer. It was practiced in community in monasteries during the time of St. Benedict. This is a time-honored way to try to connect to God through reading scripture, prayer, meditation, and contemplation or listening for God. If your tradition has fixed lectionary readings for Sunday, this is an excellent way to prepare for Sunday by practicing Lectio Divina with one or all of the readings daily as your personal discipline or  in a group.

Macrina Wiederkehr in her book, A Tree Full of Angels, Seeing the Holy in the Ordinary, writes extensively about Lectio Divina, calling it “plowing up the field of the soul.”  She uses as her guide a quote from the Benedictine Abbot Marmion, “Read under the eye of God until your heart is touched, then give yourself up to love.” She uses imagery in the process, and waits for a mantra, a holy word, a phrase, a sentence that may stay. She then carries that word or phrase with her during the day. She describes giving yourself to God as surrender, melting into God.

Joanna    joannaseibert.com

Myrrh bearers

Myrrh bearers

“But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared.” Luke 24:1.

Myrrh bearer

I am preparing for a workshop for the International Community of Hope conference this summer in Texas. Community of Hope began out of a need to train those who are not ordained to be hospital chaplains at St. Luke’s Hospital in Houston. The training is now used all over the world for people interested in visiting the sick and homebound. I have been involved in the Community of Hope in our diocese for over twenty years and continue to see it as outstanding preparation and study for people who are called to any ministry that involves pastoral care. One of the hallmarks of the training is that it is steeped in Benedictine spirituality.

The image of the Community of Hope Chaplains that keeps coming to me is that of the myrrh bearers, the women who brought spices to the tomb of Jesus on that early Easter morning. They brought their most precious possessions to honor the one who had cared for them. My experience is that this has also been the story for many of the people who are called to the ministry of pastoral care. They know what it is like to be wounded, and they have been ministered to by other healers. They know what it is like to be loved and cared for by others. Their only way of sharing and continuing and keeping that love is to carry what they have learned to someone else.

What happens with their visit is something totally unexpected. They go to honor their friend and teacher and instead they are promised a new life, a resurrection in this life and the next.

 I have never experienced a visit where I did not receive resurrection. We are touched and healed by those we go to visit. We take our most precious possessions, ourselves, our time, our presence and make an offering. In return we always meet the resurrected Christ in so many forms.

Joanna  joannaseibert.com  

Spirituality at the work place

 “LOAVES AND FISHES 

This is not
the age of information.

This is not
the age of information.

Forget the news,
and the radio,
and the blurred screen.

This is the time
of loaves
and fishes.

People are hungry
and one good word is bread
for a thousand.”

 David Whyte, The House of Belonging, ©1996 Many Rivers Press

An amazing group of pediatric radiologists to have worked with at a Children's Hospital

In his book, The Heart Aroused, poet David Wythe writes about taking our spirituality with us to the workplace where it is so desperately needed by ourselves and others. He believes that preservation of the soul means giving up our desire in the scheduled workplace not to have the unscheduled meeting. My experience as well is that God drops into my life into the interruptions not on my agenda.

Whyte believes we must relinquish a belief that the world owes us a place on a divinely ordained career ladder. We have a place in the world but it is constantly shape-shifting.  Our deeper struggles can be our greatest spiritual and creative assets and the doors to creativity. The Greeks said that if the gods really wanted to punish someone, they granted that person everything they wished for. The soul’s ability to experience joy in the workplace is commensurate with our ability to feel grief. We walk into corporate offices looking like full-grown adults but many parts of us are still playing emotional catch-up from the grief and traumas of childhood which unconsciously refuse to grow any older until the trauma is resolved.  

The most dangerous time for a male is around nine o’clock on Monday morning and then the few months following his retirement when more injuries and illnesses occur. One is a death caused by carrying the burden and the other the ability to live without the burden. Work almost always becomes a platform for self-righteous moralizing. Hurrying from one workstation to another, we hope the hurrying itself can grant us importance we seek. Wythe suggests that slowing for a moment, we might open up to the emptiness at the center.

Wythe reminds us how astonishing it is to see how we shrink from the things that nourish our soul and take on every possible experience to quit it. I personally did this for dream work as I became too busy in my “church work” to go to my longtime dream group. I also see this continually in spiritual direction where I have a hard time fitting my  own spiritual director into my own “busy schedule.”

Joanna  joannaseibert.com