Father/Mother, Give Me a Word of Life

Chapter 5
Father/Mother, Give Me a Word of Life

You will remember that we have been watching for the instructions for Lectio across these chapters. We found three separate sets of instructions for Lectio in the solitude of print in the last chapter. In Chapter 6 we find yet more instructions. In Chapter 5, however, we have a very peculiar discussion of the history of the Desert Fathers and the altered states of consciousness the meditative tradition they gave us is designed to stimulate. Let us not be coy here. Lectio Divina, indeed meditation in general, is not merely a life affirming exercise that is good for you. It is nothing less than a handbook about how to “separate ourselves from enslavement to this world’s values” [50].

This is not just another call to asceticism, plain living or even righteousness—whatever that may mean. It is a call to turn away from the “TV enthroned in our homes.” Pennington is very clear about his goals here: “It is only by the powerful grace of the Spirit that the Word of God, a double-edged sword, can pierce through and separate our spirit from the clutches of the worldly spirit. And that Holy Spirit will operate with as a liberating force only if we seek and welcome her.”

Well then we may ask, how do we do this? Pennington says “We need to carve out some time apart for ourselves to escape form the bombardment of the world and to come to our true self. Our place apart can be a corner of our room where the Bible proclaims a Presence” [51]. He says it may be as minor a gesture as “turning our chair away from our desk with all its affairs, leaving the world behind for a few minutes while we rest in the Presence and know ourselves to be held in a great and tender love.”

He names the essential quality of this gesture “Quies” quiet. “That wonderful freedom to be able to rest quietly in the Lord, knowing that in him we have all.” We might even find a private special place where we can go to find this quiet, a church, a library, a park.

But quiet is not an easy state to achieve. Most of us cannot just go sit and turn off the jabbering monkey mind that howls away inside our skulls, not without a lot of meditative practice and disciplined coached work. But it is exactly this state of internal quiet that the desert fathers worked so hard to achieve. They worked to “No longer [be] tugged this way and that by our passions, emotions, uncontrolled desires.” Pennington continues this instruction: The desert fathers “longed for the freedom to do what they really wanted to do, be who they wanted to be, without having to struggle constantly against thoughts . . . that sought to master them and rule them.” Then he tells us that it is exactly this hard fought for interior silence that is essential, “if we are going to be able to hear the Lord in Lectio.”

This is a kind of Catch 22. Of course, we can’t do this without years of practice meditating. But we have to is we are going to be able to practice Lectio properly. Pennington is, it seems to me, being a bit disingenuous here. He knows very well just how hard turning off this raging interior torrent of jabber is. He acts as if it were easy to do this, as if it is just a matter of finding a quiet place. Would that it were that easy. Yet it is what must be done if we are to be able to hear the Lord in Lectio, says Pennington.

Here, finally, Pennington states the goal of Lectio Divina, and for that matter most of the great monastic treasures. “We [must] free ourselves from the false self that the values of the world encourages us to create.”

So. Pennington asserts, there is a false self. And it is this false self that must be shed if we are to enter into the Presence of God to listen.

Here is the white water I was warning you about. This is the spiritual crisis teachers of Lectio or Centering Prayer never talk much about. It is no small thing either, this shedding of the False self because this so called “false self” is the self we have come to love and know and respect having lived with it all these years.

Yet at the same time Pennington is not very concerned that the reader of his book will take this admonition seriously because he says “We cannot hope . . . to escape the self-alienation that marks our lives from the womb and is constantly fostered by a worldly society, if we do not at times and even regularly seek periods of quietness” [51-2]. Shedding a false self is not an avocation. It is not something that can be done by seeking quietness “at times or even regularly.” The Zen men know something of this shedding and are quick to say that we should not seek this unless we seek it with the same fervor as a man whose hair is on fire seeks water. It is not a sometimes affair or even a mere regularity that is required. It is a determined dedicated and coached practice that is required. I doubt it is even something most of us can undertake on our own in isolation with our printed texts.

I would think Pennington knows this full well, but as he is writing to laity who are not in the habit of taking their spiritual life as seriously as the man whose hair is on fire seeks water, he offers this advice half heartedly—or so it seems to this reader.

Then comes this instruction: “This is the goal of all authentic meditation practices and especially of that centering prayer that comes to us from the desert tradition—the quietness that enables us to be Christ to the Father in the Holy Spirit” [52]. What an odd thing to say. “The goal is to “be Christ to the Father in the Holy Spirit.”

We seem to be in the presence of a considerable mystery here, or at least some tradition not well translated from the original languages and experiences of the desert fathers.

Pennington continues giving instruction: “But anyone who has practiced meditation knows that the asceticism of the practice lies not only in giving time to meditation, but in managing during the actual time of meditation to be faithful in the setting aside thoughts, feelings, emotions, desires, all the expressions of the self.” He says this as if setting these things aside is only a function of being faithful. He takes this too casually, I think. Setting aside these thoughts, feelings, emotions and desires—all the expressions of the self—requires nothing less than a kind of spiritual crisis, what some might call in other places a break down. Yet none of the apparatus which would allow us to engage the kind of meditative practice that would precipitate a spiritual crisis, find assistance, wise counsel and support during the crisis itself is offered or indeed suggested.

Here is where I find our good Catholic monastics far too glib as they offer us training in the monastic spiritual treasures set loose among the laity after Vatican Two. It is almost as if they trust that none of us are really going to take the meditative practice seriously—since we are mere laity—so they really don’t have to worry that they have set the cat among the pigeons—as the saying goes.

Pennington goes on to say: “Herein is the true purpose of ascetic practice: to free ourselves from the imperious domination of our own thoughts, passions, and desires, to free the spirit for things of the Spirit.” As he continues his discussion he describes the monastic men and women of the desert as folk who “all but died to life in this world.” I do not think he means here that they merely cut themselves off from the social whirl of the material world, but in fact they shed the false self and in so doing experienced a kind of death to the old self and a resurrection to the new spiritual self. This is not an easy experience, and none of our protestant institutions are ready and able to sustain such a process of death and renewal. How many pastors/priests are trained in such spiritual directorship? How many are trained in the counseling of the fragmented self? How many have the kind of team put together where they can call upon licensed psychologists/psychiatrists who might be able to deal with such a spiritual crisis and understand it as a spiritual not a medical crisis? Few, I’d wager.

When, at last Pennington writes: “A daily meeting with the Lord in the Gospels, as a true disciple seeking a word of life from the Master, is the surest way for each one of us to grow into the mind of Christ.” Again we meet the mystery. Is this a particularly intense altered state of consciousness he is offering us? I suspect it is an exalted mystical state that few if any embrace outside the nurturing and sustaining embrace of the monastic community with all its years of community experience of such disciplines and spiritual states.


Chapter 6
Lectio in Context

In this chapter Pennington continues with his instruction pointing the way to the spiritual turbulence Lectio is designed to produced in the lives of disciplined determined and coached practioners. “Whenever we say the word ‘lectio,’ we actually imply a whole process or way of spirituality—a process into God, deep into the inner life of the trinity” [57]. A greater warning could hardly be sounded, but he tosses it off right before a Latin lesson, as if it were of no particular importance.

He offers us a spiritual four-fold process composed of lectio—meditatio—oratio—contemplatio. By which he means Lection, medition, oration and contemplation.

Holy Leisure
What we laity do not have is “holy leisure” [58]. Yet it is what sets aside monastic practice of Lectio from the practice of the laity. This recognition percolates under this text in often annoying ways, in my opinion.

The Fourfold process of Lectio:

I am always interested in process as it gives us a basis for practice.

Step One: Lectio, gathering the sacred text “plucking of the word that we will use al day to remember God’s message to us” [59].

Step Two: Meditatio
Meditatio meant in the first 1000 years of Christian practice that having “received a word of life from one’s spiritual father or mother, we carried that word with us, repeating it, perhaps even on the lips but certainly in the mind, until it formed the heart and called for the response of prayer” [61]. Pennington is at some pains to distinguish between modern ideas of meditation and that meditation practice of the early Christians. “Meditation was not so much an active process whereby we worked with what we had received until it fitted into the conceptual framework we already had—rather it was a more receptive process allowing the Word to break open and reform us. It is not a wholly passive process; a certain assimilation on our part is necessary.”

One metaphor the early church fathers used for this process was “chewing the cud.” That is we would take the word of the morning and through the day we chew on what we have received allowing it to be assimilated during the day.

The meditation of Mother Teresa is one of the most profound of these traditions.

Oratio
Pennington writes: “almost naturally, this on going meditation calls forth a response, thanksgiving, praise, petition, repentance, adoration. . . . The world is shot through and through with the mercy and love of God.

I like Pennington’s suggestion that we use “some reminders, for example, forming the deliberate intent to repeat our word each time we hear a clock strike, each time we pass through a door, when we walk down a corridor or street. Some effort, some schooling, will quickly make the practice ours” [64].

Contemplatio
Con means with
Templa was the segment of the heavens that the pagan priests of ancient Rome used to watch, later becoming the place one went to know the will of the gods and to worship them. In the new covenant, Pennington says, “we are the temple of the new covenant, the covenant in his Blood, which we celebrate and receive in the Eucharist” [65].

Pennington writes of this process and of our practice: “The whole process if we have space for it can be present in each or any period of lectio. As we listen to the word (lectio), a word, a phrase, a sentence may sell strike us, and we let it reverberate within, opening and expanding, forming and shaping (meditation) calling forth varied responses (oratio) until finally we simply rest in the Reality to which it all leads (contemplatio) [67].