This Word Lectio

Chapter One: This Word Lectio, pages 1-10

In the days before printing, books were a one at a time hand made artifact. They were rare, expensive and not shared by everyone. Indeed most in the Monastic life in those days could not read or write. So Lectio was just about the only way the ordinary monk could encounter the Word of God. Lectio was Spoken Word usually during the course of meals in the refectory or in chapter meetings. When they could read, the text looked nothing like it does to day as both the vowels and spaces were omitted Stxtwldlksmthnglkths. [So text would look something like this.] As a result, if monks did their own Lectio they were as Pennington calls them a “community of mumblers.”

Lectio, today, is an experiential hearing of the word. It should properly be titled Exaudio Dvina as it is really an intense kind of listening to the sacred word and allowing the sound of the sacred word to enter you, permeate your consciousness and seep into your being. It is so very different from the kind of reading we ordinarily do, or for that matter the kind of listening we ordinarily do. This is not reading where we are struggling for interpretation, struggling to reduce the sounds to acceptable meaning. It is wholly other. And therein is its novelty and wonder.

Remember what I suggested last week: What I have found in Pennington’s book is in fact a set of instructions for a mystical experience emerging from the determined, directed practice of Lectio Divina. If you read carefully, Pennington is careful to give you instruction in the basic belief system that Lectio Divina uses to transport its practitioners into spectacular religious experience. In the weeks to come I want to unearth these instructions and see if we can internalize them to make Lectio Divina the Magic Carpet it is intended to be.

In this chapter Pennington begins to assert what are the basic assumed truths which sustain a Lectio Divina practice which would culminate in a revitalizing mystical experience. He calls these “Dispositions.”

Dispositions:
According to our know-it-all cyber encyclopedia Wikipedia: “A disposition is a habit, a preparation, a state of readiness, or a tendency to act in a specified way.” That is to say a disposition points to a response we are hard wired to give without thinking. Now I hasten to say for those of us who have been following the historical/critical scholarly commentary on Christian tradition these dispositions are hardly hard wired into us, any more, if ever they were. These dispositions are not about critical thinking, in fact critical thinking is anathema to the tradition out of which these dispositions are fundamental.

FAITH:
The first disposition is faith. That is to say we have internalized as if wholly true and without question that Scripture is the Word of God. Listen to what Pennington says here: “We believe not only that the Word who is Gods speaks to us through this inspired Word, but that the Word is truly present in his inspired Word and present to us as he communicates with us through the word.” The proposition that the Bible, especially the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian Scriptures are inspired, and as our evangelical friends are fond of saying “inerrant” is pretty fundamental, if you are a fundamentalist. It is the shield behind which so much knavery hides, as recent scholarship has suggested. Be that as it may, in this world of Lectio Divina we have to set the historical/critical apparatus aside and accept as reflex that Scripture is the word of God, literal and absolute.

HUMILITY
Pennington goes on to develop this idea by outlining the second of these dispositions: Humility. Pennington writes: “Humility is the acceptance of our profound ignorance with regard to God as well as to so many other things. We know what we know, and it is not very much. We know what we do not know, and that is a lot more. . . . We come to our listening hungry and thirsty, filled with longing and need. And God who is mighty does great things for us. He fills the hungry with good things.”

I love this last metaphor of the Christian being the pilgrim on the spiritual path who is both starving and dying of thirst. It puts Lectio on the same footing as the Zen Buddhist who says: “do not follow this path unless you can do so with the same energy as the man with his hair on fire seeks water.” Lectio is not a time for half measures. The practioner of Lectio Divina is all in or not in at all.

OPENNESS
A third disposition is the reflex of openness. Listen to what Pennington writes here: “I am not simply reading a book I have read so often before.” We all know what this means. How many times have we read the 23rd Psalm, heard it read so that it becomes a familiar chant? Pennington says set that familiarity aside and assume that when I am reading the scriptures “I am meeting a Person, a Divine Person, the God who loves me and who has a wondrous plan for me.” Again the metaphor of text as place. The scriptures are a place of meeting, a meeting ground where we come to encounter the Divine Person who loves us without reservation.

FAITHFULLNESS
I love Pennington’s image of the Kavi, the Indian garment of intense orange. “Its color is achieved by dipping a piece of white cotton in yellow dye a thousand times. The monastics [of India] wear this color as a reminder of their need to dip again and again into the Divine thorough meditation in order to attain the transformation they desire. To attain a total open listening for the Divine we need to dip again and again into the divine reading of Lectio Divina.” The practioner of Lectio is like the cloth which has to be dipped a thousand times in the water of divinity in order to achieve transformation. Let there be no doubt what Pennington is talking about here: it is Transformation. We are not practicing Lectio Divina in order to be a better Christian, we are practicing Lectio Divina to become a transformed Christian, one who is utterly different than they were before they started. It is a shedding of the old straight logic and a donning of the new divine logic that is sought here.
There is another explanation for this color. It was the color of clothing Indians gave to imprisoned and condemned criminals so they could not blend in with the locals. By wearing this color, Indian monastics declare they are one with the oppressed of the culture.

Faith, humility, openness and faithfulness. The dispositions begin where they end with faith and the distinction of faithfulness. Let us say this another way. We begin with acceptance, that is a setting aside of doubt and skepticism and critical thinking, of all those things the academy has worked so hard to instill in us for the secular world of lay life. We continue with abject debasement of our own powers of discernment, a willingness to open ourselves to the possibility of thinking differently about the world than we have been taught. We end with the reflex of habitual prayer, of dipping ourselves again and again into the sea of numinous divinity. If we can begin this way, then what Pennington charts for us may well lead to transformation.

Chapter Two: The Listening That We Are, pages 11-18

One of the things we have to come to terms with in Lectio Divina is this notion that: “The Word was made flesh. Jesus is the most complete expression of the Word in our creation. God is Word. God is communication.” This is Pennington’s interpretation of the implications of the first verses of the Gospel of John, Chapter 1. “1In the beginning, the Word existed. The Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2He existed in the beginning with God. 3Through him all things were made, and apart from him nothing was made that has been made.”

What are we to do with this mystery? How is the Word God? It has always seemed to me that when we confront mysteries we are confronting something very ancient the origins of which have been forgotten, the language used to express this idea lost to time, or in fact the culture that produced this idea has vanished leaving this incredible shard on the great mound which is all that is left of the ancient cities for us to discover. More importantly, it has always seemed to me that we who are literate who are the heirs of the incredible revolution of the fifth century B.C. during which writing began to replace oral/aral memory traditions cannot possibly understand what this means. It is as if we by being literate have eaten of the apple of knowledge and are forever separated from Eden by the transformation we have experienced as a result of that ingestion.

That is to say that this way of thinking which we find now embedded in John is very much older than John itself. It emerges from a kind of consciousness lost to us now, one perhaps available in the pre-literate cultures of the Mediterranean where what was known was known by oral retelling, was known by being held in memory by people trained in the arts of memory. So in that time before literacy, the word had great power, greater power than we who are literate perhaps can comprehend. There are numerous creation stories that have come down to us where the creation is accomplished by uttering a word, a magical incantation. (prove this). In this ancient world before literacy the spoken word had much more power than it has now. An Oath, for example, a man’s word was his bond. Breaking an oath was unthinkable because it would break the word upon which the relationship between the oath taker and the oath giver was based.

Sacred words are words of power. Words speak us into existence when we are given a name. In the Buddhist tradition there are sacred seed syllable sounds which are woven into mantras, sacred words like “Aum,” and strings of sacred words like “Aum Mani Padmi Hum.” In ancient tradition the sound of the word was all that existed: no letters existed to capture the sound, record them, and preserve them for later replay. In that lost world it may make some sense to say as Pennington does that “God is word.” The next play in this mystery is the idea of the incarnation in which “The Word was made flesh.” That somehow word and flesh can be one. And indeed they may well be, if before written language the word was remembered and uttered. Words can only exist in that pre literate world, if they are embodied because they must be uttered by a vocal apparatus powered by lungs triggered by mind and spinal chord. The Sound only exists if it is heard by enfleshed ears that can understand them because the mind of the listener is prepared to receive them. In that preliterate world, Words can only be flesh.

Now move from that understanding of a world before literacy to the next step in which Pennington asserts that “Jesus is the most complete expression of the Word in our creation.” That is to say that we Christians believe that this man Jesus embodied the ancient sacred words, gave utterance to them, and from his mouth and from his flesh came our tradition.

Now Pennington follows this with a return to the original idea “God is Word. God is communication.” Which I would rephrase by making it a syllogism “IF God is word, THEN God is communication.” He amplifies this to say “And we therefore are essentially a listening.” Our role then is to be listeners, to be the receivers of the word which was uttered by Jesus into scripture. We are “a listening for that Word. To the extent we truly ‘hear’ that Word, receive that Word into our being and into our lives, we participate in the Divine Being, Life, Love , Joy. Made in the image of God, we have an unlimited, an infinite potential to be like unto him. . . .” The gambit Pennington makes here is that the teachings of Jesus, the words from his flesh, the word made flesh, are accurately presented in the Scripture. Pennington jettisons everything we have learned about scripture from the Historical/Critical tradition and assumes that Scripture is the living word of God whole and complete. So that to hear aurally/orally in Lectio Divina the scripture read to us, is to hear the voice of God itself. For him there are no questions that this is absolutely true.

But Pennington is a wise teacher. He knows that our ability to listen even to the Divine Word is a function of our ability to hear. He writes: “As things come to me across my listening, I get only what falls within the parameters of the listening that I am. If I am a very ‘set’ person, very rigid in my ideas and convictions, then that is it. That is all I get, and all I will ever get. On the other hand, if I am very open person, then each thing I encounter in my ‘listening’ has the potential to expand my listening, to push out my boundaries perhaps just a little bit more.”

Our ability to listen is a function of our mind set, our pre dispositions, our experiences, our vocabulary, our education, our willingness to receive new things. Pennington knows that listening is a struggle. How are we to listen? Are we listening to interpret? Are we listening to find confirmation of what we already know? Are we listening for something new, some new thing yet un uttered? What is our goal in listening? Must we even have a goal as we listen?

I particularly love what Pennington writes: “From one end to the other, the Scriptures are a love story. They are a Love speaking to his beloved. And we sometimes have every kind of listening for God but that of a lover. To let the Scriptures speak to us in their nakedness can be immensely frightening, for they demand such a love in return.”

Pennington is demanding here that we shed all preconceptions, unlearn all learning, give up all critical thinking and open ourselves wholly to the scriptures as wholly as the shore opens itself to the waves of the sea. Such listening is frightening because it may mean the erosion of what we think we are. It may mean the discovery that we are not who we thought we were. It may even mean that we must journey into a pilgrimage of transformation.