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| Towarnehiooks ("Deschutes River") |
Rumi
We love facilitating spaces that cultivate what our deepest selves yearn for: the nurture of soul, the strengthening of community and the amplification of hope. Most of this kind of creative experimentation seems to be happening outside the walls of “institutional” churches. We desperately need fresh wineskins for the new wine fermenting inside us and around us. We feel commissioned to create new kinds of containers that can hold what is good, beautiful and true.
A few years back, we started experimenting with our friends Lydia and Erinn outside the walls of the church. We met on Wednesdays to play around with an ancient practice called lectio divina in the living room of their Southwest Detroit home that they bought for $10,000. For more than 1500 years, monastics and contemplatives have been devoted to lectio divina as a way of rehearsing the biblical script while tapping into the spark of the divine within every single member of the community.
The goal of lectio divina is to access and amplify our “Inner Teacher”—the Spirit of steadfast love within every living being. We do this by reading a short passage from the Bible out loud, and multiple times, so that each of us in the circle listens deeply “with the ears of our hearts,” as old St. Benedict described it in the sixth century. After the short passage is initially read twice, by two different voices in the community, we travel slowly around the circle clockwise, each member sharing the word or phrase that “shimmered” for them. This is how we begin to invoke what is divine, each from our own unique soul places.
We listen to the passage two more times, from two more voices, so that we can ruminate on the word or phrase that is shimmering. We become holy cows chewing the cuds of our souls! Once again circling clockwise, each member shares specifically out of the context of our lives. Where do these ancient words collide with our current circumstances? What feelings are evoked? What is this shimmering word or phrase doing to us and through us? This is an opportunity to take inventory of our lives and the world around us.
Rose Crowley, a high school teacher in Detroit, beautifully described the goal of this second round of lectio divina as she opened up her heart to our beloved community one Wednesday night, “I don’t want to know all the theology. I just want to know how you guys struggle.” Vulnerability is contagious. As we each open up, we come to deeper realizations that we are not alone on the spiritual journey. The goal throughout is simply listening and sharing. There are no right or wrong answers. Just permission to go deeper.
Finally, after two more readings, every member ponders what we feel God, percolating deep within us, is prodding each of us to. What is my next step, however small or large? It is time to name intentions. We are accountable for transforming words into action. Biblical truth is neither a head game, nor an emotional high. What is good, beautiful and true yearns to be embodied in real life.
After this rich and vulnerable sharing, there is time for intercessions. We hold each other and bear one another’s burdens. We rejoice with those rejoicing and weep with those weeping, as we all share out of our pain, praise and protest. We are reminded of our interdependence, our interrelatedness and mutuality. When we read the script and connect it to our own trials and tribulations, we hear Spirit speak. We cultivate intimacy. We access the divine “in here,” not just “out there.” We are moved, though, even more powerfully, by the testimony of others in our circle. The divine delights in diversity. We are invited to experience how high and wide and long and deep Steadfast Love is. We are trained to listen, to get out of our own heads so that we can join in the conspiracy.
Lectio divina is a circle of discipline, encouragement, challenge and accountability. We practice being in our bodies, quieting our minds and expanding our hearts. Everyone’s words are respected. Everyone has time to share. No one asks clarifying questions or makes corrections or tries to fix each other. We trust in the power of the Inner Teacher.
We have participated in lectio divina readings in house church and intentional community in Southern California, intentional communities in Minneapolis and Baltimore, weekly gatherings in Detroit and now monthly in Central Oregon, and on Skype calls with friends in long distance locales from California to Iraqi Kurdistan. It is a completely different way of reading the Bible than trying to decipher universal truths and principles. Every session calls us to something deeper, more vulnerable and experiential. In this process, we aren’t making stuff up. We are attending to the multiple layers of biblical truth.
Lectio Divina is not a rigid Bible study. It is a beloved community space for binding and loosing. We are bound by the compelling nature of some of the Bible’s episodes and epiphanies. But fortunately, we are released from others. And here’s the real liberating news: we are empowered to discern together what we are bound by and what we are released from. Through prayer, study, experience and testimony, we listen and learn, and then decide, what is good, beautiful and true in regards to economics, relationships, spirituality, sexuality, social stigmas and political convictions.
Lectio Divina is one tangible way to courageously read both the Bible and life against the grain of a conventional wisdom that usually assumes that we ought to leave our interpretations and life decisions to the Pastor, Priest, Pope, Professor, Parent or President. This disempowerment model has been the true scandal since the days of Jesus. These small spaces of divine discernment, in all their creativity and diversity, become gardens where healing practices and convictions can be planted, watered and, over time, grow a harvest of what is true, beautiful and good. Religion gets real when an immanent God works through intimate relationships.
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| Amplifying hope with Nephew Milo and his mommy Casey. |
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