Winter just simply does not want to go away, but we're happy that you're here. Welcome to the 12th annual Damascus Windsor Lecture, which we started really to go beyond the vision and legacy that founded Damascus, who was so visionary and ahead of his time, really, putting in place and building on principles that became sort of universalized after the Vatican Council for the whole rest of the Church. But in his day, he was very much ahead of the curve. And one of his great desires, of course, was to make the sources, particularly scripture and the liturgy, accessible to more and more people. And so this series of lectures is our effort at ongoing formation and education to do exactly that, to make

[01:10]

scripture and liturgy patristics of more and more accessible to more and more people. So we're happy that you can be with us. I want to first begin by thanking the friends of Mouth Savior for putting on this lovely little brunch or lunch, breakfast, the coffee, all of the goodies, and for all their efforts in planning and organizing this. Tom, thank you very much. and everybody else involved. So I welcome in a special way our speaker today, Abbot Jerome Codell, who I'm sure will be greatly received by all of you. He's certainly a great scholar and a practitioner of his craft. He entered Subiaco Abbey in Arkansas in 1959, having sort of grown up not too far away from it.

[02:17]

I don't know exactly in its shadow, but not too far away. So he's been there for a long time. He, of course, went through the standard seminary program at that time, and then went off to study sacred scripture in Rome at the Biblical, where he received his degree. And his specialty or area of focus was the Gospel of St. Luke and the Acts of the Apostles. So this is really his season, huh? Right after Easter, and read so much from the Acts of the Apostles. After his ordination and studies, he taught in their school, which is a boarding school at the Abbey, and then went for some years to their foundation in Baileys. When he returned to participate in the abatial election, he, in 1989, was elected.

[03:19]

He's been abbot of Subiaco Abbey since 1989, and in 2002 they closed their foundation in Belize. He's also one of the founders of the Little Rock Scripture Study Program, which many of you may be aware of. So, he's eminently qualified and prepared to share with us this morning on this wonderful topic of Lectio Divina, so much a part of our monastic tradition. And so, without any further ado, I present and introduce Abbot Geroge Podell. Well, I'm very happy to be with you. This is not my first time at Mount Savior. A few years ago, I gave a retreat here, and Father Martin tricked me into coming in January. But I made it all right.

[04:25]

The monasteries around the country and around the world, especially around the U.S., owe a great debt to Fr. Damasus, because many of the things that he proposed, the impulses he gave, are now being lived out in our monasteries, and he was on the right track. And so I'm very happy to be here to participate in this lecture series in his honor. My topic is the recovery of the practice of Lectio Divina since Vatican II. When you step back, you can see there have been different trends going on, and as it emerges, I think it's helpful to look at exactly how that happened. In the Christian spiritual tradition, there are two important spiritual disciplines that are focused on reading.

[05:29]

One of them was practically impossible before the invention of the printing press, but it has been very common after that time. The other one is very difficult to do, in the way it was done before the printing press. That's kind of the thing that changed everything regarding reading, because I'm talking about the two exercises that are known as spiritual reading, which is a modern spiritual exercise since the time of the printing press, and Lectio Divina, which came from the early era of the monastic church, from about the third and fourth century on. We understand that Lectio Divina means divine reading, holy reading, but we don't really know, we haven't known, we didn't naturally know what it meant in terms of reading, because reading

[06:36]

in the time after the printing press and the Enlightenment is a different concept, it's a different thing, it's a different exercise than it was before. And so if we simply apply the term holy reading to what we know as reading, we get a distorted idea, and that to a great extent has been what has happened. Actually, Lectio Divina, though it is an ancient monastic practice, was not very active for many centuries, especially since the time of the Reformation. In fact, I was, as Father said, I entered the monastery, made my first vows in 59, my training was in the 60s, and it was about 10 years into that period before I ever heard that term. It wasn't part of at least the tradition as I was exposed to it because we needed to get back to the sources. There's a wonderful, excellent 2011 study of Lectio Divina history and so forth by Duncan Robertson.

[07:46]

And he points out that there was an eclipse of the practice of Alexio Divina from the 13th century until it's re-emergent in the 20th. So that's a lot of centuries. And so to come back into it, it's not just a natural flow, and we have to learn, we have to study to get back what really is in our tradition. The danger is that if you apply a term the wrong way, you may not achieve what it means, what's the purpose of it. Lectio Divina is a very powerful spiritual discipline, but if you don't know, if you apply the rules the wrong way, you get a different product. For example, if you do Lectio Divina as if it is spiritual reading in the modern sense, you can hardly achieve the goal of Lectio Divina. You'll achieve the goal of spiritual reading, which is mainly intellectual, but not the spiritual goal of Lectio Divina.

[08:54]

And sort of like a good example, I think, is that a term like football, football is a term that in the U.S. means one thing and a lot of other countries means another thing. And if you try to play American football according to the rules of, say, German football, you'll never score. And that's a danger with, so it's not just an unimportant thing. Lectio Divina has one goal. Union with God, bringing transformation. That's the goal of Lectio Divina. Union with God, bringing transformation. The same thing can be achieved without any intellectual content. but in Lectio Divina it also has intellectual content, but that's the goal. The goal of spiritual reading is understanding, learning, knowing what things mean.

[10:06]

knowing the teaching of the church, knowing the history of spirituality, knowing how to interpret scripture. All these things are part of the, and they feed Lectio Divina, but they don't replace it. Until Lectio, this is a quote that I like, until Lectio Divina is understood as a journey, a spiritual journey, leading us to contemplative prayer, its power for transformation will not be released among us. Another way of stating the purpose of Lectio Divina is to, and again, playing with these words, it's not just to read like a ready text, but to holy read, which ultimately means to read reality the way God reads it. Holy reading is reading the world the way God reads it, getting the eyes of God or, as Scripture says, putting on the mind of Christ. And that will give you a whole new perspective on people, and on your own life, because if you look at the world as God looks at it, you don't see a bunch of enemies or evildoers.

[11:14]

You see a bunch of friends and potential saints, and it gives you a whole different way of looking at the world. seeing the world with God's eyes and contemplative gaze, pure perfection, and not first, what do I do about it, but how do I see the person I'm looking at. There's a wonderful text in Isaiah which says, morning after morning, he opens my ear that I may hear. Now, that's a camouflaged translation. A lot of times, the particular nuance is not false, but it doesn't bring out the real meaning of the word. Because what it really says is, morning by morning, he makes my ear alert to listen like a disciple.

[12:18]

Now that's in a few of the translations, not in all the English translations, because it's a little complicated, but the point is, listening like a disciple is not listening like a teacher. Listening like a teacher, you listen for what you already know. You see whether your students have picked up what you taught them. Listening like a disciple is listening as if you don't already know, or you have something to learn. And so it says, He opens my ear every morning to listen like a disciple, to be alert. And the danger for most of us, certainly in my profession, my danger is it's hard for me to listen except as a teacher. And so it takes spiritual grace for me to be saying, well, it doesn't sound like what I thought, but possibly it's true.

[13:22]

For me, the danger is it doesn't sound like what I thought already, therefore it's false. And so we have to listen like a teacher or listen like a disciple. A good example, these things happen all the time, but think about Mary and Martha, you know, with Jesus. Martha already knew what was good for Jesus when he came in. And Mary didn't. Martha said, he needs a good meal, he needs to get busy, you know, I needed somebody to take care of him. All he wanted to do, apparently, was just relax. I know that one of the abbots told me that he had to go give a talk one time in California. He thought, well, I'll take an extra day and go out and I have some friends out there, I'll relax the day beforehand, and then I'll get this. He was speechless. He called the family, they were very excited. And he said, all I want to do, they said, what do you want to do?

[14:22]

Do you want to see this? You want to see that? You want to see that? No, no, I just want to relax. But when they got out there, he had a program for him. And so he said, all day long, he said, I was more exhausted when I got out there than, I said, they knew what was best for me. They didn't listen to me. So to listen, and that's, in Lectio Divina, to see is also to listen. To learn to open up your eyes and your real spiritual ears to hear what is really going on, and that is a gift of God. It takes grace to do that. And if you listen, what you hear begins to change you. And it makes you open up to more things than you thought were available or even what you're aware of. A few years ago, there was a group of, there was a class in England, a biology class. The teacher had a spring trip, like a field trip, took them out one day to go into the woods. and to experience what they'd been talking about.

[15:25]

And so, at one point, the teacher said, okay, now everybody be very, very quiet, just be completely still, listen to what is going on. Because we'd been talking and walking, we haven't heard that there are a lot of things happening. They listened and they could hear twigs breaking, they could hear the wind, they could hear birds chirping, they could hear even where little insects were going through the leaves. And all of a sudden, they heard what sounded like a regular cry or a regular sound, very remote, and a pounding, and they didn't know what that was, and they followed that sound, and there was a man who had fallen into a cistern, an old cistern, and he had been trying to get out, he couldn't get out. And he just kept making a noise, but they heard it. They wouldn't have heard it unless they had been very, very silent. Again, it was the idea that you have to open up and be aware. Now, in the case with God, there's always more to learn, but that isn't mainly intellectual.

[16:33]

We call God the great mystery, and that's sort of like, mystery means a deep reality. And if you go into a cave, when you get in there, you can't see anything. But if you wait a few minutes till your eyes adjust, you begin to see shadows or you begin to see different objects. The same way, when you get into the reality of God, the more you're quiet, the more you have the contemplative gaze, you begin to get an awareness. Saint Gregory of Nyssa said, the soul's desire is fulfilled by the very fact of its remaining unsatisfied. For really to see God is never to have had one's fill of desiring God. St. Augustine has this image. He says the entire life of a good Christian is an exercise in holy desire. Suppose you're going to fill some holder or container and you know you'll be given a large amount.

[17:36]

You set about stretching your sack or your wineskin or whatever because you know the quantity you'll have to put in it and your eyes tell you there's not enough room. By stretching it you increase the capacity of the sack. And that's the way God deals us. Simply by making us wait, God increases our desire, in turn, which enlarges the capacity of our soul, making it able to receive what is to be given to us. Now, since the recovery of Lectio Divina, after Vatican II, and this has been my main point, the term has become applied to various practices, and even to series of biblical studies. And all of this is okay as long as we realize what we're doing. But biblical study groups and spiritual sharing groups are fine as long as we understand they are not what was meant originally by Lectio Divina. They're more to increase your knowledge and your understanding.

[18:41]

They're intellectual, and intellectual things may or may not be transformative. you can be very smart and very mean, you know? Or you can be very smart and very good. The Alexio Divina of the ancient monks was not interested in ideas, only in union with God. And that's the way they could play with Scripture, because they weren't hung up on exactly getting the precise meaning. They were trying to get the flavor. And that's why one of their favorite words for reading Scripture was chewing. really nazio, like chewing a cud. So, reading means a different thing for us today than it did centuries ago. We think of a text, we think of books, newspapers, today computer screens, iPads, and our mind is gobbling information. We always want more information.

[19:45]

Well, there wasn't that much information available to the people who began Lectio Divina. They might have a few parchments in their library, and they had to keep reading the same ones over and over again. And they were always milking them, some for ideas, but for inspiration. And they didn't have the same aggressive ideal learning that we do, because that comes with the explosion of thought and philosophy and communication, which is part of our life, which is a very good thing. Many things happen because of the aggressive explosion of information, but we learned how to never be satisfied. We're always gathering information. When you get this into your prayer life, it can make it, it can block it out, actually, it can smother it.

[20:45]

And so you have to be careful. That's why Lectio Divina is important. Recently, and a few years ago, I had a monk in my monastery who was trying to do Lectio Divina, and he came up to me and he said, I just have a terrible time with my Lectio, and I said, well, what's the problem? He said, well, he said, when I get there, I just don't want to read, I just want to sit. in the presence of God, and I said, bingo! I said, you're right there. You don't have to read anything, in the sense of a text. And really, think about this, this is really true. All of you are in here because of a great desire, a search for God. So you've been doing this for many years. You've been reading Scripture, you've been in the liturgy, and you would not have to read one more word your whole life to be able to do Lectio every day. Because it is in you, the Word is in you. There's an important distinction between the Scripture and the Word of God.

[21:50]

Now, the Scripture is the Word of God, but the Word of God is a much broader thing, including the person of Jesus Christ. And I told the monks a few weeks ago, I said, I have a degree in Scripture, and you might think I get to heaven, I've got it made, and I said, well, I'm afraid that St. Peter would meet me, and he said, is that thing made out of asbestos? He said, a degree in Scripture is irrelevant, but everybody has to have a degree in the Word of God. Everybody has to have a degree in personal relationship with God, and that's what Lectio Divina is wanting to bring us. Then there was an article recently, last summer, in Benedictine magazine, that gave a kind of a critique of the four, you remember the traditional four steps of Lectio Divina are reading Lectio, meditatio, meditation, prayer, oratio, and then contemplatio.

[23:02]

Now, Lectio is the first level. Meditatio at that point doesn't mean meditation. It means repetition, chewing the cud. And prayer, that's prayer with words, contemplation, prayer without words. There was a critique that said this thing has, this ladder of Lectio came into the tradition very late. It comes from the 12th century. And Lectio had been practiced already about seven centuries by then, or maybe six or five. But the danger, it could be a straitjacket on Lectio Divina. Because those steps are not meant to be a ladder. they are describing different aspects of a process. And they're more like doorways. You can go into that door, into the practice of Lectio Divina, any door.

[24:07]

Some days you may not want to read at all. You just want to sit there. That's the door of contemplation or just prayer. Or you may need to read, pick up a text and read it again. But you must, The Lectio Divina is not meant for reading texts that you don't know. It's for reading texts you already know, that you don't have to read in order to learn. That's why the ancient monks would have a few copies of parts of scripture. They could read them over and over again. But because of the danger for us is that we're so aggressive in our learning that we don't want to look at something a second time. And so we're looking for something new. But you really can't do Lectio Divina on the daily newspaper or on a periodic corner. It has to go back to the ancients. You have to get back to the figures, the ancient figures of faith. Today, in fact, this is a little bit different, give you a different perspective.

[25:11]

I think one of the ways that people are doing Lectio Divina is in perpetual adoration. It's not called that. But that is exactly the purpose of Lectio Divinum, to put people in contact with God, directly in contact with God by, and I use the repeating the ancient text, but also just by being there with God. And what happens is, again, is the transformation. It makes something happen in you that begins to radiate. I had something happen years ago, but later on I looked back at it and I said, this is how Alexio Divina or the transformation or contemplation becomes evangelizing. And that's come out again lately with the Evangelical Synod. I was having Mass at a local college.

[26:17]

I was a ministry to students there for a while. It wasn't far from the Abbey. And one day I was having Mass, and after Mass, there was other people there besides students. This couple started coming up to see me, and as they came up, I recognized that this woman was somebody that I had grown up with in a parochial school. And so we got to talking, and so forth. After a while, she said, she said, you know why I came back to the church? Well, I didn't know she'd been out of church. Yeah, she said, my husband and I, we both gave up on the church, all these scandals and everything else for 15 years. And she said, you remember that Pope that lasted about a month? And I said, yeah, Pope John Paul I. She said, well, he said when he was elected, We were completely disinterested, but the trouble was you couldn't look anywhere in a newspaper or on TV, there wasn't something about the election of the Pope. They said we were disgusted.

[27:18]

So one night we were sitting there, flipping the channels on TV, we couldn't get around it, and all of a sudden it stopped right at the point where the Pope, the new Pope came out and gave his blessing, and he gave this great smile And he said, when he smiled, it went right through me. And she said, at that moment, I knew I was going back to the church. Well, that was a very powerful insight. He reached her through grace, not through his words, but grace was coming through him. And it wasn't something he'd learned. It was something that had transformed him. He became a channel. for grace, and that's really what Lectio Divina and all our spiritual exercises are not trying to make us get more information, but to transform us so that we put the face of God to the world, and that's what brings people to Christ. So, I think that's a great thing that's happening with Pope Francis today, you know, he's saying a lot of beautiful things, but basically it's the way he is,

[28:27]

the way he comes across, he draws people, people want to be drawn into that. We don't always think of contemplative prayer as Lectio Divina, but that is what it is at its fullest expressions. You remember Father, no, Father Thomas Keating, who is known for Centering Prayer, he commented years ago about the obscuring of the meaning of Lectio Divina. He said the original practice had expanded to include spiritual reading in the broadest sense of the word. In the process, the emphasis has shifted from deepening one's prayer to deepening one's intellectual stimulation. Contemplation was regarded as an exceptional gift, not as the normal flowering of Lectio Divina. Again, that's coming back to the same point. The early monks realized, and they did this, I'm sure, by grace, they realized that what we all want and what we all need is the personal experience of God.

[29:38]

We all need the grace to give us hope. We all need to be transformed so that we act differently and we see things differently. And if we see things differently, we act differently. And so that Lectio Divina had many, as I say, had many doors. You could go in wherever you wanted to, but they all were leading, when you got in there, they're all leading to that personal relationship with God, to that personal transformation. And the pressure is off because it isn't a matter, everybody can do it. It doesn't depend on your personal gifts, or your personal education, because it is simply between you and God. But we each need different, we go different routes. The educated person needs a different route than the uneducated person. But ultimately, the goal and the result can be the same. So, the Church of the West, you know, went further in this direction until

[30:46]

As a result, pretty much, of the Protestant Reformation, the church became suspicious of contemplative prayer. And there was a time, you know, there were the extremes of quietism that made the church very defensive. And even people like St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, they were under a lot of suspicion because they were going against that grain. Now, the beauty Now we're returning, and so the recent renewal has been a return. And my point is that the first point of the first phase of the return has primarily been intellectual. That we have been in a time, we needed that time, of reassuring ourselves that this is a good thing, because in the tradition there are voices that have doubted that you can really have a personal experience of God, or that it's really open to everybody. I know that when we started having our scripture study series back in the 70s, there were still a lot of people who thought that lay people should not lead those discussions.

[32:00]

You know, they don't have a degree. But again, that's because you're thinking of scripture as an intellectual discipline, or you're speaking of discipline as a word of God. And that is open to everybody. You have to know the tradition, but you don't have to have the degree. And I think that that period is coming to an end. We have the intellectual background, basis for the practice, and we have all kind of information. But now, for many people, it's getting beyond just knowing about it and how to do it. Now it's getting just to spend time, spend time in the presence of God. And a lot of times it's just resting in a word, resting in a biblical scene, or going even beyond that.

[33:08]

The thing that bothers most people in prayer is distractions. And because of the intellectual component in much of our teaching about prayer, it seemed, the idea was as long as you're distracted, you're not praying, or you're not praying very well. I remember Thomas Burns said, that's not true. Anybody who hasn't been distracted doesn't know how to pray. But what's very helpful is an idea from the East. They say that every time, no matter how fervent you are, every time that you want to pray and sit down or kneel down to pray, you inevitably find yourself under a tree full of monkeys. Now, the monkeys are your thoughts and distractions. They're always going to be there. You think, I want to try to find a new place and I won't have that. No, monkeys find you. And the temptation is to think that if you go up in that tree with a gun, you can kill all those monkeys.

[34:20]

No, the monkeys will multiply faster than you shoot. But the key is, our minds are very alive and very aggressive. You can't shut down those things. What you do is you get under, there are different levels of consciousness. You go down and sit under the tree and let the monkeys fly away up there. If you find yourself up there, you just come back down under the tree. But another thing, because of our overemphasis on conscious control, The fathers of the church now have been coming to our rescue because somebody like St. Augustine says, he says that prayer is desire for God. It's not so much what you know about, it's desire for communion with God. And as long as your desire is there, your prayer is there. And the purity of prayer is measured not by the clarity of the focus, but by the intensity of the desire.

[35:28]

That is a thing that's helped me a whole lot. The purity of prayer is measured not by the clarity of the focus, which means you don't have any distractions, no, but by the intensity of the desire. And whether you pray well or not, is not determined by how composed you are during your time of prayer, how you hold your head or whether you stand up or sit down or kneel down, but how you act when you go outside of church. And that's what tells whether your prayer was successful or not. So it's all grace. It's the grace coming in. And again, in today's world, Because we were so scared of, we were so worried about our distractions, this was a very good example too. I keep coming back to perpetual adoration, not because it has the same name as Lectio Divina, but because the goal is the same.

[36:32]

And ultimately, the practice probably is the same when it gets to a certain point. When you go, some of you I know have regular times of prayer and go for perpetual adoration. And when you get into perpetual adoration, that doesn't automatically shut everything out. It's like the monkeys come in with you, you know? And so you go in there for 15 minutes, a half hour, an hour, and you come back out and you think, I was distracted the whole time. I don't know if I prayed at all. St. Augustine would say this. It would say, why did you go in there? You went in there to pray and to meet God. What did you have to do to get there? Well, you had to take time off. You maybe had to get somebody to watch your kids. Maybe you had to drive a certain way. Maybe you had to change your schedule. And so you made a lot of preparation. And so you came in there, and as soon as you got in there, you were distracted.

[37:34]

Did you desire not to pray? No, you hadn't changed your intention. When you get out of there, that whole time was prayer, because it was your desire. And your distractions did not ruin your prayer. When you get in there, all of a sudden you start following your distractions up the tree. That your whole time is spent doing that on purpose. Then, of course, you did it. But if you didn't, if it was something involuntary, that is very good news, very comforting news. And it also is very much in the line of, it's very in the line that God is in charge and we're not. A lot of times our spirituality gives us the idea that if we don't do it right, it won't get done. God says, even if you do it wrong, I can get it done. And I will get it done. So the encouraging thing is to do it every day, to give time for it, to do it according to your background constantly.

[38:39]

You need spiritual reading all the time. You need constantly to be learning the tradition. You need to know the Catechism. You need to know the documents of Vatican II. You need to know the Scripture. But in your prayer, you don't have to be worried about all the subtleties. What you're trying to do is to come into the awareness and presence of God and to let God work on you. Um... It's interesting that our idea of reading is very intellectual, as it should be, and we don't hardly make any noise when we read. If somebody reads out loud, that means they're reading to a public. You don't have people sitting, unless they're reading their book out loud, usually. Then people say, shut up. But in the ancient church, in the ancient world, most private reading was out loud. up until at least the 7th century or 8th century, because texts, if you look back at those texts, you'll see that they weren't divided.

[39:47]

One word ran right into another word. the idea of separating words on paper didn't happen originally. And so people had to read out loud to know when a word came to an end and another word started. And so they would read out loud. And Father Jean Lefebvre has an example. He said one monk wrote to another, wrote a note to another. He said, I'm having a terrible, I can't do my Lectio. He said, why not? He's got a sore throat. So, to make this point even stronger, the difference between Lectio and spiritual reading is this. You can become great at spiritual reading without becoming a saint. You can't become great at Lectio Divina without becoming a saint. because spiritual reading ultimately, which is a good thing, ultimately is about myself, Alexia Devinas, ultimately about God.

[40:52]

And they're both good, they're both necessary, but we don't want to spend all our time in the learning process of spiritual reading, we want to spend it in the communication with God. I want to give you an example, another example of how we can get a person like myself, who's been a scripture scholar, a problem that I can get into. It comes from another person. At our monastery, back in the 70s, I was teaching at our high school, and I saw a note on the bulletin board that said there was gonna be a retreat, midweek retreat, on contemplative prayer. and I looked to see which monk would be given it. Well, it wasn't going to be a monk, it was going to be a Methodist preacher. And I wondered, who's coming too? Well, it was Methodists and Episcopalians. And then it said any monk that has time is free to come for any of the talks.

[41:55]

So I had finished my talk in my classes in the afternoon, and there was a talk, so I went over there. It was kind of a life-changing experience for me, because the teacher, He was, his name was John, his name was John Paul Jones, which is a, it's a, or Paul Jones, it was Paul, maybe John was his first, but he had three initials, but Paul Jones, and he was a, I was not aware of him, but he was one of the prominent theologians in the country in the Protestant church. He was a teacher at Harvard. And he was at the top of the scale of divinity professors, you know, teachers of theology. And he gave his life history, and I happened to be there. And he said, this is what happened to me. He said, I was born in Appalachia. He said, absolutely poor. We had a coal mining family. It really, every day was a struggle. And he said, very early on, I realized I had a, I had, God had given me a ticket out of there.

[42:58]

It was my brain. Because he said, I was very good in school. And he said it was evident that I had been gifted. And he said he was very religious also. And so he eventually got a scholarship to Princeton Divinity School, became a doctor of divinity, got a number of jobs until he was very good. He got to the top of the ladder just about with Harvard Divinity School. And he said, They were having this big conference in Los Angeles, two years down the road, going to be on God. And the great pinnacle of my career was that they chose me to give that speech, the keynote address, two years. So he said, I was on cloud nine. He said, my head was so big, I couldn't hardly get around. And he said, I went all over the place. I went to all kinds of libraries, interviewed all kinds of people over a two-year period. And I went out and I gave the talk. And he said, it was a huge success.

[44:00]

And he said, I was on my way back in the airplane, back to the East Coast. And he said, I was again, there wasn't, I don't see how anybody else could breathe, he said, because my head was filling the hole. He said, but all of a sudden, I had a stroke of divine grace, a lightning stroke, hitting me because he said, all of a sudden I realized, I thought to myself, for two years, I have been talking, I've been reading, and I've been talking to all kind of people, but I haven't been talking to God. And I don't know God. And I'm the world's expert on God, but I don't know God. I know all about God, but I don't know God. He went back to Harvard. He resigned effective at the end of that semester. And then he looked around the country to see where he could learn to pray. And he eventually ended up at Snowmass with the Sturgeons in Colorado. He spent six months there.

[45:02]

And then he went and worked in the inner city, Kansas City, for a while. And eventually he's become a great retreat master and so forth, but he got completely He got completely out of his academic career because it was ruining him. It was taking him away from God. Now, that isn't the normal thing. It doesn't ordinarily take you to God. But he said, that was what happened to me. I got consumed. Started out with the right idea, but I got consumed. Now, this can happen to any of us. Certainly anybody who's professionally in religious studies or something, that can happen to all of us. It showed me again the difference, what he was really looking for, and he's got it now, was Lectio Divina. He was looking for knowledge of the Word of God that would go beyond the superficial, go beyond the intellectual, and get to the heart of God. And all of these, the great thing that's happened since Vatican II, all these resources have opened up again.

[46:08]

the great prayer traditions from all the different orders. We have all these beautiful texts, and we have, at the same time, we've gone back further and understood what was their original inspiration. Because in any generation, you believe that you can understand anything in your own terms. That if you read something, you think, well, I understand what that means. Well, maybe you don't. And anything before the printing press, very difficult for us to interpret. So I'm going to stop there. I'm going to To give you one quote from Vatican II, it's about Mary, and it's applied by the Fathers of the Church in the same way to us. It says, "...at the message of the angel, the Virgin Mary received the Word of God in her heart,

[47:12]

and in her body and gave life to the world. And the church is saying you can do the same thing. You can receive God in your heart and in your body in terms of your mind, and if you let that transform you, you give life to the world. God bless you, thank you. Okay. Does anyone have any questions or like observations yet? Yes. Yeah. I'm a tentative from I've heard people talk about contemplation. I still struggle with it.

[48:15]

The whole concept. A lot of you can actually, I'm a very virtual person, but you can actually take me on one slide and contemplate. I've heard talks about the goal is actually so far. And you show the work thought. uh... tried that and also heard people talk about you know staring seeking Jesus I still struggle with that so what can you in a nutshell help me with that? okay uh... contemplation actually contemplation is a gift and all we really can do is prepare for it but there are ways to prepare for it and uh... Some people are more visual than others. Basically, one of the most common ways people prepare for the gift of contemplation is to silence themselves, and to, for example, to ask the help of the Holy Spirit in time of prayer, and then pick some kind of prayer word that you can repeat over and over again. It can be just the name of Jesus.

[49:18]

That's very common, the Jesus prayer. or some ejaculation, something simple that doesn't change. Ultimately, the content of that verse is not as important as the fact that it keeps out your mind from ranging at other places. So what you're doing is you're trying to just say, I'm here for you, O God, and at the heart of this is the presence of God. Now, there's a difference, there's a very similar technique in Transcendental Meditation But it's quite different, because in Transcendental Meditation, there's nothing at the center, like emptying yourselves out completely. In Contemplation, God is always at the center. You're always focusing on God. You're trying to break through the cloud of unknowing. But you can't control that. All you can do is make yourself available to it. But God wants that, and so it's going to happen if you make yourself available.

[50:19]

Does that help? And so there are different ways, again, to stay focused, but even if you're not, as I said, if your mind is aggressive, it's going to keep bringing things in. Even if you're sitting here listening to me at the same time, there are a lot of things going on. If you just were quiet for a minute, you'd hear things probably outside. You'd hear one of those sheep, or you'd hear a car go by, and it wouldn't register. It would register, but it wouldn't distract you. And so you try to get to that point. But always gently, always confident that God wants it for you more than you want it yourself, but that you will never control it. He doesn't want you to control it, because if you get control, then you lose discipleship. And just one thing I want to say on behalf of this part of the country is the same in ours. We owe the U.S. government a great gratitude, because all over the country, they have put these signs with this spiritual message on it.

[51:28]

It says, yield. That's really... I wonder if there is a role of memorization, scripture, and to open the door to God and go through that process. When I think of, if you read a poem, from an intellectual standpoint, you get information. But if you memorize it, you've got to internalize it, and you see beyond what your intellectual information that you receive. Is there a role for that? Well, that really is the step of meditatio in the scale of Lectio Divinis.

[52:33]

And the early monks, that's what the novices did most of the time. When they were studying scripture, they weren't taking classes in scripture. They were memorizing the verses so that they would be in their consciousness all day long. And in the time of Pecomius, you couldn't become a monk unless you were able to memorize the New Testament and the Psalms. And I would have been out of it. But they had that very aggressive, it was because they didn't have the printing press, they relied on their memory. But yeah, memory is very good. Yeah, memory is very good. Memorization. Yeah. They never talk to you. They're going back to anoration. Yes. To elaborate on that a little. Okay, what I'm just saying is, Lectio Divina is, the thing that is good about it, it's using written materials or images to go directly to God without images, or to the person of God, and not worrying about how you describe God or how you, you know, it's just personal.

[53:46]

And when you go into this perpetual adoration, you're not there trying to think about all kinds of things about that. You're just wanting to relate directly to God. So it's the same purpose. I know that there's this story of these two guys that went to perpetual adoration, and they went for a few months, and one of them finally quit because he just kept getting distracted. And he asked the other guy, he said, are you still going in there to breast adoration? He said, yeah, I'm still going. And he said, why are you doing it? Don't you get distracted? Yeah, he said, I get distracted all the time. So why would you keep going? He said, well, I'll tell you this. If you sit on the railroad track long enough, you'll get hit. Yes. I also want to thank you very much for your insight, Kahan. Dr. Davina, who was talking about the discipline in monastic communities, and then with the experience of John Paul Jones, the story you told about him, about his experience and personal experience of God.

[54:59]

It seems as though this discipline of this idea of Lectio Divina, it's out into a culture of, excuse me, it allows us to understand each other a little bit better across denominational lines, kind of. It has this kind of enigmatical kind of you're too grateful. And I think that that certainly is a wonderful thing. You make it that all a danger to the different communities or what have you, or will it change specific institutional communities to understand a hundred Well, I think it's definitely getting across there. You see what happened, especially at the Reformation, with the debate over Scripture. Scripture became a content, a book of content of doctrine.

[56:05]

it began to be a wrestling match over what does it mean and doctrines. Before that, and in the true sense, the use of scripture is not a study book. It's a place to meet God. And in fact, Vatican II says that in the books, in the holy books, the father meets his children with great love and speaks with them. So it's like, instead of opening a book, it's like walking into a church or walking into a temple. with the scripture. And that attitude is coming back because we felt when the Protestant Reformation happened, both sides fell into that as if the Bible was the source of argument. And now we, basically what the Catholic Church says is that certainly the Bible is a great source of doctrine, but we get our faith, we get our creed from the church not from the Bible. We get it from the church. The church existed before the Bible and expressed its creed in the Bible.

[57:07]

But we don't have to wrestle with the Bible to get our creed. We've already got it. And what we need the Bible for is to get in touch with the Word of God, which is a much broader concept than a text. Like Jesus himself, the Word of God. So that sure, I think it's gonna have a great, it is happening a great effect as people use scripture, get away more and more from that attitude that's just a sort of something to fight with. it's a uh... it's a temple to go into, enter into that and uh... and you're in the presence of God. Yes? You used a word there that has been obsessing me the last few minutes, the word presence. Yes. When one goes, for instance, into church for adoration is you're seeking a presence. When one goes to Lectio,

[58:08]

the focus becomes the presence. And the presence is not outside one, as Teresa says, the presence is within. And I think when Lectio really releases It's something deeply within. It's not something out there. But all of the ways that we seek God's presence, we're seeking the ultimate end. I mean, Lectio is the presence, the presence. An image that, to me, says it is Michelangelo's creation where you have Adam and his spark right there. And every one of us has that continual spark of creation. going on all the time. And just to get into that, it doesn't need words. You might need one word from your Lexio, and that's it. Years ago, at my Texas monastery, we had a condolite, Sam Morello, you think?

[59:12]

Oh yeah, I know Sam. Pastor Mary Light. And he gave us three or four days on Lexio. And He saw it, and I've never heard it put that way yet. He started with the gospel of the day, which was that one at the Thanksgiving time that we put in a sickle and reap the harvest or something. But whatever text you take, he said, you start by slowly reading it, just a paragraph from the reading today or something in the scripture that you like or don't like. And as soon as something clicks, Narrow it down, narrow it down, narrow it down. Just keep going through it. This is part of the reading part. And so finally, you're left with one or two words, or maybe only one word, and that is the focus of Alexio. And he even advocated doing it while you're walking. Yeah, that's the technique.

[60:15]

If you're using a text, that's a beautiful technique, but you don't even need a text because you've already got the presence of God. And I think one thing to think about, the difference between spiritual reading and Lectio Divina, that we don't have to make that happened, the presence of God is already there coming toward us. God wants to come toward us. In spiritual reading, we are generating the desire within ourselves, which both are necessary because then they meet, but God is, to get in the presence of God, that's the reality, that's where we are. But to open ourselves to it, you know, I'll tell you a story on Sam Rulo. He told me, he told this in a public audience, he said, and he was in Dallas and he was, He was trying to do his meditation, Lectio Divina, and he was doing it walking, so he went out on the sidewalk and he said he happened to see there was this big billboard with Coppertone and had this model laid out there on this sign.

[61:17]

And so he said he's, we got his praying his prayer word, the Jesus prayer over and over again, and all of a sudden he said he got about 100 yards down the road and he found himself saying, Coppertone, Coppertone. Yes. Some years ago there have been several articles advocating communal flexio. I don't, in such personal things, I don't see how it can be done communally. Well, I think that practice can be good. I think that's a misuse of the term, lexio, communal lexio. That's a very new thing. The only thing that's comparable to that in the early monasteries was that monks would write letters which they would pass around, what they were experiencing in prayer, but they never had open discussion.

[62:20]

And that's a good thing, but that's a different practice. It's not Lectio Divina. It's a good thing, but it's not that. And when you start misapplying the term, I think you lose focus on what it really is. Well, thank you very much. Certainly enjoyed it.

[62:45]

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