Lectio

This is the first I have heard of using lectio with text other than the Bible. I find it interesting how much lectio has come up recently. In my Bible class, in chapel, now in my literature class. I think people are realizing how impactful it can be in our culture today. The business of our lives has gotten to be so hectic that the thought of being silent and reading something more than once is unheard of. I think this is why lectio has started to pop up more and more, because when we actually do it, we take time to be silent and God can actually speak. He no longer has to compete with the iPod in our ear, the images on TV, what’s going on in the facebook world or what our next twitter will be, answer the text message and so on and so on. We are just silent. Letting the words sink in. Letting God speak to us. Just us, God, and written word. This sounds so ancient to me in my world today. “When we pray with poetry, whether the biblical poetry of the psalms or non-biblical poetry open to Christian appropriation, we open ourselves to the possibility of spiritual experience. In such instances, we not only read for information and aesthetic pleasure, we also engage in a sort of reading for transformation, a term I borrow from Sandra Schneiders and her seminal work, The Revelatory Test.” (Reading for Transformation through the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins) The thought of taking this prayerful attitude into poetry and allowing God to speak through other text is something worth trying. It, for me, goes against what I am used to and so therefore take discipline and intentionality on my part. To go, sit in silence and read and pray and talk with God. Probably will be valuable.