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Trails & Transcendence

Lectio Divina and the Question of Depth

4/29/2016

2 Comments

 
This guest post is by my good friend Don Volent, whose letters, journal entries, and conversations have encouraged, challenged, and delighted me for many years.  Thanks, Don!  
    
​     I was first introduced to the practice of Lectio Divina in the autumn of 1976, though I didn’t know it at the time.  The initiation was given as an assignment by the Reverend Albert A. Cardoni, S. J. at Fairfield University in his Medieval Philosophy course of that term.  The thirty students of this class were each given a single mimeographed sheet (blue inked sheets, the midcentury version of the photocopy) of only three paragraphs taken from the fifth question of the first part of St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica entitled The General Notion of the Good.  We were told to fold this sheet into eighths and to pocket it.
     “You are to live with these three paragraphs for the next three months until the eve of Advent.  If I see you on campus, I will ask you to fish it out for me.  Like the peripatetic philosopher Aristotle, I want you to pace with it so that even your muscles and the blood that courses through your veins will question with you what these three paragraphs mean and where they can take you.  Speak the words out loud inside your rooms and outside beneath sun and moonlight, because these shall be words that are with, with the being of things, with the sound of your pacing on the sidewalks of this university and with the way the autumn leaves –which you will soon see- blow across the open spaces between your dorms.”
     Diligent student that I was, I listened to the man.  From the afternoon of that class until the eve of Advent I lived with those three paragraphs.  I paced with them on the sidewalks of the university and, just as Father Cardoni predicted, I saw the yellow aspen leaves swirling at my feet and gusting across the open space.  “A thing is good insofar as it exists.”  The words have stayed with me to this day.  “Being is good!  Shout it from the rooftops!”  And God is the fertility of the Actual, the heart that beats in the what is.  And the words were seeds, go figure, if one stays with them long enough to see that they actually germinate, break through the soil, peeking, seeking light, drinking in, nourishment, space, fertility, song.
     Twenty years after this initiation I came across Luke Dysinger’s 1996 translation of The Rule of Saint Benedict and there, within the introduction, I found the description of the practice that Father Cardoni had introduced me to: Lectio Divina (Latin for “Divine Reading”).  Mr. Luke speaks of the “art of lectio divina” as beginning with “cultivating the ability to listen deeply, to hear ‘with the ear of our hearts’ as St. Benedict writes in the Prologue to the Rule.”  To listen.  To listen deeply.  To listen with the heart (the heart that has moved into the mind, the mind that has moved into the heart).  To everything.  To the sound of the man sweeping under the lintel of his shop.  To the sound of a woman talking about a farmer’s porch.  Mr. Luke further says “The reading or listening which is the first step in lectio divina is very different from the speed-reading” which we “apply to newspapers, books, and even to the Bible.”  Yes, to slow the mind down from its dizzying whirl.  This, too, I learned from Father Cardoni’s assignment, and which was further corroborated by the feeling of depth I felt once while, oddly, reading a passage from the writings of Thomas Merton that I happened to disagree with.  But whence the depth?  From the slowing down, from the staying with.
     Mr. Luke, that fine friend of mine, also shed light, etymologically, on our “information” age, and, quite simply, it’s not.  ‘Information,’ etymologically, points at a staying with something long enough for it to be formed in us (in formed, formed in), which is seed, germination, living with.  But this is quite different to the norm of data surfing (surfacing) that we do nowadays, enticed by span to the detriment of depth.  In fact, it seems like a variation of the canary in the coal mine that, when using the word ‘depth’ recently, in a conversation with a young 30’s gentleman, I was told that the word was pretty much an anachronism in the current age of expansive networking.  Span versus depth?  But why not span and depth, balanced?  Which is to say, mustn’t our breathing out be balanced with our breathing in?
2 Comments
Johannes de Silentio
7/31/2016 05:13:14 am

Please forgive me, Sir, but is there a possibility that these are just pretty words? True, one doesn't hear the word 'depth' much these days, but that goes for your word 'span' as well. We just live, Sir. We go to work. We pay our bills. We return home at night and cook our meals. We go to K-mart for school binders for our kids. "Yellow aspen leaves swirling at [the] feet and gusting across the open space," -who has time for this? Poets, perhaps. But must we all be poets? In fact, indulge me, Sir, and tell me how it is that people become poets, and of what use are they?

I am listening, Sir.

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Don
8/2/2016 02:31:54 pm

Dear Mr. de Silentio:

Please accept my apologies for my lack of a prompt response to your recent comments and questions. Part of this delay was due to my mulling (a favorable, an appreciative mulling, Sir) to what you were kind enough to point out to me and to ask me about.

The question of the "possibility that these are just pretty words" is a question that I have asked myself down through the years and for most of my life now. It is true that I have a fondness for the Word (Oh, do you see that I am already at it?), but what's wrong with a fondness? Wouldn't our plight of the human condition turn much more favorably if we were all to wax to a fondness for one another, to the spoon that needs washing in the sink that turns the world upside down within the curve of its bowl? But more about that later. That is, we're talking about the "possibility that these are just pretty words," -yes? Well, that is exactly what makes me read them over and over again and maybe write them 10,000 times until I get close to the marrow of what is, the marrow of what we are, the song that sings there (Oh, there I go again, but isn't that a valid question: whether there is a song in us?).

You point out that the word 'depth' isn't heard much these days, nor 'span.' Then, what about 'rapture,' 'bliss,' 'delight'? We're "bummed," "pissed," "stressed," but how often are we "rapturous," "blissing," "delighting"? And if it is not often, or, if these Things are rare events, then why is that so? Is this not another worthwhile question? Is it that we delight in secret, bliss behind closed doors, or rapture at midnight when all are asleep, only to be overcome by shyness on the morning after? Why, then, are we more vocal about our not liking what is than about our liking of it, our blissing with it, our delight with the curl, with the nubble on the jaw, with the astonishment of what is?

This, of course, brings me to "poetry," which, Mr. de Silencio, is yet another topic that you asked about. So, is not all that we have already talked about here: poetry? To see, Sir. To see your wife without the overlay of a past, to see the line of the nape of her neck sweeping down to the curve of her shoulders with her billowy blouse and then falling to her flank -O Flank!- is this not poetry? To see! To see, Sir!

That is the human task, Sir! That is the human task, Mr. Johannes de Silentio. To see! For, to see is to fall in love. To see is to explode into the thousand pieces that The One Who Is exploded into -loving like that- and that we Moderns now call the Big Bang.

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