Dear Faith Family,
On Sunday, we turned our attention to the source and means of experiencing our God gifted free life: a conversational companionship with Him and His family. Our focus on Sunday was on unclogging our hearts to open our ears, preparing us to focus over the coming weeks on developing competency and confidence in the all-important skill of shared life with God: Hearing God.
While we will discover and discuss the multifaceted nature of God's speaking to us, there is one particular practice our faith family for over millennia has used to mature in assuming and discerning God's communing with we, his children. The practice is called Lectio Divina, literally translated "divine reading."
Lectio (as we'll refer to it), is a framework, guide, or structure used to help us in our often distracted lives and noisy minds, to dialogue with our Father through His word. In Lectio, we assume that God has spoken in the words written and that those words help us recognize His voice today. When incorporated into our regular rhythms, Lectio grounds our hearing in something sure (scripture) and helps tune our ears to be attentive to the living and active voice, which is the foundation of our conversational companionship throughout our everyday routines.
In regards to the practice itself, Lectio has four "movements": Read, Reflect, Respond, Rest. Each step guiding us deeper into dialogue with our Father through the scripture and Christ, who is in us via His Spirit. While Lectio can be applied to almost any passage of scripture, psalm, or story, it is best used in familiar or easily understandable texts or ones in which we have a bit of context. The purpose of the practice is dialogue through meditation and contemplation, so having to do a lot of research kind of defeats the point.
Lectio is not a new practice for our faith family. We've often used it in our Gatherings and have put together several guides for the practice. For instance, last summer, while in the books of Ezekiel & John, we used Lectio to help us engage with God through Jesus' seven "I AM" statements. These would be an excellent place to start to (re)introduce you to the practice.
CLICK HERE FOR ‘I AM’ LECTIO GUIDES
These guides will most likely migrate over the current series resource page in the coming days, along with additional guides to help us mature in our competency and confidence in Hearing God, especially amid the disorientation of our current moment.
One last word on Lectio. The assumption of those in our faith history who developed this practice was that it would be the starting and balancing practice for knowing God and His word. Lectio was the beginning practice for individuals (within the community, of course) in the study of scripture. It was also incorporated into the regular rhythms of the more "mature" to help ensure that studying God did not replace communicating with God. In other words, it is a practice for all of us, no matter how much (or little) we know or how new (or learned) we are in following Jesus.
Praying that you have the humility and courage to enter into an ongoing conversation with our Father. If you have any questions or need any help along the way, please don't hesitate to ask.
Love you all. God bless.