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“Preparing to Receive the Lord with Lectio Divina (Sacred Reading)” Part 1: Lectio (Reading) On this, the First Sunday of Advent, we welcome the beginning of a whole new liturgical season in our Church: the expectation of Christ coming to visit us again. Do we feel exhilarated and joyful, or maybe just content and pleased with what we have contributed to God, our Faith journey, and our communities? Or perhaps we actually feel anxious, wary, maybe even fearful after doing a self-examination? Whatever our personal responses might be, clearly this is a time for preparation, preparation for him who told us: “Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when [I] will come.” Have we adopted his gospel just as he adopted us, his children?
Therefore, preparation to receive the Lord, to meet the Lord, to see the Lord, and to walk with the Lord is indeed what these coming weeks are all about. But we are not left to our own devices. The Church has given us many tools, guides, and gifts to know and prepare for Christ’s second coming. Chief among these is “prayer”. The Our Father, Christ’s own gift to us, is of course the greatest prayer of all time. But perhaps the next greatest prayer, the next most profound gift the Church gave us, is the Prayer of Contemplation. It is this prayer which the Desert Fathers instituted, which the great saints – St John of the Cross, St Teresa of Avila, St Therese of Lisieux – said was critical to the very life and being of a Christian, because it was the prayer which removes us from the challenges and monotony of the world, sets us apart from our daily commerce and turmoil, and takes us to a place where we leave the outer world and enter the inner world where, once our minds are at rest and our hearts are opened, we are ready to receive Christ, to meet him, to see him, to hear him, feel his presence, and walk with him where time stands still and nothing else matters except the love which surrounds and embraces us. Can we imagine having such an experience? Or do we doubt it? “I’ve tried before.” But we can! It is in our DNA. And we’re going to look at how we do this! This past week, I had the great honour of being asked to teach a class on-line to students at St Peter’s Seminary in London, Ontario – my own ‘alma-mater’ – on this particular subject of Contemplative Prayer. So, I thought certainly I should offer some of this same learning opportunity perhaps as a gift to our parish, right here at St. Joseph’s. Therefore, over these next four Sundays, including today, we are going to look at the earliest, definitive form of this great prayer: Lectio Divina or “Sacred Reading”. We focus on this prayer form, because it is still to this day used by the Benedictine community, as well as where all other, derived contemplation forms come from. This decisive form was compiled by a Carthusian monk at the Grande Chartreuse monastery in the late 2nd C, named Guigo II, or ‘Guy’. He would have been well versed in the many forms contemplative prayer had taken over the centuries. For the sake of training his novitiates, Guigo, the 9th prior of his community, put the prayer, critical to his brother’s spiritual development, into a distinctive, step by step form. Referencing Jacob's vision in Genesis 28.12 in which angels are ascending and descending a ladder to God, bringing human prayers to heaven and returning to earth with God's responses, Guigo wrote his now famous book, Scala Claustralium or “The Ladder of Monks”, sometimes called, the Scala Paradisi or “The Ladder of Paradise” with the subtitle, the Epistola de vita contemplativa or “Letter on the Contemplative Life”. Using this image of the ladder which allowed humanity to climb into the heavens to interact with God, who in turn interacted with them, Guigo compiled and solidified all the prayerful thoughts and incentives of the previous fathers of the Faith into one straightforward guideline of 4 distinct stages: 1) Lectio or “Read”: reading a scriptural text; 2) Meditatio or “Meditate”: pondering upon the text; 3) Oratio or “Address”: appealing to God for feedback; 4) Contemplatio or “Contemplate”: dissolving into silent awareness God is in control. This week, we will focus only on Stage 1: Lectio. Select a passage from one of the gospels, either a personal favourite, or open to the gospels and see what Holy Spirit presents to us. Normally one reads the text for about 5 or 10 mins, but take as long as we wish to read the text, slowly, gently, over and over again. Maybe read it once a day. Do not analyze its meaning, theologize, or look at it historically. Simply read it. Let the text speak to us. If certain words or phrases resonate, make note of them. We will use what we find and experience in the following week, Stage 2: Meditatio. Meanwhile, let us prepare by living Christ’s gospel of salvation and light with our every thought, deed and word as we go about our daily work these coming weeks. – Rev Fr Christopher Tracey, Saint Joseph Parish, Saugeen Shores, Ontario
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“Blessed Are You” In many ways, the Sermon on the Mount, is the highest point in Christ’s active ministry, with the Beatitudes his greatest instruction for all humanity, before his sacrificial journey to Calvary. We might wonder: did Christ simply make these profound statements live ‘on-the-spot’, or did he prepare his words ahead of time?
Perhaps when he went to pray through those long nights, he contemplated and organized his thoughts for us in those hours, with help from his Father in Heaven. In any case, Christ would certainly have known the impact the Beatitudes would have on the world. Although the Ten Commandments provide the classic guidance for Christian living, they are mainly expressed in firm, commanding statements; whereas Christ’s Beatitudes deliver their meaning in a gentle manner, complementing the Ten Commandments, showing their intent in further detail. We are mainly taught, not so much what ‘not’ to do, but what ‘to’ do: to comfort others, be merciful, live meekly and humbly, bring peace to disharmony around us. He also promises those who suffer poverty in body and spirit, and those who seek righteousness, will be fully satisfied and beautifully rewarded in the next. Christ was in essence giving us guidelines to become Saints. According to historical records, the first feast to honour ‘all the saints’ was actually an early 4th C celebration of all the ‘martyrs’. Later, in the 7th C, following many invasions of the Christian catacombs, Pope Boniface IV loaded approx. 28 wagons of bones of these martyrs, and buried them beneath the Pantheon, a Roman Temple to the Gods. He would rededicate the temple as a Shrine to the Christian Church. However, this rededication took place in May, when still today, the Eastern Church commemorates the Saints, often during Easter or soon after Pentecost. Although it is not clear to historians and academics why the Western Church celebrates this Feast on Nov 1st, we do know the Anglo-Saxon theologian, Alcuin, and his friend, Arno, Bishop of Salzburg, chose this day, Nov 1st, 800, to celebrate all the Saints. Once Christians were free to worship, the Church honoured other paths to holiness. Such early saints were normally acclaimed by the people themselves, even before the bishop’s final word. This is why many very early saints have strange, even exaggerated accounts about them, though still saintly icons. The first formal canonization took was in 993. But the lengthy process of ‘beatification’, then ‘canonization’, involving the verification of miracles etc., which we know of today, evolved over the past 500 hundred years. In fact, this weekend we are observing the highly anticipated ‘beatification’ of the founder of the KofC, Fr. M. J. McGivney. But it is important to know we also celebrate today the saints living among us. We might even know them personally. So, we must not be like many who thought the saints were odd, or disturbed or even crazy in their own life times. St. John of the Cross was imprisoned in a bare room with only bread and water for three months by his fellow monks, on the premise he was encouraging too harsh a rule on his own community. Luckily, he escaped. But during his imprisonment he wrote what is considered the greatest triumph of Spanish poetry and mystical thought ever written in their country. After his death, his relics were sought with a frenzy, many prayed earnestly to him for healing and intercession, while others took and treasured his possessions. This was surely all done with good intentions, but there is also something wrong with this picture: too much adulation and devotion for the man, and not enough for what he stood for – his imitation of Christ. Saint Francis once said, “Don’t imitate me, imitate Christ. He is the original.” Thomas Merton was struggling with what his true purpose in life was, and whether to enter the Trappists, when his friend told him it was obvious – ‘to become a saint’. Let us learn how to live like the saints from the saints. Read about them. Their lives are entertaining and enriching. Many do not realize this until we pick up a book on them as St. Francis himself did. There are multi-volume sets like Butler’s, Lives of the Saints; Bert Ghezzi’s, Voices of the Saints, deserves its acclaim; Saint of the Day, by O.F.M.’s, Foley and McCloskey, is excellent. Of course, there is internet. Remember: Blessed are those who try to live as the saints, as well as honour them. Rev Fr Christopher Tracey Saint Joseph Parish Saugeen Shores, Ont. |
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Rev. Fr. Christopher Tracey
St. Joseph Parish Pastor Archives
January 2022
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