Lectio Divina - Twenty-six

Ann and Barry Ulanov. The Healing Imagination: The Meeting of Psyche and Soul. Daimon Verlag, 1999, 60.

The pictures of God given in scripture and by tradition are far-ranging, startling, even violent. God in Samuel is a punisher of false priests who are careless with their vows. God cuts them off and breaks the priestly succession. God is a military commander sending Israel into battle or a mysterious presence that hovers over the mercy seat set above the ark in the center of the tent of the Holy of Holies. God is a high tower, a doorway, the one who sees our fear when our daughter is sick, the one who breaks the rules, relativizing them, knocking them out from under us as a prop we constantly misuse to defend us against the immediate experience of the religious imagination. By tradition, God comes to us as the One who nurses our beginnings as in John of the Cross, as the One who awaits our entrance into the central rooms of our Interior Castle, as in Teresa of Avila, as the One mysteriously born in our souls, as in Meister Eckhart, a winecask, as in Catherine of Siena, or as a Trinity of gemstone, fire, and word, as in Hildegaard of Bingen, as the abyss of omnipotence, working on the soul with a relentless love that is “terrible and implacable, devouring and burning without regard for anything,” as in Hadewijch of Brabant. The task for each soul, and for the clergy as guardians of the soul, is always to ask, to ponder, and imaginatively to weave connections across the gap between the two kinds of images, the personal and the traditional. No preaching - or counseling or direction - can reach very far that does not take into account our unconscious and highly idiosyncratic images for God.

Lectio Divina - Twenty-five

Roberta C. Bondi. To Pray and To Love: Conversations on Prayer with the Early Church. Philadelphia: Augsburg Fortress, 1991, 65-6.

What about the names for God? Most of us in our prayer are stuck in a very limited number of “religious” names and images for God -- Father, Lord, Savior, Mighty, for example -- that narrows our ability to know God in more than the few ways we have known God since childhood. In some cases, if as children and even adults we associate God with important figures of authority in our lives who have hurt us, to pray to God using those names can do us injury. Not only does it limit our ability to know God in other and truer ways, it also keeps us from the healing love God intends for us. Where we know we are being hurt, in our private prayer we avoid those names, no matter how hallowed the tradition. At the same time, in praying Scripture daily we work hard to get to know the God of the Bible, a God who is infinitely complex and many faceted, mysterious, and at the same time intimately loving. We meditate on what kind of God can be described as “living water” for us. We try to hear deeply who our God really is when Hosea describes God as a gentle father who did not think it beneath him to teach baby Israel to walk. We ask to know the one who cares about us so much that our names should be written on the palm of God’s hand. While we are learning all this, we also begin to understand in our hearts the importance of the truth that so many writers of the early church fought for: God is so infinitely inexhaustible that none of the names Scripture gives to God, not even all of them put together, can ever finally define God. Whether we pray to God as our peace, rock, mother, wisdom, water of life, father, maker of the world, Spirit, friend, healer, comforter, redeemer, great bird -- all these names are finally provisional. The God we come to love who is our light, our life, and our joy is wonderfully beyond us.

Lectio Divina - Twenty-four

Stephen Mitchell, A Book of Psalms: Selected and Adapted from the Hebrew. New York: HarperCollins, 1993. Psalm 139, final section, continued from last week.

You fashioned my inward parts;

you knit me in my mother’s womb.

My soul was not hidden from you

when I was being formed in secret,

woven in the depths of the world.

How can I keep from praising you?

I am fearfully and wonderfully made,

and all your works are marvelous.

Your eyes saw all my actions;

they were written down in your book;

all my days were created

before even one of them was.

How measureless your mind is, Lord;

it contains inconceivable worlds

and is vaster than space, than time.

If ever I tried to fathom it,

I would be like a child counting

the grains of sand on a beach.

Search me, Lord; test me

to the depths of my inmost heart.

Root out all selfishness from me

and lead me in eternal life.

Lectio Divina - Twenty-three

Stephen Mitchell. A Book of Psalms: Selected and Adapted from the Hebrew. New York: HarperCollins, 1993. Psalm 139 (continued from last week)

Where can I go from your spirit?

Where can I flee from your presence?

If I take the wings of the morning

and fly to the ends of the sea,

even there your hand will guide me

and your spirit will give me strength.

If I rise to heaven, I meet you;

if I lie down in hell, you are there:

if I plunge through the fear of the terrorist

or pierce through the rapist’s rage,

you are there, in your infinite compassion,

and my heart rejoices in your joy.

Lectio Divina - Twenty-two

Stephen Mitchell. A Book of Psalms: Selected and Adapted from the Hebrew. New York: HarperCollins, 1993. Psalm 139

Lord, you have searched me and known me;

you understand everything I do;

you are closer to me than my thoughts.

You see through my selfishness and weakness,

into my inmost self.

There is not one corner of my mind

that you do not know completely.

You are present before me, behind me,

and you hold me in the palm of your hand.

Such knowledge is too awesome to grasp:

so deep that I cannot fathom it.

Lectio Divina - Twenty-one

St. Dimitri of Rostov, "The Inner Closet of the Heart," from The Art of Prayer: An Orthodox Anthology, ed. Timothy Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1997, 46.

Wherever a man is, his heart is always with him, and so, having collected his thoughts inside his heart, he can shut himself in and pray to God in secret, whether he be talking or listening, whether among few people or many. Inner prayer, if it comes to a man's spirit when he is with other people, demands no use of lips or of books, no movement of the tongue or sound of the voice: and the same is true even when you are alone. All that is necessary is to raise your mind to God, and descend deep into yourself, and this can be done anywhere.

Lectio Divina - Twenty

Genesis 32: 22-32, the NRSV version of the Bible

The same night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. He took them and sent them across the stream, and likewise everything that he had. Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket; and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, “Let me go, for the day is breaking.” But Jacob said, “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.” So he said to him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob.” Then the man said, “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.” Then Jacob asked him, “Please tell me your name.” But he said, “Why is it that you ask my name?” And there he blessed him. So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, “For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.” The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip. Therefore to this day the Israelites do not eat the thigh muscle that is on the hip socket, because he struck Jacob on the hip socket at the thigh muscle.