I remember the first time I ever participated in Lectio. I was a freshman in college and I was sitting in a dimly lit office with a group of girls studying the importance of praying the scriptures. I remember how slow we went over the passage. This article described what Lectio is and the significance in each part.
Lectio: begin with silence.
Meditatio: reading each line of the poem and reflecting on words, phrases, metaphors etc.
Oratio: addressing God in personal prayers.
Contemplatio: sitting quietly in silence.
These steps drastically changed the way I approached scripture. What I mean is I was always able to get something out of scripture but this made me pause and deeply reflect on what I was reading. I was able to really absorb the words that were written many years ago that still hold so much truth 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." This quote stood out to me as I was reading the text. I love knowing that I can apply a spiritual discipline to all types of literary texts. Lectio in some ways, opens the meaning of words that are often overlooked in our day to day reading.
The next article I found interesting. A section discussed dispair and I had just recently finished A Sickness unto Death by Soren Kierkegaard. What was interesting was the different viewpoints I received. Soren feels that despair is a sin, Corrigan views it as something we all have to identify with at some point in our lives. To truly know hope we must have experienced the contrast to that. I really appreciated how personal this article was. By reading the tragedies that occurred in the professors life I was able to identify with my own feelings of grief and despair at different points in my life.
Both articles said different things but the theme was the same. How can you get the most out of a literary text? Whether this text is Christian literature or not there are meanings in words that need to be discovered
"Whether this text is Christian literature or not there are meanings in words that need to be discovered". Amen.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad to see you connecting/contrasting the reading in this class with reading you're doing elsewhere, in this case, Kierkegaard.
To add to your reflection, I would say that I'm not saying that one should give into despair and that Kierkegaard probably doesn't think that one should always be "happy."
I think that we probably need to engage in the full spectrum of life--but, for me, hope is always the bottom line.