Looking through a window at Lehb Shomeah
On Sunday afternoon, after Eucharist, June and I drove up to Nashville, TN, so that we might visit my son Kirk and his wife, Lora, and their new baby, Kirk Michael. Our seeing each other again was a rich and wonderful blessing. Somehow I managed to take along my carmera without its memory card, so I don’t have any photos to share (Kirk, however, took a bunch of photos and will send me some which I’ll share later this week). We got back to Barnesville a little after sunset last evening, thankful for a safe trip, full of good memories.
As you might surmise, I’m an early riser, usually slipping out of bed sometime between four and five a.m. Like you, I have a list of things to do, people to meet, and a “honey-do” list. After the sun rises to brighten up the back porch, my day gets noisy; somebody turns on the tv, a repair man comes to the door, groceries need purchasing, and the laundry taken to “the wash room,” as my mom used to call it. On Mondays and Wednesday, about 7:00, I drive over to Gordon College to teach two freshman writing classes. As a consequence, I find God’s blessed silence and quiet best available to me very early in the morning, a few hours before dawn. It’s for that reason that I roll out of bed and make my way to the screened porch where I can have a good time and place to do some sacred reading.
Sacred Reading's Four Movements
Conventionally sacred reading is said to have four movements, stages of progression, or phases: reading/listening, meditation, prayer, and contemplation. While these four movements do not always or necessarily follow upon each other lockstep, taken together they are an apt description of what we look for and often experience in sacred prayer.
Today I want to share with you some thoughts about the first movement: reading/listening. My spiritual friend, Luke Dysinger, describes reading or listening this way:
[It's[ first step in lectio divina [that's the Latin phrase for sacred reading] is very different from the speed reading which modern Christians apply to newspapers, books and even to the Bible. Lectio is revertial listening; listening both in a spirit of silence and of awe. We are listening for the still, small voice of God that will speak to us personally–not loudly, but intimately. In lectio we read slowly, attentively, gently listen to hear a word ro phrase that is God;s word for us today.
While much more can be said about the first movement of sacred reading, Dysinger’s description proves itself to be well written. In this phase of sacred reading you dramatically slow down your usual pace of reading. Your eyes trace the words, one at a time, aware of the white spaces inbetween words so that your eyes are walking very slowly across the sentences, down a path, one stone at a time. Musically speaking (and I’m no expert at this, so excuse me if I allude mistakenly here), you play your text as though it’s marked Adagio — slow and stately (literally, “at ease”), or Largo — very slow, or even Lento — languidly slow. This means, of course, that you don’t read a whole lot of text, certainly not a page or two. You tend to be satisfied with a few sentences, maybe a paragraph. And to slow things down even more, you may wish to read your little choice of a Biblical text over a time or two again–and maybe again.
In other words you are letting the Word of God wash itself over you; you stand under it (“understand”) so that God’s Word seeps like an extended rain into you, getting you soaked with what God is saying as you listen. Or to change the metaphor slightly, you wade into a slow moving stream, the “Living Water,” and let the waters of God’s Word drift over and submerge you as you feel the current of God’s presence pressure itself all around you. You read slowly.
Briefly said, that’s something of phase one: reading/listening. St. James says we can listen with the “ears of the heart” (1.21) to God’s Word. It’s that listening that we do in sacred reading. There’s a place in southern Texas called Lehb Shomeah (Hebrew for “Listening Heart”; see I Kings 3.9) that I’ve visited often; it’s a place that cultivates the practice of sacred reading/listening. In these September mornings the back porch is where I cultivate my lehb shomeah. I hope you are finding your lehb shomeah, your listening heart, as your read this. Try reading this once again. Slowly. Then do the same with a little part of the Bible, maybe a few verses from St. Paul’s Letters to the Philippians. That’s what the ears of my heart were listening to this morning.
