It seems a bit sacrilegious to do Lectio Devina with something other than the Bible, but re-reading the same thing over and over and in different contexts has benefited me on more than one occasion, so I guess I don't see anything wrong with that. I often read a paragraph and glaze over it so I have to go back and read it again. This going back has often brought so much meaning to the text that I am no longer so upset that I'm sometimes a slow reader.
I love the quote by Schneiders. Our goal should be to come back different when we read something. If a person is a Believer, then everything he or she does should be a spiritual experience. I don't think God made us to be so compartmentalized. When I read, it's spiritual. Even when I'm filling my car with gas, it's spiritual. Something I've been doing lately is to practice living within the next five minutes. Because of this, I have noticed a lot more little details that God has been showing me along the way rather then worrying about what is going to happen in the next twenty years. I think this really applies to literature. I need to ask, “What can I get out of this right now?”
Poetry does, as the text says, give us words for things we are unable to express. David often expressed things so well in the Psalms that I could sit there and read the same verse over and over again and learn something new every time. He was often expressing something 5,000 years ago that lines up so well with where I am currently at in life. That is how a lot of poetry is, I think. When I can't think of what I want to say, sometimes someone else has already said it pretty well. Other times, I even like to write my own poetry, because it gives me time to chose the exact words for what I'm feeling or what I wish to convey about a particular moment or experience.
A number of very nice observations. In particular, I like this one: "I don't think God made us to be so compartmentalized." And I like how paying attention to that fact has led you to noticing more things.
ReplyDelete