Peter on Lectio Divina

Many Quakers seem to get a lot of sustenance from the Bible. A Friend/friend of mine shared with me a few pages from her prayer journal the other day, and I was really struck by her careful, prayerful, Spirit-filled reading of the Psalms.

I read the Bible, too, but not like that. I attack the Bible the way I would tackle an immense Rubix cube, or a crossword puzzle in a foreign language. It’s an exhilarating intellectual challenge, and it’s got me digging through history with the excitement of a puppy finding new smells in the woods…but it’s not prayerful, and it does not, by any stretch of the imagination, bring me closer to anything I could call the living G*d.

My friend’s prayer journal got me asking myself, what is there that I could be reading with the same kind of attentiveness that Christ-centered Friends bring to the Bible? (What Cat, in a post a few months ago, called Lectio Divina.)

What I came up with were mostly poets (even though I read very little poetry) and also a few essayists: Wendell Berry, Mary Oliver, Annie Dillard, Rainer Maria Rilke, Anne Lamott… For the moment, the list stops there.

I’m 6’1″, but even I had to stand on tiptoes to get to my poetry shelf, which shows how often I take it out and reread it. But I did today, and here is one of Wendell Berry’s poems that speaks to me this afternoon:

A Homecoming

One faith is bondage. Two
are free. In the trust
of old love, cultivation shows
a dark graceful wilderness
at its heart. Wild
in that wilderness, we roam
the distances of our faith,
safe beyond the bounds
of what we know. O love,
open. Show me
my country. Take me home.