Abiding messages from a period of lectio divina focused on life, death and neighbours

I have just completed over two years reading the words written by Rowan Williams in Silence and Honey Cakes, using the ancient discipline known as lectio divina – ‘Divine Reading’.

What is lectio divina?

What we read is divine – we encounter a passage of scripture to see in it God’s word for us – and

How we read is divine – we read prayerfully, moved by Spirit – we let the text come to us, un-queried, unedited – seeking  to be addressed by what we read, and to respond to that interrogation.

There are four movements to lectio divina:

• We  read – slowly and unedited
• We meditate – we enter deeply into the meaning of the text
• We pray – we respond to God in the light of this meaning
• We contemplate – we simply rest in the presence of God without further words

Looking back over this long exercise, these rather random and not very coherent snippets (slightly adapted in places) will be the abiding messages for me:

“…. a person who is wholly self-consistent, whose identity is completely bound up with the calling to live in God…..”

“…..because of our baptism into life, we are bound to the patient, long-term discovery of what grace, life, will do with us…..”

“Do not take short cuts around the processes of real personal exchange.”

“Intimacy with God is both the fruit and the course of living together.”

“The goal is reconciliation with God by way of truth and mercy.”

“At the moment when we reveal a sibling’s fault, God reveals our own.”

“Withdraw from everything that helps imprison the neighbour.”

“The problem of myself will not just go away or solve itself or get solved by a new environment.”

“….. the temptation to think that going somewhere else will make things easier….”

“Becoming vulnerable before God is the heart of transformation, which we are by no means sure we want, if that is what it costs.”

“Without silence we shan’t get any closer to knowing who we are before God.”