Archive for January, 2012

“What do you hear from God when you practice lectio with the past year of your life?”

That’s the question Conversations Journal’s editor invited me to ponder. My initial reaction was to think: “This is going to call for a good bit of time and effort!” After all, my answer to most “what did you hear from God?” questions has typically required my heart and mind to patiently wait for hours. However, this time it was different. Almost immediately, what I heard from God while prayerfully reading and contemplating the story of my life this past year was both an invitation and a command. It is contained in these three words:

“COME TO ME.”

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Somewhere along my path through undergrad and grad school in psychology, I came to really love B.F. Skinner. I know that there are questionable ethics and perhaps an eschewed moral compass in his history, but his contributions to the science are inescapable in their influence on modern psychological thought.

Writing a blog for Conversations Journal is intimidating. Though I know it is illusion, I have this image of a typical reader to be someone who lives in holy rhythms all day long, a communal lunch perfectly placed between lauds and vespers, silence and service.  My rhythms look a bit more like ventricular fibrillation.  I am also a reluctant blogger. So this should prove a good discipline for me, making a blog offering each month, as topics are assigned.

This month’s topic? Do a Lectio Divina of my life in this past year.

Wow. Starting easy, huh?

I am a journal keeper.

I’m so grateful that our editor at Conversations invited us to use lectio and listen for God regarding our past year. Frankly, I had never considered the idea.

This summer I was vacationing with my family in Europe when I was slapped in the face by a sentence hiding in a book. We were near the end of our adventure and had worn most of the print off our four Eurail passes. My wife and two daughters were napping, and by reading Huston Smith’s The World’s Religions, I was trying not to join them. Somewhere between London and Edinburgh, I found the words that left me red-faced: “Paul, whose letters epitomize the concerns of the early Church, knew what Jesus had taught, but he almost never quotes him.”

To anyone who knows me even superficially, my writing an article on contemplative prayer might seem ludicrous. By temperament I am far from being a natural contemplative. I am active (often impulsive), restless, and non-reflective. And anyone who knows my spiritual life well knows also that I have always struggled with disciplined prayer, in fact, with spiritual disciplines of any sort. How, then, could I be one who dares to offer others anything about this seemingly most advanced of all forms of prayer?

After graduating from high school, James Finley did something unusual. He became a monk. For the next six years, he lived at the Abbey of Gethsemane and learned from one of the great contemporary spiritual figures, Thomas Merton. Now married and the father of two, Finley has built a career as a teacher, clinical psychologist, writer, and speaker. He is the author of Merton’s Palace of Nowhere, The Awakening Call, The Contemplative Heart, and Christian Meditation: Experiencing the Presence of God.

Ever since I’ve been a Christian, I’ve asked God for lots of things He hasn’t given. There have been times I’ve begged God for clear guidance on how to handle messy relationships or on what direction to move in a confusing situation, and it never came. I could name a dozen nasty spots in my life, probably more, when I’ve felt desperate to hear from God yet heard only silence.

David: I hope I have not embarrassed you by introducing you as Ate Thelma, but hearing you addressed in this way in your culture, I sense that spirituality remains more central to your culture than is true in the secularized West. You have lived in both worlds, completing some of your training in the U.S.A. Does this generalization seem true to you?

God led me to contemplative prayer through back roads.

I became active in church when I was a teenager and a very attractive girl invited me to youth group. God uses all kinds of ways to enlist people in His service! My next step was to be a Volunteer in Mission in the West Virginia Mountain Project after my junior year in college. Seeing the love and generosity of the Presbyterian men and women who served this group of churches in a poverty-stricken area profoundly challenged me; I wanted what they seemed to have.