For fun, I asked Wade to take this staged photo
of me "meditating" in South Africa last August!
Benedictine
monk John Main has reminded me of something I first learned reading one of Gore
Vidal’s historical novels. Reading silently to oneself became a thing only in recent
centuries. “The spoken word is the essential medium for the communication of
the gospel,” Main wrote in 1982, the year he died. He explains:
…To meditate is to listen to the word. In the
early days of our literate culture, the link between the book and the spoken
word was not broken—St. Benedict warns his monks not too read too loudly while
at their private lectio; and St.
Augustine was reading aloud from his Bible when his great awakening occurred.
Today our books are too private experiences that rarely communicate themselves
to others. --Letters from the Heart:
Christian Monasticism and the Renewal of Community, p 19.
I
did not intend to offer two spiritual imperatives in a row on this blog. Last
week’s “Be Still!” was a reflection on another book of Main’s. I ran across
both books on my shelves, having no idea how I came by them and why I haven’t
read them till now. This second one has a bookmark from Newman Bookstore in
Baltimore, so maybe I purchased them on a speaking trip there, one of my favorite
cities. If someone gave them to me, I thank them!
In
a conversation about speed reading with fellow English majors in college, I
remember now retired Episcopal priest Gary Hall commenting how we needed to
“hear” literature at least in our heads to get the full effect intended by an
author, as we were not reading simply for information. Tom Boomershine has argued
the same for scripture, coaching readers in the art of re-telling rather than
simply reading a text. Oral transmission was the original way many of these
stories and teachings were “traditioned,” or passed on, after all.
John
Main suggests “that tradition becomes just a historical memory when it is not
one with personal experience.” That’s why I often invite listeners to hear a
biblical text as personally addressed
to them.
One
of my novice mistakes was asking the brothers at Mt. Calvary Retreat House not
to read to retreatants from my then congregation during mealtimes, explaining
that one of the reasons church members go on retreat is a chance to talk among
themselves. I had no idea I was denying those church members the monastic
experience of listening.
I’ve
written that the most challenging monastic vow for me would be that of
“obedience,” thinking little of how the word obedience comes from a word
meaning “to listen,” to attend to what another is saying.
We
use the phrase “listen up” when we want to convey something vital, something
important, possibly urgent. How true this is also of things spiritual.
For
Main, in his other book, Word into
Silence, silence is needed to catch the deepest cries, ahas, and awes of
our hearts, of our world, of our universe. He writes, “The qualities we need in
this fundamental encounter between ourselves and the ground of our being are
attentiveness and receptivity.” [p 34] Main later adds:
The understanding of prayer that makes it merely a
matter of telling God what we want or need and reminding God of our sins of
omission only compounds our alienation from reality. For this was the
liberating message Jesus came to bring: “I bid you put away anxious thought
about food and drink to keep you alive and clothes to cover your body. Surely
life is more than food, the body more than clothes (Matthew 6:25).” [p 65]
Main
writes that the Lord’s Prayer was “a series of rhythmic phrases in the original
Aramaic,” thus memorable. I have found each phrase can serve as a centering
word, a mantra. Mine lately has been “Thy kingdom come.”
Along
with other centering prayer advocates, Main believes such a mantra can quiet
the mind and welcome a “reverential silence.”
I will again be co-leading
a 5-day contemplative retreat: April 27-May 1, 2020 in Cullman, Alabama,
through the Spiritual Formation Program of Columbia Theological Seminary. It is
open to the public.
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