Meditations—points to ponder

Austin Farrer referred to the ‘forbidding discipline’ of spiritual reading: 

this means that such reading requires that we read with our entire life, 

not just employing the synapses of our brain. 

Forbidding because of the endless dodges we devise 

in avoiding the risk of faith in God. 

Forbidding because of our restless inventiveness in using 

whatever knowledge of ‘spirituality’ we acquire to set ourselves up as gods. 

Forbidding because when we have learned to read and comprehend 

the words on the page, we find we have hardly begun. 

Forbidding because it requires all of us—our muscles and ligaments, 

our eyes and ears, our obedience and adoration, our imaginations and our prayers.

Our spiritual ancestors set this forbidding discipline (lectio divina) 

as the core curriculum in the most demanding of all schools—

the school of Holy Spirit—established by Jesus when He taught His Disciples …

John 16:13–15 (NRSV) ¹³ When the Spirit of Truth comes, He will guide you into all the truth; for He will not speak on His own, but will speak whatever He hears, and He will declare to you the things that are to come. ¹⁴ He will glorify Me, because He will take what is Mine and declare it to you. ¹⁵ All that the Father has is Mine. For this reason I said that He will take what is Mine and declare it to you.

All writing that comes out of this school anticipates this kind of reading: 

participatory reading—receiving the words in such a way 

that they become interior to our lives, 

the rhythms and images becoming practices of prayer, 

acts of obedience and ways of love. 

Words spoken or written to us under the metaphor of eating are words 

to be freely taken in, tasted, chewed, savored, swallowed and digested—

have a different effect on us from those that come at us from the outside—

whether in the form of propaganda or information.

Eugene Peterson Eat this Book! the art of spiritual reading pp10

John 16:13–15 (The Message) — 13 But when the Friend comes, the Spirit of the Truth, he will take you by the hand and guide you into all the truth there is. He won’t draw attention to himself, but will make sense out of what is about to happen and, indeed, out of all that I have done and said. 14 He will honor me; he will take from me and deliver it to you. 15 Everything the Father has is also mine. That is why I’ve said, ‘He takes from me and delivers to you.’