Lectio
“Sometimes we fall off the ladder because we try to skip the first rung. We start to talk before we’ve listened.”
— James Finley, Turning to the Mystics: Guigo II, Session 1: What is Lectio, Meditation, and Prayer?
Meditatio
Prayer is communication with God, and communication is never a one-way street. It is both speaking and listening, hearing and being heard. It is relational. As the Church says, prayer should accompany the reading of Sacred Scripture “so that God and man may talk together” (Dei Verbum 25).
And God never withdraws from this relationship. He always hears us and He always speaks to us. His grace indwells us such that, through Christ, He is always connected to us, always in relationship with us, and always communicating with us.
Our difficulty is not that God’s communication falls short, but that we do not always receive it. We often talk without listening, and desire to be heard without ourselves hearing. Rather than connecting back to the God who connects Himself to us, we go our own way and desire our own will. Rather than relating to God rightly, as creature to Creator, we all too often relate to Him as if we are Him and He is our servant. This is to say, rather than communicating with God, we talk at Him.
As if climbing a ladder to heaven by skipping the first rung, the rung of listening, that God gives us through Scripture, we make our own way, and we fall. Yet the ladder was never ours to build. In Jacob’s dream (Genesis 28:12-13), the angels of God ascend and descend upon it, and the Lord Himself speaks to the dreamer.
In spite of our hubris and our repeated falling, the Lord’s ladder remains within our reach because God does not abandon His children, even when they have stopped seeking Him. He invites us first to listen, to receive what He is already speaking, and then to answer, to tell Him what we need. This is a conversation already underway: the Father speaking His Word in the Spirit, into which we are adopted as children through Christ.
Oratio
Love Always Speaking
You have given me Your Word
so that I may hear You
if only I will listen
if only I will not say no
to Your Love
that is always speaking
calling my name
joining me to You
through the Word made flesh
the divine communication
by whose grace
my ears open to receive You
Contemplatio
The rung beneath your feet is the one God has already set there, and it asks only that you listen. Put down your words for a while, and let the quiet be the place where He speaks. Stay here without reaching for anything, and let Him have His way with the silence.
Related Scripture
“The Lord God has given me the tongue of a teacher, that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word. Morning by morning he wakens — wakens my ear to listen as those who are taught.”
For Further Reading
If you enjoyed this post, you may also like The Room Becomes the Teacher: Abba Moses, Camping, and the Stillness We Cannot Escape (Lectio Divina), which carries the quiet of listening into a borrowed room at dawn, where silence itself becomes the teacher.
Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity.
Wrestling With God.
Returning To Love.
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