Found – A Lectio Reflection
Part I
There is always at least a small element of surprise when I do lectio divina. . I always pray before I begin to read. That is vital: I ask the Holy Spirit to enlighten my mind and strengthen my heart. Then I always read slowly, going over words and sentences again and again. Gradually, insights emerge from some deeper place in my being by the action of the Holy Spirit. Sometimes the surprise is that there are no surprises: simply by reading the words I enter a different ‘place’. It is not a matter of insights or new realisations but of the Sacred Presence that emerges, subtly but undeniably. It is like being with someone you love. You don’t have to talk in order to feel sustained on a deep level. Other times, however, I am given an insight into God’s action in my life that is so surprising that my entire mind-set and outlook is affected.
This happened to me memorably some years ago when I was reading the book of Exodus, chapter 16. This chapter is the one about the journey of the Israelites through the desert after they have miraculously crossed the Red Sea on dry ground. The waters of the sea had parted for the Israelites. The Egyptians, however, pursuing the Israelites with their entire army, went into the dry sea-bed, assuming the waters would remain parted for them, too, but they did not. The sea swept back into place and all the Egyptians were drowned in the sea: “not a single one of them was left alive” as the text reports (Ex. 15:28). At last the Israelites were liberated from their slavery, but this was only the beginning. They found themselves crossing a desert now, where a much deeper testing by God would take place.
As I read this story, I was identifying with this desert experience. The Israelites are rather famous for their faithlessness during this episode in their history—‘But who could blame them?’ I asked myself. Despite their miraculous deliverance from their life of oppression under the Egyptian pharaoh, they were essentially unformed in faith. God led them into the desert and they didn’t like it. I understood. I was undergoing a desert experience myself at that time and was not coping with mine any better than the Israelites had coped with theirs.
It was a time in my life when everything had gone wrong. This is not melodrama. I was struggling with many vital losses on a profound level. People, place, even my vocation itself: all were affected, all had received a blow to the major organs. The details of what caused this personal disaster are less important to the story I’m trying to tell than the resulting state of my mind. Like the Israelites, I complained bitterly to God—at least, I did on days when I thought God might still be listening to me. Many days I could not summon enough faith even to complain. I could not see how God could possibly be working within the experience I was undergoing; I couldn’t see what to do or how to interpret the events. I would not wish this experience on anyone, yet I am also aware that this sort of suffering is not at all unusual. Many, perhaps all of the readers of this post will have been through times that do not merely seem to be disastrous but really are so, when everything and everyone that you had counted on and trusted, every source of support topples over, is exposed in all its flimsiness, or is in some fundamental way called into question.
I had continued my practice of lectio through the experience, but to say it was ‘dry’ is to vastly understate matters. I would read the words, but could not derive any meaning from them. Through the days and through so many sleep-deprived nights what kept bouncing around in my head as prayer to God were questions like, “What is this, Lord? What is this about? I cannot recognise your work at all in this experience. What is this?”
Perhaps this is a good place to stop for today—in a state of mind in which nothing is recognisably God’s. Tomorrow we will look more closely at what I found in Exodus 16.
Found
Part II
And the whole community of Israelites began complaining about Moses and Aaron in the desert and said to them, “Why did we not die at the Lord’s hand in Egypt, where we used to sit round the flesh pots and could eat to our heart’s content! As it is, you have led us into this desert to starve the entire assembly to death!”…Moses then said, “This evening the Lord will give you meat to eat, and tomorrow morning bread to your heart’s content, for Yahweh has heard your complaints about him.” ….[A]nd the next morning there was a layer of dew all round the camp. When the layer of dew lifted, there on the ground was something fine and granular, as fine as hoarfrost on the ground. As soon as the Israelites saw this, they said to one another, “What is that?” for they did not know what it was. “That,” Moses said to them, “is the bread which the Lord has given you to eat” (Ex 16: 2-3, 8, 13b-16).
St Paul tells us that we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Holy Spirit prays for us with groans beyond all utterance (Rm. 8:26-27). Looking back, I can see that the Holy Spirit was turning my perplexity into prayer, and preparing my heart to receive God’s answer to my prayer, but if anyone had told me so at the time, I am don’t think I would have believed them.
For all intents and purposes, I was one of those Israelites, angry and bewildered, ready to challenge any and every pious platitude that the Moseses and Aarons in my life tended to offer me. It was not physical starvation I feared, but spiritual, emotional, psychological collapse.
And then I came to the famous lines in Exodus:
“They said, ‘What is that?’ for they did not know what it was.”
Likewise, I did not know what my experience ‘was,’ or what I should do with it, how to process it. As the Israelites did not recognise the dew-like substance as actual food, so I did not recognise God’s hand in anything that had happened to me. But Moses gave me my answer:
“That,” he said, “is the bread which the Lord has given you to eat.”
And then everything changed for me then.
I saw that I had been trying to distance myself from my experience, I was trying to find some formula which would enable me to end all the distress and bewilderment, I was trying to rid myself of the suffering I was undergoing, Instead, what I needed to do was entirely the opposite. I needed to embrace the whole perplexing, disastrous mess: because ‘this’ was the bread God was giving me to eat. I needed to see it as food, as bread from God, even as Eucharist. Instead of seeing it all as an evil to be eliminated, or as a psychological event to be ‘processed’ it was an experience which, by its nature, could not be processed or understood until it had been embraced and lived. How much do we ‘understand’ the food we eat? We don’t. Or how do we process it? We eat it, and allow the body to do the rest. My experience was meant simply to be absorbed, taken into my being as fully as food is taken into my stomach. It was not to be regarded as a species of poison but as nourishment—albeit a very new kind, the taste for which I had not yet acquired.
And that was how lectio divina brought me to the beginning of a very long process of inner change. The change did not happen overnight, nor did the suffering end, but an element of the suffering ended. I was no longer fighting the experience. I felt that God had found me, that God had spoken his Word within my experience, and that I would find him within what I was going through in the present, no matter how bewildering.