My meditation practice has enlarged to include Lectio Divina, a traditional way of reading sacred texts as if I were having a conversation with Christ.

There are variations in technique, a couple of which I will mention shortly, but the essence is to deeply read a text “with the ear of your heart,” and reflect on it.

The most ancient form follows in four steps:

Lectlo. Read the passage. Ask yourself whether there is a phrase or passage that speaks to your heart. Begin to repeat it.
Meditatio. Reflect on the words, create an attitude of quiet receptiveness. Recognize what the passage is saying to you.
Oratio. Respond—out loud if you can—with a prayer or petition that puts into words what your heart has recognized.
Contemplatio. Simply be with God’s presence as you open yourself to this deeper hearing of the Word.

What you pick to lecto about depends on your own situation. Traditionally, meditators pick a piece of scripture. Some follow the lectionary passage for the day, although I’ve found that passage often doesn’t speak to my heart on a given day.

Often, particularly in recent days, I have been moved to reflect on pieces of poetry.

Recently, I picked one of the Jan Richardson poems, prayers, blessings, in The Cure for Sorrow. “It is hard to be wedded to the dead,” includes a passage that the dead make “different claims” and “offer comforts that to not seem comfortable at first.” I meditated on: Which claims? Which comforts?

Although I have practiced Lectio Divina with others, it works better for me as private meditation where the messages from my heart stay between me and God.

Visio Divina: Meditating on Images

An interesting variation on textual mediation comes from Pamela Begeman, who writes “The Word of The Week,” a message from Contemplative Outreach, the organization that extends Fr. Thomas Keating’s ministry. She presents us with Visio Divina, meditating on an image. She bids us to look at the NASA image of the Nebula (above) and asks “what speaks to your heart when you gaze on it”?

I am a photographer and a museum fan. Visual images transfix me.

I remember vividly sitting at the edge of Claude Monet’s pond at Giverny, taking a picture at the same place he painted some of the waterlilies. The location never lost its hold on him, and he painted the pond and flowers more than 250 times in the last 30 years of his life. Even as his vision declined, the waterlilies could rest in his heart even as his paintings verged toward abstract expressionism.

I made a photograph or two there, sat on a bench, meditated, and thought to myself that I could understand Monet’s fascination with this place.

Monet’s pond transfixed me just as it had him. I could have spent many more hours at its edge.

Here is a link to the Contemplative Outreach page on Lectio Divina. Yes, you can try this at home.

Meditating on the Stars

The image in the banner at the top of this post comes from NASA’s remarkable imagery. In particular:

This infrared image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows the Helix nebula, a cosmic starlet often photographed by amateur astronomers for its vivid colors and eerie resemblance to a giant eye.
The nebula, located about 700 light-years away in the constellation Aquarius, belongs to a class of objects called planetary nebulae. Discovered in the 18th century, these colorful beauties were named for their resemblance to gas-giant planets like Jupiter.
Planetary nebulae are the remains of stars that once looked a lot like our sun. When sun-like stars die, they puff out their outer gaseous layers. These layers are heated by the hot core of the dead star, called a white dwarf, and shine with infrared and visible colors. Our own sun will blossom into a planetary nebula when it dies in about five billion years.