Father Richard encourages us to read the Scriptures by following the model of Jesus and in the company of the Holy Spirit, whose presence the church celebrates today.
Jesus knows how to connect the dots and find out where the sacred text is truly heading, beyond the lower-level consciousness of a particular moment, individual, or circumstance. He knows there’s a bigger arc to the story—one that reveals God as compassionate and inclusive. Jesus doesn’t quote lines that are punitive, imperialistic (“My country is the best!”), wrathful, or exclusionary. He doesn’t mention the twenty-eight “thou shall nots” listed in Leviticus 18 and 20 but chooses to echo the one positive command of Leviticus 19:18: “You must love your neighbor as yourself.” The longest single passage he quotes (in Luke 4:18–19) is from Isaiah 61:1–2. Jesus closes with the words “proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord,” deliberately omitting the next line—“and the day of vengeance of our God”—because he didn’t come to announce vengeance.
This is what the Holy Spirit teaches any faithful person to do—read Scripture (and the very experiences of life) with a gaze of love. Contemplative practice helps us develop a third eye that reads between the lines and finds the thread always moving toward inclusivity, mercy, and justice. [1]
The biblical revelation is about awakening. It’s about realization, not performance principles. We cannot get there, we can only be there, but that foundational Being-in-God, for some reason, is too hard to believe, and too good to be true. Only the humble can receive it, because it affirms more about God than it does about us. To achieve that realization, I invite us to read the Old Testament and the New Testament as one complete book: an anthology of inspired stories, with a beginning, middle, and end. Read it as one Spirit-led text.
Read it as inspiration, by which I primarily mean that God is slowly evolving the reader’s consciousness, so that it can receive an ever-clearer understanding of itself as the beloved of God. Biblical texts, when read with “poverty of spirit” (Matthew 5:3), explain both ourselves and history to us. When read with a sense of entitlement, as if we are owed something, they unfortunately lead us to an imagined ability to explain God to others.
God does not change in the text, but we do. The written words are inspired precisely insofar as they inspire and change us! Here, I’m using the literal meaning of the word inspire—to “breathe into us” a larger life. If the written words don’t accomplish that, then they’re not at all “inspired”—at least for us.
I’ve met too many people who believe in all kinds of inspired texts but are lifeless—without the breath of life that was blown into the nostrils of Adam (Genesis 2:7). “They approach me, but only in words” (Isaiah 29:13), with what both Isaiah and Jesus called “lip service” (Isaiah 29:13; Matthew 15:8). [2]
Chewing on Sacred Texts
One day when I was busy working with my hands I began to think about our spiritual work, and all at once four stages in spiritual exercise came into my mind: reading, meditation, prayer and contemplation. These make a ladder for monks by which they are lifted up from earth to heaven.
— Guigo II, The Ladder of Monks
CAC faculty member James Finley describes the wisdom that comes from contemplative reading, as taught by the Carthusian monk Guigo II (c. 1114–1188):
The first rung of the ladder to heaven is reading. By reading, Guigo means a “careful reading of Scripture, concentrating all one’s powers on it.” He likens reading to the act of eating, saying that when we read God’s word we take in spiritual nourishment…. Guigo writes:
I hear the words read: “Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God” [Matthew 5:8]. This is a short text of Scripture, but it is of great sweetness, like a grape that is put in the mouth filled with many senses to feed the soul…. Wishing to have a fuller understanding of this, the soul begins to bite and chew upon this grape as though putting it in a wine press to ask what this precious purity may be and how it might be had. [1]
Finley continues:
The transformative power of reading, as described by Guigo, holds true in a unique sense in the reading of Scripture. For to read the Scriptures as an act of faith means that the words of the living God are on your lips. The power of God’s words works as leaven in the heart, awakening us to a personal experience of the presence of God that Scripture reveals. Read in this way, the Scriptures are one long love letter from God. Each verse tells the story of the love that perpetually calls us to itself….
Spiritual reading is not limited to the reading of Scripture…. Reading Guigo and other works of spiritual wisdom can embody our search for God. As we search for God in the writings of the mystics, we can experience in their words something of the experience of God the mystics are writing about…. As you continue on in your own spiritual journey you will no doubt come across those spiritual books, written by authors both ancient and contemporary, that you will learn to cherish. These are the books we never really finish. For each time we open them and read a few passages, we once again recognize something of ourselves and the path along which we are being led….
To commit ourselves to seeking God in the practice of meditation … assumes that we are learning to read the Scriptures … in the manner Guigo describes. That is, it assumes that we are committed to the ongoing process of quietly and unhurriedly reading, as a way of seeking and coming upon intimations of God’s presence manifested to us in the midst of our reading.
| Quote of the Week: (Learning from the Mystics by John Chaffee). (Jim Finley) “Imagine a caterpillar who is about to undergo a metamorphosis. Imagine, too, that this caterpillar has been eagerly looking forward to this great event. It has studied and researched metamorphosis. It has a camera and a journal at hand to take pictures and carefully record everything that happens, so as to publish what it senses will be a best-seller – My Metamorphosis. But when its metamorphosis actually begins to occur, something the caterpillar had never anticipated happens. Its brain begins to change first. That is, the state of caterpillar consciousness from which it assumed it was going to observe its metamorphosis is the first thing that begins to change! For a butterfly is not a caterpillar with wings. If it were, it could never fly. Resurrection is not the resuscitation of a corpse. Enlightenment is not insight.” – from The Contemplative Heart, p.66. Reflection A transformation that only happens on the surface level is not transformation at all. Jesus even seemed to identify this issue in Matthew’s Gospel when he said,“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisee! First, clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean.Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside, you appear to people as righteous but on the inside, you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.”- Matthew 23:25-27 The spiritual life has the same temptations as any other field, the temptation to be further along the path than one truly is. Theologian and writer Chris Hall maintains, “Spiritual growth is the slowest kind of growth possible.” We can easily become impatient and so dress ourselves up. And this is where Jim Finley’s insight comes into play. The first thing that transforms when a caterpillar enters the chrysalis is its mind, its interior life. The old must be done away with to make room for the new. It is not enough to simply cling to the new while still holding on to the old. It is no wonder that spiritual figures and titans from across the world’s religious traditions have held butterflies as their main symbol of transformation. Perhaps we need to recognize that transformation happens first in silence, stillness, and solitude. It is barely perceptible and cannot exactly be witnessed at the moment by ourselves. If any of us are seeking to be transformed, it will likely demand that we give up any desire to be a detached observer of our metamorphosis and give ourselves fully over to the process. Spirituality is not a spectator sport, if anything, it more likely looks like a butterfly’s metamorphosis, a seed dying in the ground, a death and rebirth. Prayer Heavenly Father. We admit that we do not dare to change ourselves. We cannot help ourselves as we attempt to cling to the old rather than embrace the new. We desire to be detached from the process of our transformation rather than to dive into it with our whole selves. Be gracious with us, and remind us that we can trust the process because it is you leading us at all times and in all things. We pray this in the matchless name of Jesus of Nazareth. Amen and amen. |
| Life Overview: Who is He: James Finley When: Born in Akron, Ohio in 1943. Why He is Important: As a Clinical Psychologist and Spiritual Director, James speaks from the depth of his own experience and training about the life of a Christian mystic. Most Known For: James was a direct mentee of Thomas Merton while living in the cloistered monastery of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Trappist, Kentucky. Notable Works to Check Out:Merton’s Palace of NowhereThe Contemplative HeartChristian Meditation: Experiencing the Presence of GodTurning to the Mystics Podcast |
