On Lectio Divina

I’ve been reading His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman. Part science fiction, part theological reflection, Blake and Milton, high fantasy and modern physics. This includes the idea of parallel worlds.

            The monastic practice of Lectio Divina seems similar to me. It’s a way of reading scripture that puts you into a parallel world which informs and infuses us. I read the first eight verses beginning Mark: ‘John did baptise in the wilderness, and preach the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins.’ Because I’m reading King James, I get ‘did baptise’ which appears to me. It’s emphatic. In this parallel world where all the land converges on Jordan River John stands as a marker. I can see the prophet, preparing to baptise the Lord.

            What did John do? He did baptise. He preached. He preached the baptism of spirit, after the water. When I read this passage again, I get the word ‘remission.’ I would dearly love a remission of illness. John preached the remission of sins. Yet it was Jesus who has the actual power to forgive sins. On third reading, John baptised in the wilderness. Are we not in wilderness, much of the time? In this parallel world, some healing is taking place. It’s a world worth exploring: Lectio Divina is one way.

           

On the Body and the Blood

I’ve just received a little over nine bottles of a substance derived from other people’s blood. Nine is the number Dante associates with his blessed lady Beatrice: so much so, that she’s said to be the number nine. Her name calls her a Blessing; her number calls her a miracle. Dante’s maths makes three the sole factor of nine, and three is comprised of Father, Son and Holy Spirit (three in One) the root of miracles.

            Many in hospital were needing miracles. Not only the patients, but the staff were contending with illness, distress, and close calls. A nurse told me she was in this country looking after her dying sister. Another had been a cancer patient on this same ward. A doctor had two sick family members. Being a nurse, a doctor, or a priest won’t exempt you from the suffering all around. The truth of suffering is Buddhism’s first Noble Truth.

            Can the blood of others entering the body contribute to miracles? In Dante’s day it would have seemed so. The blood of one Other in particular carries miraculous power. The recovered nurse believed her faith had made her well. ‘Others can cure,’ she said, ‘but Jesus heals!’

On Temperament

Distractibility, persistence, focus, physical sensitivity, calmness, flexibility, are examples of inborn temperament. Times of sleep and waking, mood, and appetite may be natively determined. We see already in children that one is imaginative, another boisterous, one analytical, one instinctively attuned to the feelings of others. Worry, I’m told, is a genetic trait.

            Characteristics can be learned. I’ve seen extraversion taught to small children, and optimism is famously teachable. What can’t be unlearned may be controlled by various means, though the underlying tendency to care or to jump around may remain. Proust thought our repetitive mistakes, what he called our vices, were the key to our selves. I surely know that certain situations require attentiveness if I’m not to fall to disaster; often I know it too late, and this after decades of experience.     

            Experience modifies. Sometimes it moderates; sometimes it tends to extremes. The hot quick temperament and the cool cautious one may face the same experience with differing results. It’s at the conjunction of temperament and experience that character is formed. The temperament that’s tempered by experience has become the quality of the person, for good or ill.

            While temperament is of God, experience comes from the world. The resulting character is ours to use for life and love and blessing.

On Gravity

George MacDonald wrote a charming story called The Light Princess, about a girl with no gravity. Without gravity, she floated about, neither stable on earth nor sensible in mind. The key to gravity was tears. Grave is a slow solemn tempo in music, a critical situation, a dangerous pass. The grave is where the body lies down.

            But gravity makes us able to walk in the world. It gives each thing its proportional weight. Gravity is the general attraction of everything in the universe, affecting matter, time and space. Without it, would anything hold together?

            What then is frivolity? Is it horses for courses? (Some view horses’ paces weightily.) Celebrities and crime? The serious life’s work of many journalists. Fashion, comedy, or laughter? Is it lack of weightiness, wisdom, or depth? Does each kind of frivolity have its own gravity, based on the attraction of things for one another?

            Veronese shows Jesus at the Resurrection, leaping up from the tomb full of life and lightness. Do we have the hope of losing gravity at the general resurrection, when our deeds call us to account, and the soul commits again to the body? How would gravity behave in a new heaven and a new earth?

On Conversion

I’ve known people who’ve converted, or reconverted, to Buddhism, Judaism, Catholicism, and Born-Again Christianism. One man went from Catholic to Islamic to Biblical Fundamentalist: that’s a lot of conversion. Conversion can change families and friends to unrecognisables, having drastic and sorrowful effects; or it can give illumination and life.

            Scientific conversion talks about energy. Energy being moved from one state to another. Heat to mechanical movement, for example. In closed systems, energy cannot be lost. Maybe it can be frittered away, though.          

            What does Benedict mean by ‘conversion of life?’ Some say the correct translation is ‘conversation’ as a way of life within the monastic setting. Such conversation is with one’s fellows as well as one’s environment as well as with God. The monastic environment is one of constant prayer and saying of the Hours, in the midst of daily work.

            Work is conversion of energy.

            Conversion implies change. And since most of us aren’t monastics, the lay life could be changed to reflect our conversation with God, our fellows, and our environment, or context. Ongoing conversion.

            Try changing something today. Even something small: wear a different colour, pray a new prayer, speak to someone you often ignore. A major conversion would find you. But conversion of energy as a way of life, you can find.

On Compromise

Jesus said: ‘Rise, take up your bed, and walk.’ He says this after he has forgiven the sick man’s sins. The bystanders say, ‘Who can forgive sins but God alone?’ But what’s more difficult? The healing is a kind of arbitration, so they will agree that Jesus has authority over disease.

            Compromise is a third way; the parties combine, rejecting part of each other’s demands and abandoning others. What’s left is the true gold. Compromise also has a negative aspect: computer systems, privacy, health can all be compromised, failing to act ideally due to malware, lack of security, or maladies. This lays them open to vulnerabilities, perils, and harms.

            At present, I sometimes have to compromise with my compromised body. I try to take Jesus’ words as a prescription: rise, get up out of bed, and walk. The purpose of walking in Luke’s Gospel is to glorify God. The purpose of healing is to glorify God. So each day I try to walk a little more.

            You get a compromise between what you want and what you get. We know too much science now to think sins cause illness. We pray for God to be glorified by healing.

On the Tide of the Morning

Lao Tzu said the hallmark of the Sage is the love of doing things at the right time. Finding the right time is a skill and a gift of God. Times of tides are listed and charted for mariners: the moment when the tide turns to retreat or advance can be known.

            Melissa had been ill and bedridden for months. Alzheimer’s had robbed her body of the memory of how to nourish with food. She was thin; the time of her tide was unknown. Her family lovingly stayed and visited, and her devoted mother followed her to the time of the tide. I have the word ‘follow’ from a friend, who was in Vienna to be with her dying aunt, and there’s no English equivalent to this German word. ‘It’s like what the bridesmaid is to the bride,’ said the Austrian nursing staff.

            The right time, with so much suffering, was surely coming, surely. Time then passes another portal; it flows slowly; it’s time beyond measurements and human designs. Waiting for its nature to be revealed.

            It chose the hour after 3AM, the body somehow knowing to take its tide at this instant. ‘If I have knowledge, it will come to an end,’ says Paul, but ‘love never ends.’ And if I have not love, I am nothing.