A time of silence for God to speak

The icons of Bose - Woman's face - Coptic style - egg tempera on wood
...Learn to make times of silence for yourself and let lectio create a rhythm in your day and in your life...

For your lectio divina try to choose a time of day and a place which will provide you with some external silence. This is the necessary condition for interior silence.

The Master is here and he is calling you (Jn 11:28), and to hear his voice you must silence other voices. To listen to the Word you must lower the volume of other words. There are some times of the day which are more likely to provide silence then others: the middle of the night, early in the morning, in the evening. You must consider your own daily work schedule, but whatever time you choose, make the choice once and stay faithful to it. You are not taking your prayer seriously if you go out to meet the Lord whenever there's an idle moment between tasks. Prayer isn't a filler for your empty moments. The Lord cannot be pigeon-holed. And don't even think of saying: 'I don't have time!' This excuse makes you an idolater. You have twenty-four hours at your disposal each and every day. If you get enslaved by your schedule, then that schedule is the god you worship!

Learn to make times of silence for yourself and let lectio create a rhythm in your day and in your life. You know that we are called to pray always, without growing weary (Lk 18:18; 1 Tm 5:17), but you also know that when we do this at specific times explicitly and visibly, the awareness of God will begin to sustain our whole day. Are you in love with God? Are you reaching out towards God? Well then, do not balk at consecrating to God a little of your time every day, just as you set time aside daily for your wife or your husband, your relatives or your friends.




And don't forget to make the time you set aside for lectio adequate for this task. Don't try for a quick fix. You need time to calm down, to come to peace. A few minutes are not enough. For good lectio, according to the Fathers, you need at least an hour.

We hear so many words every day; we read so many! We have to be careful not to drown the Word with our own words. There is no end to talk in the world. It's everywhere. How can the Word speak in all this din? Doing lectio divina at a regular time every day gives you the opportunity to evaluate the world's words in the light of God's Word. The world speaks to us constantly, and both the quantity and quality of the world's words can scramble the sound of God's voice until it bears no fruit in us from day to day (cf. Mk 4:1320). What sense does it make to read everything we can get our hands on, to feed ourselves on all the world's issues, to stuff ourselves with things that leave the heart divided and unfocused and then to pretend that we are living by the Word which comes from the mouth of God? We have to exercise some prudence and make some choices between words and the Word, or else we will end up as nothing but dilettantes, hearers who become paralyzed when our path leads us up against any real challenge.

 

From: ENZO BIANCHI, Praying the Word, An Introduction to «Lectio Divina»,
Cistercian Publication, Kalamazoo 1998
, pp. 88-89.