A Coaching Session on Lectio

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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James Finley (0:07)

Greetings, I'm Jim Finley.

Kirsten Oates (0:11)

And I'm Kirsten Oates.

James Finley (0:13)

Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.

Kirsten Oates (0:15)

Thanks.

Welcome, everyone, to Turning to the Mystics. I'm here with Jim, and we're going to have a special episode where Jim is going to coach me in and guide me in implementing the Lectio practice that he's been teaching from Guigo II. And we're going to be using the podcast as a kind of audio Lectio, and as an invitation for you to use the podcast in that way going forward. Thank you for being here, Jim.

James Finley (0:57)

Yes, yes, I'm glad we're doing this. The idea in Kirsten and I kind of talking about this is that how it might be helpful, instead of just thinking of it as listening to me quote a mystic like Guigo, and then comment on Guigo, and comment on Guigo's insights of how to do Lectio. Instead, you'd be listening to the actual podcast as the Lectio, that is how to listen to the podcast as your Lectio Divina. Since Lectio, Lectio is Latin for read, so it's like your audio divina. You're like contemplative listening, and Kirsten and I will do back and forth and we'll model that for you as things that come up within her on phrasings or whatever. And so it'll help you to model how it might go on within you, how to write off on it or personalize it for yourself. And I'd like to begin then with an initial thought that how you listen to these sessions that we have here together with the Mystics is, of course, is preeminently personal. It's what's most natural and meaningful to you. And so for you, it might just be listening to them while you're out taking a walk or you're going to bed at night or to sit quietly. And to just listen that way, you're already doing Lectio because there's a kind of attentive listening to it. And you're also doing Meditatio in the sense, quite naturally, you'd be interiorly just reflecting on something. Like you hear a certain phrase or, I never thought it that way before, and you reflect on it. And I say, God, for the grace to be faithful to this and so on. But what we want to look at here is, let's say you want to go more deeply into it. Let's say you want to get into it in a more kind of substantial, broad-based way that Guigo has in mind. And that's what we're going to be exploring here, how to do that. And I'd like to begin, then, with some practical points about a practice, about a daily practice and so on. And then we'll do the dialogue with Kirsten on taking a text and number of texts and so on. First of all, real basic things. One is intention.

That your intention is to set aside some time each day to deepen your experience and your understanding and response to God's presence in your life. That's your, like, purity of intention.

And also knowing that it isn't a practice to just simply end passing to sense that desire in your life. It's necessary to set aside some time devoted to this. It's like a rendezvous.

And therefore, it's a habit that's cultivated in a practice, like how does a poet become a poet, or how does an artist become an artist? You have to commit yourself to the craft to get into the poetic mind, into the artistic mind. And so it's the same with this. And so it would be something that you would do each day, if possible, maybe twice a day. A practical time for people is often, say, for 20 minutes. Because it's short enough to be practical, you can do that. But it's long enough to begin to settle into meditative mind. If you're prompted and can do longer, you would do longer. You would go with the flow of the givens. You would meditate at the time of day, your practice, your time with God, would be the time that you're most naturally alert or rested. But you go with the flow with what the realities of your life allow. You're always working with your circumstance to do this.

Next, the place you meditate anywhere. But it's very helpful also to say in your home, like the place where you sit for this daily rendezvous with God, you can also have different postures like yoga, postures you can meditate lying down, so on. But most of the time you'd be sitting in a chair with your back straight, both feet flat on the floor. So you're sitting still, you're sitting straight, and you're sitting in the place that you go to each day to be with God for meditation and prayer. If you want to have some sacred symbols there based on your tradition, a crucifix, an icon, the scriptures might be there burning candle, a stone or something from outdoors, but there's a certain kind of configuration or simplicity to the place that embodies what you're sitting there for in that place at that time to be with God.