David G. Benner - Opening to God: Lectio Divina and Life as Prayer

Opening to God

Lectio Divina and Life as Prayer

David G. Benner

www.IVPress.com/books

InterVarsity Press
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Downers Grove, IL 60515-1426
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2010 by David G. Benner

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All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from The New Jerusalem Bible, copyright 1985 by Darton, Longman & Todd, Ltd. and Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.

Design: Cindy Kiple
Image: Laurie Knight/iStockphoto

ISBN 978-0-8308-6799-8 (digital)
ISBN 978-0-8308-3542-3 (print)

To my father Gordon Wilson Benner

(1920-2007)

whose life was a prayer

and for whom prayer was his life

And to my friend

Fr. M. Basil Pennington, O.C.S.O.

(1931-2005)

who helped me discover lectio divina

as a framework for prayer and life

Contents

Acknowledgments

This book began as a series of talks at Christ Church Cathedral in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, during Lent 2009. I wish to thank the Very Reverend Dr. Logan McMenamie, dean of Columbia and rector of the Cathedral, for inviting my wife and myself to deliver this series of Lenten meditations on prayerher part also resulting in a book.

I would also like to thank my agent, Kathy Helmers, for her assistance in the early stages of manuscript preparation, and my editor, Al Hsu, for his characteristically extremely helpful suggestions in the editing process. And, once again, I am happy to be able to acknowledge and thank my wife, Juliet, for her continuing role in my spiritual journey, particularly for the way she has modeled a life that is prayer. The opportunity to work with her in lecture, workshop and retreat contexts over the past several decades remains one of my lifes most fulfilling experiences.

Thanks be to God!

Introduction

Transforming Openness to God

JUST IMAGINE HOW DIFFERENT YOUR LIFE would be if moment by moment you were constantly open to God. Think of how much your experience of yourself, others and the world would change if you were continuously attuned to the loving presence of God and allowed the life of God to flow into and through you with each breath. Such a life would itself be prayer, for, as we shall see, prayer is not simply words that we offer when we speak to God but an opening of our self to God.

Most of us live most of our lives somewhere between the extremes of being completely closed to God and completely open. This is why I speak of opening . Opening implies not just a position but a directiona direction of movement toward full openness. It recognizes that, even for those of us who long to know deep communion and union with God, we are ambivalent about the vulnerability of the surrender that this involves. We are hesitant in our opennessoften taking a tentative step toward it and then quickly pulling back again. Obstacles obstruct the channels of self that we long to open fully to God, blocking our capacity to receive the fullness of Gods life. These obstacles can take many formspsychological (i.e., our fears and unhealed wounds), theological (i.e., our distorted views of God) and spiritual (i.e., rigidly hanging onto spiritual practices that no longer bring us life). It is these sorts of blocks to openness that God longs to remove so that we can become increasingly open to God and full of the very life of God.

This is why prayer holds the possibility of being so transformational. Of course, through prayer God can touch the world. But first and foremost, through prayer God touches and changes us. We become whole as we learn to live in openness before God. And as we respond to Gods constantly inflowing life, God touches the world.

The possibility of transformation lies right at the heart of Christian faith. Think of the promise of being born again or, if this term sounds too archaic or feels like a better fit with some other faith tradition than your own, of conversion or spiritual awakening. The magnitude of the changes implied in these concepts might be somewhat embarrassing to us when we feel discouraged by the extremely limited progress typically resulting from our spiritual self-improvement projects. But they do remind us that Christianity is built on a hope that in Christ all will be made new.

Transformation is foundational to spirituality. Unlike religiosity, which can involve nothing more than beliefs and practices, spirituality involves a journey. Much more than a mere identity, it is walking a path. This is, of course, particularly clear in the case of Christian spirituality since the earliest followers of Jesus were called people of the Way. And prayer has been central to that Way since Jesus was asked by the first disciples to teach them to pray.

Prayer would not be worthy of being called a spiritual practice if it did not play a central role in this deep inner work of transformation. Perhaps you have never thought of prayer in these terms. I certainly didnt for a long time. I was quite content to think of it as spiritual work but never considered that it might be the means through which God gained access to me to do the spiritual work of transformation. This has not only changed how I understand prayer, much more importantly, it has changed how I understand my role and Gods role in the whole process.

If, however, you happened to notice the subtitle of this book, you might wonder how the ancient monastic practice of lectio divina connects to this transformational dimension of prayer. Anything coming to us from a monastery might strike you as quaint but irrelevant to twenty-first-century Christians living busy lives in the world. But this could not be further from the truth. For, as we shall see, this ancient prayer practice was developed expressly for transformational purposes. It was understood as a way of opening ourselves to God so we might be touched, awakened, realigned, integrated and healed. Or, we could say, it is a way of opening ourselves to God so we might be born again and again in a continuing series of conversions that together constitute this grand process of transformation. This is precisely the gift that lectio divina offers us. It leads us to a way of understanding and practicing prayer that is vastly different from how most of us understand and practice it, because it leads us to opening ourselves to God so God can pray in and through us.

Be prepared, therefore, to have your understanding and practice of prayer changed. In fact, if you are not open to this happening, save yourself the time and put this book down. It isnt for you. If, however, you seek a deeper openness to God and long for God to continue the divine work of making all things newin you and in the worldthen read on. If this is you, you are the reason I wrote this book. I wrote it to help you see how much more prayer is than you could ever imaginehow things you may have never considered to be prayer are, in fact, ways of opening yourself to God. I wrote it to help you move from prayer as something you door, worse, feel you ought to doto prayer as a way of living your life. I wrote it with the prayer that you and I would both not simply become people who pray but people for whom our lives are prayer.