Eat This Book :: Contemplatio

The final movement in lectio divina is contemplation, which "means living the read/meditated, prayed text in the everyday, ordinary world." p. 109

Contemplation is one of those hard to understand words.  In our culture, it is typically reserved for those who have chosen some sort of monastic lifestyle in seclusion somewhere up in the mountains.  Sometimes that life sounds really appealing to me, but in the end I just don't think it is what Jesus intended for me.  While, historically, contemplation has rightly referred to such, it doesn't refer to only such lives.

Peterson has a deep longing to see that people not just read the text, not just read and meditate on the text, and not just read, meditate and pray through a text.  His drive is to see people carry their reading, meditation and prayer into their muscles and bones, into their oxygen-breathing lungs and blood-pumping heart.

For me, this is where the rubber hits the road, so to say.  If the Story, stops short of contemplation, then what good is it to me, and what good am I to the world or to God's causes in the world.  When we continue in this long enough, prayer by prayer, "we find ourselves living in a reality that is far larger, far lovelier, far better."  This is where I want to be in my relationship with the Holy Script.  I know that God is writing, what some of us call an upper story, while we continue to live and struggle in this lower story (the one we know all too well).  Contemplation allows me to participate/experience the greater Story that God is writing around me...and in me.

Kathleen Norris calls "The quotidian (daily) mysteries: laundry, liturgy and 'women's work.'"  She writes,

I have come to believe that the true mystics of the quotidian are not those who contemplate holiness in isolation, reaching godlike illumination in serene silence, but those who manage to find God in a life filled with noise, the demands of other people and relentless daily duties that can consume the self.  They may be young parents juggling child-rearing and making a living...If they are wise, they treasure the rare moments of solitude and silence that come their way, and use them not to escape, to distract themselves with television and the like.  Instead , they listen for a sign of God's presence and they open their hearts toward prayer.

Contemplation means living what we read - not wasting any of it and not hoarding any of it away.  A contemplative live is not some special life, but the Christian life - not more, not less, but lived.  

Unlike the first three movements of lectio divina, contemplation is not something we can just do.  It's more something that happens in us and to us.  As we humbly approach the Scriptures with prayer and intentionality, we beckon the Spirit of God to live out the words in our daily lives.  It is our response to what we have experienced in the first three movements.  I want to live the words on the pages.  I want to live in those words.

I believe this is the most crucial of the four movements.  This is where the Word of God transforms us into people of the Words.  We actually discover our part in the Story, rather than simply finding parts of the Story for us.  Intuitively, I find myself resonating with Peterson's explanation of this movement.  Something inside my heart aches for this, yet I fail often.  I guess you could call me, well all of us, failed contemplatives.  Nonetheless, there is a bent in me toward this living out the Story.  I want my failings to lead me to greater transformation into the man God has called me to be.

The last section of the Eat This Book, is dedicated to translation and the formation of Peterson's Message translation.  I'm not sure if I'll post anything on that section - it may just be a bonus if you went and got the book.  If this is the last post from the book, I hope you've enjoyed the "cliff's notes" version of my small journey.  I'd be interested in hearing if you liked the posts and if it would be worth our time doing this again sometime.