It's Time to Chime In

So, let us talk about sacred reading or lectio divina. I see that everyone in the class has spoken about it except me. It was quite ironic how in the morning, in chapel, Dr. Hackett had done this same exercise except with scripture. I found that the more I read it, the more it became clearer and like a movie in my head. Now, in literature class we did it with Sonny’s Blues. I thought that was such a great story. It really caught my attention with its metaphors, especially parts like “Then the horn insisted, sweet and high, slightly detached perhaps, and Creole listened, commenting now and then, dry, and driving, beautiful and calm and old” (409). When I heard that we were doing lectio divina in class with literature, I was a bit confused. I cannot see normal literature as some form of sacred writing. When we started the activity, though, it was interesting. I listened along rather than read along. Listening helps me picture things better and to understand things better. I ended up sketching some pictures I saw in my mind while he was reading. When we started off with lectio, that part of the story we read was not motion perfect in my mind. I see everything I hear or read like a very detailed movie in my mind. I was trying to put the scenes together. When we got to meditatio, I found that I liked how the piano and jazz music illustrated life. I love how poetic the language was of the main character. When we read it in contemplatio, I could see it vividly. I understood the end of the story completely. I saw that it was a hopeful ending, though some might have thought that it was anticlimactic. I do believe that lectio divina is a good process of understanding, but I think it should just be for the Bible. You can take some aspects of sacred reading and use it to understand literature by subtracting oratio and resting in the spirit.