The Teaching Life. Week 5.
This week I made a breakthrough of the highest order in my high school class at Purcell Marian. But first some background.
As a young man, not much older than my current students, I once stood in a stark and wooden monastic cell, with stone-faced Chartreuse mountains rising in the east and snow covering the ground all around me. Inside the cell, in a low voice, a white-robed French monk was teaching me how the monks go about praying in response to the subtle impulses of the Spirit found in Holy Scripture. He was teaching me Lectio Divina.
I stood there, transfixed. I wondered how I had never heard of this way of prayer before. At the same time, I felt an urging, the beginning of a calling that the world needed to know this. I felt that the pearl of Lectio Divina had to be a pearl for the world.
That was winter, at the end of 1994.
I spent three years after that, making myself a disciple of the monastic way. I learned the deep art and practice of Lectio Divina, this way of prayer first whispered by Origen, taken up by Ambrose and Augustine, made widespread by Benedict, then the Cistercians; codified and deeply practiced by the Carthusians, respected by John Calvin, lost during the Age of Enlightenment and then the excesses of the Historical Jesus movement; and finally recovered, in the mainstream, thanks to the 1965 Document Verbum Dei; later strongly echoed by Pope Benedict and the Orthodox theologian Paul Evdokimov. True, the hidden stream of Lectio Divina was kept quietly flowing, all through the centuries, in faithful monasteries. But its flow in the workaday world has often been but a trickle. I have always thought this to be a spiritual tragedy, like an occlusion of blood flow in the body of Christ.
I returned from the monastery in 1998, full of confidence that I had a story to tell and a pearl to share. Alas, I quickly stumbled in the thickets of modern life, amid the pressures of finding a job, the wrestling with inner demons, the traversing through arid sands of the spiritual life without a guide, getting married, raising a family, starting and selling a business, starting and failing at a non-profit, raising children, making plenty of mistakes.
But I could never shake the question: was Lectio Divina relevant to a busy married man, a Dad, an entrepreneur? On my own, without a light to guide me other than the one that burned in my heart, I decided: yes, it was relevant. Yes, this light that I found in the monastery, lost in the early years after my return, then regained, re-discovered, validated in my own spiritual and lived experience; this light was a light for me and a light for the world. So I believed. So I continue to believe.
I set out first to build a fire of the Word that would daily burn in my heart, one no longer ephemeral, one not susceptible of being put out by a casual or sudden storm. One strong enough and bright enough to light one human life. My life. One durable enough to be tested and yet still radiate and grow.
Several years later, when I felt confident in my personal practice of Lectio Divina as a layman, I set out to teach it. To test this theory of mine that the wisdom of the monks regarding how to pray with Scripture was a wisdom that could illuminate lay people. I taught Bible studies, I wrote a book about it, I gave lectures on the topic – once at St. Peter in Chains Basilica in downtown Cincinnati. I began writing a second book, animated by all the learnings of those prior 8 years of experiences.
I spoke to Catholics, Orthodox and Protestants. I found the Word of God to be a uniquely unifying strand within the divided Church of the 3rd Millenium. I started seeing durable fruit.
But nothing can compare to what I witnessed this past week.
I am now an Instructor of Scripture for Sophomores at Purcell Marian High School. I began this position in the Fall of 2024, part of the unfolding of my belief that the Word of God is a light for every human soul; part of my determination to discover the best way to unveil that light.
I teach the grand arc of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation. I aim to teach my students the art of diving into the depths of God’s mind and Spirit as they are revealed through these thin and mysterious pages and the curious Spirit-bearing stories they contain. 54 stories of the Old Testament, 54 from the New: that is our trajectory. We cover the central characters and themes; in each story we plumb into the depths; we probe with tools of observation and reflection; we resolve our search of mind and heart in an ascending prayer to the invisible God whose breath gives pulse to the inspired words, whose breath can give pulse to our souls, again and again, with each beat of our spiritual heart.
Who ever thought that African American children and White American children and Latin American children; 15 and 16 years old; children whose grade-schooling was fractured during the Covid years; with attention spans now greatly attenuated; who ever thought these children could learn the monastic wisdom of Lectio Divina; a wisdom so rare I once had to take a train from Paris to the French Alps, then a bus, then a cab up a windy mountain road, where I learned this way of prayer from a rare group of French monks I befriended; who ever thought these kids in my classroom could learn this way of prayer and deep spiritual thought?
Well, I did.
I cannot say I didn’t think I was crazy, at times, to think so. Certainly, others have thought me crazy.
But I tell you, 4 weeks into my class, 4 weeks of practicing guided Lectio with these kids – which (for them) I call ‘Biblical Exploration’ – 4 weeks of walking through the 7 steps I presented; 4 weeks of intellectual and spiritual work; after these 4 weeks I set them down for their first Test, this past week. The Test was to perform, on their own, a Biblical Exploration of 1 Sam 3: 1-11, the Call of Samuel. This passage narrates the call of a child whose mother had helped direct him toward the prophetic ministry; it is the call of a child who would become the last Judge of Israel, the prophet who would anoint David as King.
The word of God was scarcely heard in Samuel’s day. Samuel didn’t even recognize it when the voice of God first presented itself to him. There were few who had the practice and the wisdom of hearing it. No one told him what to listen for. But after Samuel kept coming to Eli, saying, “Here I am, you called me,” even Eli could recognize the pattern of God’s self-disclosure. So he urged Samuel to respond, if another call would come, with the words: “Speak Lord, for your servant is listening.”
I found it a perfect text for my students’ first Test.
Picture this, especially if you have read my previous posts: 100 kids, generally rambunctious, full of chit chat and boisterousness; sometimes rebellious, easily distracted, generally uncertain about this whole God question; picture them suddenly silent, across 5 different classes, each at their desks, Bible open before them, lined paper and pencil beside it, reading silently, mind and heart absorbed, occasionally scribbling in neat and not so neat script; scribbling the 5 key steps of Lectio Divina, while instrumental worship music from my iPad fills the air and their ears. The stillness of it. The wonder!
It was like – no, it was not like; it simply was – it was as though the Cloud that had accompanied the children of Israel through the desert now filled this room – filled it 5 times, once for each class – with the presence of God. Stilled the kids’ souls for a fat 30 minutes of silent, spiritually pregnant time. Occupied their minds and hearts with the contemplation of the mystery of how God calls a human soul.
It was the Ruah of God hovering over 26 high school desks in a room without air conditioning.
“Samuel is sleeping near the ark,” one student observed, “which is the physical and spiritual symbol of the covenant between God and the Israelites.”
“He ends up listening to God for the first time in his life. . .” wrote another.
Still another (I do not make this up): “In this passage, Samuel’s initial inability to recognize God’s voice reflects a period of spiritual dullness in Israel. Samuel’s learning process underlines that recognizing and responding to God’s call requires guidance and growth.”
I could keep going. I will simply close with two prayers of my students. To turn to God in prayer is last step of Biblical Exploration; one prays in response to what has been revealed in the text. One student wrote:
“Lord, please help us to always hear and understand your word, even if it may be difficult to understand. Bless us so that we may know to open our ears, mind and soul, so that we may know the word of Truth. Amen.”
And another:
“Dear God, now that I learned about this story, it makes me think that you are probably calling me to do or notice something, but I don’t notice it, but I hope I will be able to recognize it.”
When the last class had left and I was alone, I wept.
I cannot conceive of what will transpire 6 months from now when we reach the heights of the New Testament. But until then, I’m feeling good about my theory that Lectio Divina is a light for every human soul.
