It’s Christmas break and I have some time and space to think back about this past semester. What stands out? What’s top of mind?

Two months ago, I stumbled onto one of the most important insights from my teaching experience. I’m going to frame it in the form of a question.

If we hold that God spoke in the past; if He etched his living Word first upon tablets of stone, then upon the tablets of the prophets; if He then echoed those Words through the events that happened to the people of Israel: does it stand to reason that He would stop communicating to human beings in real time?

Our common sense and lived experience says: ‘No.’

So does my teaching experience.

So if we say no, can we say, plainly and simply, that God still speaks today – through his Word and through the unfolding of daily events – in such a way that we might come more deeply to know Him by learning to read the way He reveals Himself in time?

Is God, in other words, the God of the Bible alone? Or is He the God of the living (Mt. 22:32)?

I didn’t come to these thoughts by myself. They presented themselves to me as a possibility as I taught my students proven principles for reading Scripture.

Consider my situation. Here I am, on a daily basis, telling 15-year-olds they can come to decipher the living Word of God by practicing the principles of Lectio Divina: by believing, in other words, that God speaks through a Sacred text; by combing over that text attentively; by observing her concrete details, zeroing on what seems to be the central, most moving message on a given day; by plumbing that Word, considering it in light of the rest of Scripture, and then praying about it. These are the 6 steps of Lectio Divina, spelled out in a single sentence.

Using this approach, I have explored, over the past four months, more than 50 Biblical passages with my students. You would think I would have already known that life itself can be read this way. That God also speaks in real time; and that our capacity to notice it, retain it and respond in prayer can be aided by following an approach like the one the monks developed for reading Scripture.

But I didn’t. Of course, I wouldn’t have denied this possibility; but I never became fully aware of it – until one Friday in late October.

It was a day that ended like a splatted tomato – dropped from a third story building upon hard blacktop. The day ended with me deflated; in such a state that I almost missed a deep message of God’s grace that day.

Some context.

On Fridays at Purcell Marian, we have a 90-minute period called Flex, which the school uses to create blocks in the schedule for special programming like school-wide prayer services, career events, formal college testing etc. On the days when we don’t have any of these special events, the kids end up with a free 90-minute block of time in their homerooms. Yep – 90-minutes at the end of the day on Friday afternoons. You can imagine spirits tend to rise during that time.

I already have a rambunctious home room, and, at the time of this story, I had not quite figured out how to manage this end of day Friday Flex period. What behavior is appropriate? How strict should I be? I tended, in my first few months, to shy away from confrontation so, as a result, my Flex period often got out of hand. This day would be no exception.

But more than other Fridays, on this day, I am bothered because the bulk of my day had gone so well; the contrast between afternoon Flex and the flow of my earlier classes was thus jarring. It left me feeling sad and dejected, like my classroom efforts had gone for nought.  Earlier in the day, I had introduced my classes to the Jesus Prayer, a 1500-year-old prayer particularly suited to them, it seemed to me, because of its simplicity, brevity and spiritual depth – and the fact that members of any Christian denomination would feel comfortable praying it.

Lord Jesus Christ, son of the living God, have mercy on me.

The day had gone well – exceedingly well. In my classes, the kids were receptive to the prayer. They listened attentively to its history, its theology and all participated in the group prayer practicum at the end. I even noticed a striking resonance in my morning Bible study that day, as without prior planning, we had prayed with one of the Gospel passages from which the Jesus Prayer is drawn. It felt like a providential prelude to the day.

So by the end of my classes that day, I felt buoyed by a wave of the Spirit. It felt like the routinely thick psychological traffic clogging my regular efforts of evangelization was suddenly clearing. An open road was emerging ahead and I could see daylight.

And then my Bell 6 shuffles out of my classroom – like so many frailly nascent angels – and my homeroom rumbles in.

It’s nearly the end of the day. Cell phones are out, headphones on; kids are bantering loudly, standing up and moving about the room, tossing about the occasional insult or impure comment.  It was a shock to my system. Back then (I do it differently now), I did not enforce the school technology policy. I had not yet informed my classes that I do not appreciate hearing unkind comments about other faculty members. And I certainly had not communicated at what point banter breeches common decency. They had assumed – and I had not challenged this assumption – that Flex was essentially a free for all; a free bell. They could scroll what they wanted; listen to what they wanted; and well-nigh say whatever they wanted.

The color of the conversation that roiled around the room that day; the volume of verbal parlays; the faces buried in phones; the utter absence of appreciable impact upon any of these children of the deep exchange of spiritual truth I had just witnessed over the past two days in my classes: these hit my spirit as though I was suddenly rear-ended by a Ford F-150. It was jarring.

I did my best, as I usually did in Flex, to keep behavior within reasonable bounds, while counting the minutes for it to end.

And end it did – at 2:50 pm. Then came our school-wide prayer over the PA – which the kids too often endure in a perfunctory manner – followed by announcements, and then out the door they roared, just as in the door they had rumbled.

Now I am left alone. Defeated. Disillusioned. Discouraged.

Will I ever reach the souls of these kids in an enduring way, I think to myself? Or is every petal of the Spirit that I place upon their desks destined to be trampled by the traffic of social media and high school culture?

I am too sad and disheartened to process these feelings. They sag like sacks of wet concrete in my leadened brain. I get up. Go to the bathroom. Spirit slumped, I come back, gather my things, sling my bag over my shoulder and trudge silently down the stairs toward the parking lot.

But on my way I take notice: I am too down. I can’t leave like this! This day wasn’t all bad. I need to take it in context.

So I turn around, go back to my room, sit at my desk, slip out my iPad and do an inventory on the day. What had happened, on the whole?

This is when I more deeply noticed the amazing synchrony of the passage we studied at 6:30 am in my men’s Bible study. Each Friday morning, a group of about 10 men at our Church study the passages pre-selected for Sunday’s readings. On this day the Gospel passage (one of the origin passages of the Jesus Prayer) meshed perfectly with the content of my classes that followed that day. It struck me as a blessed echo of my classroom with the caverns of the broader Christian tradition.

I also recalled and noted the incredible sunrise that filled our hallway window that morning, right behind the rustic wooden cross I had hung up earlier in the year. I remembered a Linkedin message I unexpectedly received in the morning from a reader in England, assuring me that she prays for my students every day. I recalled the multiple moments of connection with my students that day; the rare level of interaction I had seen from one of my challenging students.

But best of all I recalled this moment that arose, in my room, like a choir of angels; when my 26 student-Bell 6 class prayed the Jesus prayer in sequence, like a symphony of the soul’s awakening. And how I had ended that prayer in a spontaneous prayer out loud for each of the children, their families, their teams: that they would know God’s love, recognize his presence.

Remembering this now, I had to choke back tears, wafted, as I was, by the wellspring of love I feel for these kids; the awareness of the love God feels for these kids. That moment was, as I tell the kids when referring to the powerful revelations of Scripture: deep water. Something happened then that was outside the ordinary. It called for further exploration.

Wow, I can’t believe I almost forgot all that, I thought to myself – and just because I had a bad 90-minute patch at the end of the day!

I pack up my things, once again, and head to the parking lot, my spirit feeling much lighter. I drive to the restaurant where I go on Fridays – in its quiet bar on the side – to do my writing before the dinner traffic hits. There I do my normal exercise of choosing a rich experience from the week and reflecting on it. Not surprisingly, I choose the process of teaching the Jesus Prayer over the past two days and particularly this mystery of the Tale of Two Extremes.

And here is where it really hit me.

I have just lived through the process of Lectio Divina, in real time. Well maybe it would be better to say I have come to discover that life is like a sacred page where God’s action and revelation are written; there to be deciphered, read and grasped; received in gratitude, responded to in love, echoed in prayer and praise.

The one who reads life in this way, it occurs to me, is reading it with a prophetic gaze. He sees events as arising from the hand of God; he hears God’s voice through them; he takes in that voice and responds to it. It is quite similar to the way monks read Scripture.

Thus, the monks say you start Lectio Divina with an attitude of faith and love, ready for God to speak. Similarly, the one with a prophetic gaze on reality – the one who reads God’s action in real time – starts with the same mindset. He starts with faith, love and an expectant disposition that believes God will act today.

Next, the monks say you should read the Biblical text 2 or 3 times, knowing that it is easy to miss certain details through just one reading. In a similar way, the prophetic gaze does not just pass through life once. He reflects upon it. He goes back over what he initially experienced to catch the essential. He recounts it to himself. He pulls it up from memory; he ponders it, trying to notice, capture, and record the significant details.

The monks say you should isolate a key section of a text – they call it the heart – and plumb its deeper meaning. So, too, a prophetic gaze on life knows that certain events come charged with significance, so he stands ready to pause and take in that deeper significance when it arises; to capture the event as though on photographic film, to raise it to the light of prayer and reflection, to plumb its essence. This includes letting other events – possibly Scripture or some other form of insight – color this event with their light.

And finally, the monks say you should respond to God’s revelation with prayer. Prayer in faith, in gratitude, in love – in a conscious, interiorizing response to what God has revealed. At the end of the day, the prophetic gaze does the same; ascends toward the same place of light. God speaks in time and in the created world; He speaks in the details of our life and conscious awareness; and we respond simply, gratefully, joyfully, freely, naturally – as though we are in a living dialogue with the Creator of all things who also knows us personally.

For, of course, we are.

Is God the God of the dead or of the living?

This process is much like sifting for gold from a moving stream. You scoop up the sediment in your hand or your sifter; you lift it out of the moving stream; you sift and let gradually fall away the sediment that does not shine with the lustre of gold; you isolate and hold onto what does.

In a similar way, the prophetic observer of life pauses, from time to time, amid life’s moving stream. Looks back on what he has experienced, sifts experience and observation in his memory, looking steadfastly for those moments that shine with the lustre of the Holy Spirit, with that unmistakable divine life. When he sees it, he lays hold of it – in the memory and perhaps by writing it down – and ponders what truth this experience, event or dialogue unveils.

Such things can bear the mark of divine revelation. When they do, the prophetic observer responds to what he has learned in prayer – in gratitude, in love and in praise. In the Amen of one human soul to each tangible revelation of God’s created energies.

As I think about it, the monks live this way, eyes open to the way God reveals Himself on the daily parchment of created reality. They constantly see God acting in real time and they are continually learning from these revelations. Evdokimov calls them “masters of experimental knowledge,” scholars of the divine nature as unveiled in time. “Theodidacts,” they are men and women who are taught by God. They live with a prophetic gaze.

With these insights swirling about my brain, I walked out of the restaurant that night – aptly called ‘Embers’ – as through the world were ablaze with divine light. Just above the horizon, the edges of the darkening sky still glowed softly, like the embers of a celestial fire. And my muted heart gave praise and thanks.

I want to walk this way from now on. Ever since that Friday night, if I have my wits about me, I end the day with a question:

What was the heart of this day? Set aside, for a moment, the struggles and the frustrations – what was the deepest thing God said to me today?

I hold on to that message; I respond with a prayer. And if I do, my days, at day’s end, are cast in a different hue.

I like this idea of reading reality in the same way I read Scripture. How about you?