What experience tells us
Everyday experience seems to bring out the presence of a double attitude:
On the one hand we notice a certain widespread difficulty in practicing a true listening to God’s word, especially when you want to be faithful to the method of lectio divina.
The custom of images, in which we are immersed, makes especially the passage to “contemplatio” rather difficult, and so the journey becomes long and hard to follow without experienced guides or without the assistance of appropriate aids, which keep in mind the concrete situation which conditions us so much.
This leads to the impression in some that the practice of lectio is reduced sometimes to a partial approaching of an exegetical nature, sometimes to an equally partial approaching of a moralizing nature, especially on the part of those who have frequent occasions to comment on the Word in public.
In face of these and other difficulties, some prefer to be nourished at other sources more immediately accessible and less demanding: special devotions, more or less spiritual authors, theological scholars.
On the other hand there emerges an urgency to resume a vital contact with the Word of life. The exhortation of the letter to the Colossians looks as current as ever: “Let the message of Christ, in all its richness, find a home with you.” (Col 3:16) It is a call to the necessity of an abundant and constant presence of the Word of God in personal and community life: the possibility of living a true faith authentically today is made possible and sustained first of all by a praying familiarity with the word of God. Otherwise, the current thinking, the widespread mentality, the leading culture will end up dominating. It is necessary to be convinced that no other source has the intrinsic power of the Word.
I do not need to tell you that our communities are also entrapped by the obsessive presence of the TV, a real “cathode ambo”, in addition to other persuaders, more or less hidden. The erosion of the Christian mentality happens slowly, almost imperceptibly, day after day, even with what once were called the walls of consecrated life, walls which today have become fragile palisades penetrable by every wind and every influx.
A decisive becoming aware of this our not infrequent “interior decadence”, of the weakening of our Christian mentality, in face of the world’s pushiness, is absolutely necessary at the risk of rendering consecrated life in our time completely irrelevant. The real weakness of consecrated life does not lie so much in the numerical decline, as in a spiritual drying up (withering), which renders incomprehensible and even useless a kind of life meant to reproduce Christ’s form of life, one designed to say that today, too, God is to be loved and served with the totality of one’s being, the way his Son Jesus did.
How can we reproduce this tension toward configuration to Him, this challenging orientation, without a daily immersion in the way of seeing, judging, and acting of the God of Jesus Christ?
The Word, transmitting with the power of the Spirit, the mind of God (mens Dei), is able to weigh, critique, correct, upset the mind of the world (mens mundi) and to form to Christ’s style of life.
But it is necessary to remember also that this Word normally is able to develop its action in a climate or way of life where there are at least some moments of interiority possible, moments of calm listening to and warm welcoming of the Lord’s will.
Permitting oneself to be guided by the Word of God, especially by lectio divina, implies in the first place a conviction that without “religious listening” and a “praying familiarity” with that Word, we are on the road to the saddest decline.
And in addition, it implies that it is necessary also, realistically, to rediscover or enable a discipline, an ability to made priority choices, an ability to organize one’s own time around indispensable values, and this requires the determination to give oneself an “off-limits” schedule, at least for what touches this point, fruit of a firm resolution to put the one thing necessary (“unum necessarium”), the best part, in absolutely first place.
These seem like obvious things, but from appearances, they are not so always and everywhere.