Your Lectio Divina is Not Your Own

When I am reading his wonderful meditations on St Matthew, Father Simeon Leiva-Merikakis always seems to take me to places in the Gospels where I have never been before, though I have been reading their pages and listening to them at Mass for over sixty years now. All those revelations “hiding in plain sight” that he has discovered and shares so willingly with me. Today was no exception. This morning’s revelation did throw me off kilter a bit in the best of ways. I began to wonder if I am quite dense for never seeing it before. I can see Father Simeon smiling quietly as he pushes his broom across the refectory floor in his Cistercian abbey far away in Massachusetts.

The matter is this. All my life I have read the Gospels with the presupposition that I was one on one with Our Lord, in the quiet of my living room, by the open window. And that He and I were speaking one to the other alone about His heavenly doings in the world He came to save. That my lectio divina was a very private affair. But this is not so. In the case of this particular Gospel, Matthew was obviously there with us. I was seeing and hearing Jesus through the thoughts, impressions, and memories of Matthew. The Gospels are not novels. They are not short stories, or myths, or legends. In these, the author controls the narrative. He creates characters and puts words in their mouths that are his own thoughts. He creates a unified story. Sometimes I think we read the Gospels like this - as one story written by one man with made up characters and lovely episodes. We don’t often ask: how did he know the rich man went away sad? that only one leper out of ten was grateful? that Jesus shone like the sun on the mount? that Peter wept bitter tears after denying Christ? These are all REAL people. And Matthew could not have possibly witnessed everything himself, in real time. The Gospels are not stories. They are more like the memoirs written by the Body of Christ with its collective memory. Truly the Evangelists wrote them down, and God inspired which memories would be recorded. But these are not the memories of just one man. Thus, we are never quite alone when reading them. We are sitting with the members of the Mystical Body who were eye witnesses to His ways among men, and who are telling us the most marvelous things in many different voices and perspectives - like fantastical memories eagerly told around a burning campfire. Things we would never have known unless they had bothered to tell them.

We are never alone with Jesus as we read the Gospels, but that all the other saints and angels are there with us seeing Him through their own eyes and seeing different things to share with each other and with us. We in turn reveal our hearts to them as we meditate on the Word. It is ALWAYS a mystical body experience when we take up and read, even if we are alone physically - a fully human, communal experience. God wanted it this way.

Father Simeon points out that in other religions, there is one person to whom God shares His thoughts, and that one person sets out God's thoughts from beginning to end unilinearly. For example, He revealed a whole body of thought to Mohammed and only to Mohammed in a Koranic revelation. But for us Christians, our Lord speaks through ‘perspectivism’ - Father Simeon's word. He posits that we are always seeing, hearing, and learning to love Jesus and His Father through one another's thoughts, words and actions - through several unique perspectives. That is why there are four Gospels, and many prophets, and many different inspired writers of different sorts in the Bible. So, the words of Scripture can be said to bind the Mystical Body one to the other in a REAL and not a metaphorical sense. The spoken and written word are concrete realities.

It is why I love the prophet Baruch or Isaiah. They speak to me in a way that I am ready to hear, being me and they being they. Their perspective was meant to reach into my heart. And when I write or speak to my dearest friends about my thoughts on Scripture and they to me, we are being bound by each others thoughts and insights into one love and admiration for God in a very real way. It is a lovely thought.

Here is the most wonderful part. I am going to quote Father Simeon as I could never say it as beautifully as this:

"We encounter one more manifestation of that unfathomable humility of God whereby he patiently chooses the long and arduous roads in order to make His descent into the heart of man all the more irreversible".

He willed to so entwine Himself in each of our hearts when He came. And out from our hearts go more vines to other hearts and he takes root and so intricate a root that it would now be impossible, by His will, to extricate Himself easily. He did not just come down to one man and then ascend without a trace. When He came a seed to Our Lady's womb, He began to grow - and through her expressed perspective was planted in Joseph's heart - then to shepherds - and to kings - who also shared their perspective with others. Like this great, gorgeous, slow growing vine wrapping itself around our hearts and binding us one to another - inextricably. Through words about the Word. It is Matthew who is speaking to me now by my window, planting the vine of his inspired word around my heart. That God finds even me worthy to express my perspective of Him to others is a mystery to behold. God's profligate love shining like "shook foil" everywhere - even in me.

That is why the Mystical Body is so vital. We learn of the heart of God through the saints and even each other's 'perspective'. Through all the people who walked the pages of the Gospel. It is never a private revelation. So, we must learn to listen to each other, for He has so much to say through us. He willed it so. Never. Never. Have I thought of this. He has, as Our Lady cried out to us in her magnificat, "done unto us a mighty thing".

In this spirit, I keep turning over the loveliness of a recent week’s Gospel in my mind. I know this Gospel. It is familiar in a general sense. Every other year it appears and I recognize it. But this time it seemed so fresh and new, as though I had never really read it carefully before - down to its shining particulars. I am receiving the unique perspective of a man, perhaps a shy introvert, who later told someone his story so that we would all receive it and know Jesus in a light we had never known Him before.

Jesus has just arrived at Bethsaida with his disciples. Perhaps it hasn't been fully announced that He is there yet. In the gathering clumps of people beginning to mill about, there is a tight little group of 'people' - whom I soon recognize as more than just people - they are friends to one unfortunate man in their midst - a blind man completely dependent on them as they lead him. Maybe he had not wanted to come. The fear of a strange, uncharted place, perhaps. A natural shyness. A fear of attention. A man who had long since determined not to be a bother to anyone. One who had resigned himself to the blindness that was his. One gathers that this was absolutely not his idea. It feels as though he would never have come except for his friends.

These are friends I would be honored to have in my corner. The blind man must have been very lovable to them. Maybe he was light hearted. Maybe he was funny and kind and gave good advice to them. Whatever his qualities, his friends were certain that he was worthy of a cure and they had the courage to approach and ask Jesus to touch him, for they knew their friend well enough to know he simply could not ask for himself.

Jesus cured in many ways. Sometimes he cured for the benefit of the crowd - to help the people's faith. Sometimes he cured from a distance as in the servant of the Roman official. Sometimes he demanded a profession of faith from the one asking for a cure. Sometimes he told people not to tell - and they loudly told anyway. Oh, extroverts! Some who were cured danced down the road. Some picked up their mat and walked away.

But this cure? This cure was to be very private. A group of friends helping someone who could not help himself. Too shy. Perhaps feeling unworthy of all the fuss. Jesus honored his reticence, and his anxious introversion. After they told Jesus what they wanted, his friends waited to see what Jesus would do. And in exquisite thoughtfulness, Jesus took the man's hand and led him out of the town. The friends did not follow. Instinctively they knew this was to be a calm and private encounter. Jesus took the blind man's hand. Like a child being led. Out of the town. Every shy, introverted, anxious person in the world might sit down and thankfully weep at the considerate heart of a God for this shy and retiring one who simply longed to see. There would be no fanfare. But there would be cure.

How far did they walk? How quiet it must have been. Just the two of them. Perhaps Jesus asked him some questions about his life. Perhaps the silence was even more comforting. But to have your hand in the hand of Jesus is no small thing. And the feeling must have flooded the blind man with joy.

Even the cure was simple, personal, homey and beautiful. Jesus puts spittle on the blind man’s eyes and then asks with what I think would be a gentle smile. "Do you see anything?" "I see people looking like trees and walking." stammers out the blind man. No thunder, no gasp in the crowd, no picking up of mats. No flashing dramatics. Jesus quietly lays his hands on his eyes again and this time the man sees clearly - clearly enough to see that his hand is held in the grasp of God.

This was such a personal and private cure brought to the attention of Jesus by the love of friends. This cure was a revelation to one, single man that indeed he was worth the trouble of God. That he was seen. And loved. And cherished for the shy, introverted person he was. Love was so present outside that town though there was no drama nor a crowd to witness it.

And the best part was saved for last. Jesus sent the man home and said, "Do not even go into the village." Probably to his great relief, the blind man was allowed to disappear down the road in quiet calm. How grateful he must have been for the gift of that. Not being a spectacle for crowds to gape over, but a loved son and brother of the most High King who now saw God face to face with his own eyes . One would need a long walk home to take that all in. Did he turn and look behind him and see Jesus smile once more before he turned to make His way back to Bethsaida and the Father's will waiting there for Him.

How do we know this perspective unless the blind man later told his friends and they in turn told someone and that someone told Matthew? Perhaps Matthew found the man later and heard it from his own heart’s memory. But because of this memory shared by a private, shy man we now understand that some of Jesus’s cures and miracles were kind and simply tell us that we are beloved of the Father in such a personal way and that our needs and sufferings are important to him. And that we should bring our friends, who feel too shy to come themselves, to the attention of His love.

How rich our lives have become because of the perspectives and memories of the members of the Mystical Body who, even now, call attention to one more facet of the glory that is Jesus. A facet we had never seen before.

Tell your stories. Tell your perspective of encountering Jesus with your friends. Add it to the collective Lectio Divina that is the Body of Christ. Let it be one more leaf growing on the vine that binds us one and all to His Divine love which will never extricate itself from the delight He finds in being with the Children of Men.

Father Simeon handed me his own little leaf of revelation this morning and then continued in his lovely monkish way to sweep the floor as I closed the book. I thank him and pass on my leaf to you.

I do not feel inclined at this time to have a paid substack. But if we were together in a cafe discussing all these thoughts, I would not be opposed to you buying me a cup of coffee - with cream, of course. In that spirit, if any of my posts resonate with you and you feel so inclined, you can donate here: buymeacoffee.com/denise_trull