Last month I promised to start a series on the ancient spiritual discipline of Lectio Divina, or spiritual reading. And, well, here we go: some words on rationale, purpose, and sports equipment.

But, first, why bother with spiritual disciplines? And what are they anyway? Spiritual disciplines are practices we use to shape who we are. They are practices that you can pick up inside a couple of hours’ instruction, yet they take a lifetime to master. They are art, craft, and technology.

We are shaped by myriad forces beyond our own individuality, but how will we shape ourselves? For millennia, folks have been concerned with finding ways to be true to themselves in a world that places its own demands on them, demands that may be counter to their own best interests. Spiritual disciplines are the methods that folks have devised that will help you better direct your own formation.

You will, have no doubt, practice spiritual disciplines. We seem to ache for them as a species. Whether it’s telling stories around the campfire, sitting meditatively on a creek bed, or chanting for a football team, our need for formational ritual will find us. Better we choose disciplines ourselves than have them chosen for us–how many folks practice the spiritual discipline known as shopping without asking how it shapes them and toward whose end?
Spiritual disciplines are simple enough to learn in the space of a short afternoon, but they should be learned. It’s entirely possible that you might stumble upon your own spiritual discipline. As a teenager, I sometimes found myself swaying back and forth as I sat on the bed reading the Bible—it helped me focus. I would later learn that this swaying is practiced by Hasidic Jews as they pray over the Torah.

I doubt there are many unique spiritual disciplines out there. There are dozens of forms of prayer and dozens still of meditation (to pick the two most common disciplines) and many that would seem to be both. Each practice has its own history; some community of folks taught each practice over time, the practice becoming more sophisticated and specialized. And yet they seem to be new takes on old standards. So, even if you do stumble upon a spiritual discipline by yourself, there is little reason to go it alone. Someone, some time, has done the same thing and can probably offer good advice, even if they play it in a different key and at a different tempo.

Lectio Divinia, or spiritual reading, comes to us from Christianity, showing up in the literature even before the Bible got its final edit. Like many spiritual discipline, though, it doesn’t need to be confined to the religion that originated it. That is, you do not need to be a Christian to practice spiritual reading. (Someone better informed may know of a similar disciplines in other religions.)

What do you need? Before beginning any spiritual discipline, it’s helpful know what equipment you’ll need, and the practice of spiritual reading is no different. Spiritual reading requires at least three pieces of equipment: you, a quiet place, and a piece of wisdom literature. You, obviously. The quiet place because you won’t want to be interrupted by cell phones or subway stops.

And the wisdom literature. What is wisdom literature? Wisdom literature is literature that reads you.1 You may read it, well enough, but—if you’re paying attention at all—it holds you in its gaze and mirrors you back to yourself. And yet you’ll find something fuller and larger than yourself in it, something that will linger after you’ve put it down. That something will challenge you, and, if you devote time to it, even a little, it will change you. Promise.

You don’t need to believe that any particular piece of wisdom literature is divine writ for spiritual reading to work for you. (I suspect most authors of wisdom literature wouldn’t claim divine status for their work.) You just need something that will read you.

I wouldn’t pick up any old thing though. At least, not at first. Better to pick up something that others have found to be wisdom literature. My own favorite is the Tao te Ching, a collection of eighty-four short poems.2 One friend prefers the poetry of the Sufi mystic Rumi. From the Hebrew Bible, I’d recommend Ecclesisates, the atheist book of the Bible. In the New Testament, I’d read the “red letter” portions of the first three Gospels (the Sermon on the Mount and all that). More heretical types might like the Gospel of Thomas or the Sayings Gospel Q. I recently stumbled upon some heretical Gnostic literature that I like.

And it doesn’t have to be traditional wisdom literature. I’ve had good luck with some T.S. Eliot. Or occasionally some passage in a novel or magazine article will jump out at me. Odds are, though, prose and nonfiction won’t do it for you. Poetry, aphorism, and parable are the native forms of wisdom literature.

So get you a good piece of wisdom literature and sit yourself down someplace quiet and calm, and, in the next post in the series, we’ll begin.

1. More properly, wisdom literature is a genre of sacred literature from the ancient Near East. However, I prefer a more functional definition that says what wisdom literature does, based on my own experience on many of those texts. [↩]
2. You can find a free tongue-and-cheek version here, though I prefer the Stephen Mitchell paraphrase. [↩]