you!) Don’t jump too quickly to the next line.
In the monastic tradition, this practice of lingering and going to the depths of
a text is called “Lectio Divina.” It is a contemplative way of reading that goes
deeper than the mental comprehension of words, or using words to give
answers, or solve immediate problems or concerns. Contemplation is waiting
patiently for the gaps to be filled in, and it does not insist on quick closure or
easy answers. It never rushes to judgment, and in fact avoids making quick
judgments because judgments have more to do with egoic, personal control than
with a loving search for truth.
And that will be the practice for you and for me as we work our way together
toward an understanding of a Christ who is much more than Jesus’s last name.
*1 When I use the word “mystic” I am referring to experiential knowing instead of just
textbook or dogmatic knowing. The difference tends to be that the mystic sees things in their
wholeness, their connection, their universal and divine frame, instead of just their
particularity. Mystics get the whole gestalt in one picture, as it were, and thus they often
bypass our more sequential and separated way of seeing the moment. In this, they tend to be
closer to poets and artists than to linear thinkers. Obviously, there is a place for both, but
since the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there has been less and
less appreciation of such seeing in wholes. The mystic was indeed considered an “eccentric”
(off center), but maybe mystics are the most centered of all?
*2 John Dominic Crossan makes this point rather convincingly in Resurrecting Easter (San
Fransciso: HarperOne, 2018), a study of how differently Eastern and Western art understood
and depicted the Resurrection. We delayed the publication of this book so I could include his
artistic, historic, and archaeological evidence for what I am trying to say theologically.