To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty,
and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before,
and which shall never be seen again.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Lenten season is here, and several one-hundred-day projects are happening across the web¹. I will do contemplative reading and notebooking using Laurie Bestvater's Studying to be Quiet: One Hundred Days of Keeping. Laurie likens this type of reflection to the ancient practice of Lectio Divina, which means spiritual reading. This practice teaches the reader to read the scriptures slowly and attentively (Lectio), to think and meditate on them deeply (Meditatio), to pray or narrate those scriptures (Oratio) and lastly, to contemplate and ruminate over them (Contemplatio) so that they are embodied. We can also use this process to view the whole world as a "text of sacred revelation"². For those of you who use Charlotte Mason's methods, I'm sure you see some similarities with the procedure described above.
Laurie quotes Rev. Bosco Peters' definition of lectio divina:
The Slow Food movement is the opposite of Fast Food. Slow food is about taking a little bit of food and enjoying it, appreciating it, relishing it. Slowly.
This is one way of thinking about this way of using the Bible in prayer.
You choose a short piece of the Bible that already speaks to you, or that you think may speak to you.
And then you treat it like slow food. Because this small piece of the Bible is going to nourish you.
In Slow Food you do four things. You take a bite, a small bite. Secondly you chew.
A lot. Then you savour the flavours. Fourthly you digest this food, and it becomes part of you. Bite; chew; savour; digest.
Slowly relishing, appreciating and enjoying life: it sounds like the act of 'knowing glory'³ that Laurie introduces us to in her enlightening book titled The Living Page. In it, Laurie eloquently brings to our consideration the connection between the habits of attention and observation and the revelation of 'knowing glory'. She refers to Charlotte Mason's Meditation on John 1:14:
Perhaps this is one of the secrets of life — to know 'glory' when we see it. Moses prayed, 'I beseech Thee show me Thy glory,' and the answer was, 'I will make all My goodness pass before thee,' and for three and thirty years all the goodness of God, which is His glory, passed up and down in the eyes of men.
Scale How Meditations, p. 49
Laurie opens our eyes to the fact that through Charlotte Mason's simple method of being a keeper of notebooks and journals, our observations awaken us to encounters of glory in the world around us. Through this one practice of attending, we learn to mindfully step away from distraction and the busyness of life –deliberately taking the time to look out for the manifest Goodness of God. Knowing glory is a possible secret to life! If we have attentive eyes and hearts, God's Glory is everywhere for us to see.
Laurie invites her readers to capture ideas that captivate them for one hundred days. She recommends trying out one of Charlotte Mason's notebooks; you can find more information on them in the Wildflowers & Marbles blog by Jennifer Mackintosh. I have decided to do a mash-up of commonplacing and adding observations to my Book of Firsts. I look forward to slowing down for 15 minutes daily, studying to be quiet (1 Thessalonians 4:11) and savouring the flavours of the goodness and glory all around me.
I hope you will consider joining me⁴.
¹ One Hundred Days of Wonder (I would like to do this one), and One Hundred Days of Making
⁴ See Laurie's original invitation to One Hundred days of Keeping
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