Lectio Divina: Contemplative Awakening & Awareness

Author: Christine Valters Paintner, PhD, REACE, OBLSB and Lucy Wynkoop, OSB

Publisher:
Paulist Press

Publication date:
October 23, 2008

ISBN-13:
978-0809145317

Description

Lectio Divina: Contemplative Awakening and Awareness offers a unique prayer resource that provides a thorough grounding in the different moments of the lectio experience: listening, reading, savoring, responding, and then contemplating God s Word. It will act as a guide for those who have a desire to pray more deeply into this ancient practice and invites readers into a spirituality that encompasses a way of being with God and the whole of life. Lectio Divina, grounded in Benedictine tradition, provides an accessible approach to praying with scripture as well as several concrete and creative ways of praying lectio with different texts such as poetry, icons, and movies. The book also explores ways of bringing lectio into scripture study and integrating lectio into busy lives. It concludes by offering the reader an exploration of the transformational value of lectio divina and a way of using lectio to pray with life experience.

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Praise for the Book

"I highly recommend Lectio Divina: Contemplative Awakening & Awareness. While many books laud the value of integrating lectio into our lives and some may provide the briefest of explanations, this is the only source that I am aware of that provides both the tradition and development of lectio divina along with contemporary expressions of lectio in practice. This book has grown out of years of practice and in mentoring others to cultivate ways of lectio divina that deepen the contemplative stance toward life. Lectio has been the heart and gut of monastic practice for centuries; the Spirit invites all of God’s people to partake of this ancient way with God.”

Sr. Laura Swan, OSB Author of The Forgotten Desert Mothers: Sayings, Lives, and Stories of Early Christian Women

"With the rising interest in the art of Lectio Divina Christine Valters Paintner and Lucy Wynkoop have created a work of great promise. In this superb resource the ancient wisdom and the poetry of the Lectio process shines forth. This is a praiseworthy offering.”

Macrina Wiederkehr, OSB

Author of Seven Sacred Pauses: Living Mindfully Through the Hours of the Day

"Christine Valters Paintner and Lucy Wynkoop offer a way of practicing lectio divina that is inviting, accessible and practical. Their deep confidence in this way of prayer, and the clarity and wisdom with which they beckon the reader, spring from their own lived experience. With its singular combination of insights for daily life and prayer and suggestions for practice, this book will prove helpful to both the novice and to those who teach this way of prayer.”

Rev. Mary C. Earle Author of Broken Body, Healing Spirit: Lectio Divina and Living with Illness

"If a college student practicing a secular adaptation of lectio divina hears the “still, small voice” that was “lost to years of Ritalin use,” then Sister Lucy Wynkoop and Dr. Christine Valters Paintner’s Lectio Divina: A Way of Being with God and Life provides an immensely practical guidebook for discerning the voices of “God” and for being with the vicissitudes of contemporary life.”

Dr. Sarah Williams

Professor of Feminist Studies, The Evergreen State College

"Wynkoop and Paintner’s LECTIO DIVINA is a lovely book, with a gentle, lyrical style that reveals lectio’s aim in the authors’ tone as well as words. In their hands, lectio takes shape as a transforming power, combining the great aspiration to love and be loved by God with full acceptance of ourselves as we are. I especially enjoy the way Wynkoop and Paintner integrate the prayer of lectio with the senses, describing its wisdom as basking and luxuriating in God’s presence, and offering specific suggestions for integrating art, poetry, images, music and the body into a lectio practice. LECTIO DIVINA is an act of consecration – the lifting up of our lives and souls to God.”