Practicing "Lectio Divina"

Creating sacred spaces for writing and reading

I’ve read that procrastination tends not to be caused by laziness, but by a crippling emotion like fear, especially when it comes to writing. We fear the self-confrontation of the page. We fear our subject matter. We fear not measuring up to the writer we’d like to be.

And other fears, of course. So many fears and anxieties course through me on any given day that I sometimes scarcely notice them. They’re just part of my blood.

I’ve been feeling those feelings with my recalcitrant and unwelcoming memoir of late, and I’ve also been feeling them with a document that is an inventory of the remains of all of my mother’s things in a storage facility in Des Moines.

I’m supposed to look at the inventory and choose the things I’d like to keep as my brother, sister, and I divvy things up. But I can’t open up the document.

I’ve spent a lifetime hearing my mother say how she wants me to have this or that piece of furniture, this or that plate or painting or lamp.

Most of the things, I can’t keep, though, because I live in a tiny house that is … too, too full, even for the most precious of family heirlooms.

The photographer Nan Goldin once said, “I used to think that I could never lose anyone if I photographed them enough.”

We are creatures averse to loss living a life defined by loss (and therein lies the drama of our lives). The snapshot of art holds a tragedy: we lose things, people, and memories each day. Our words and images can do little to truly preserve things.

Yet we try to preserve. We try to reach back with our art and experience it all again.

The chair of ‘lectio divina’

That’s why I want to give a brief tribute to my truest of sacred spaces: the leather wingback chair that was next to the fireplace in the living room of my mother’s house in Iowa. It was the single place on the whole vast spinning planet where I felt most at peace, most thoughtful, most creative, most me.

I sat and read and wrote in this chair since my parents moved to this house when I was 20, 40 years ago. So many different eras, different states of being, different selves.

I remember sitting in this chair and tearing up to the last words of Love in the Time of Cholera before leaving to Mexico when I was 24. I remember writing on the elegant page of a handsome Italian leather journal my friend Karima gave me 30 years later. I remember starting stories (which likely never went beyond the start), and I remember finishing my novel The Letters in the chair just a year ago.

The chair is rooted in a time when I was young, full of all of the best kinds of fantasies, so ready to bound into life. Perhaps I’m so attached to it because I’ve so often sat in it during interludes between things. Perhaps it’s because the chair has always offered a moment of reprieve.

Or perhaps it’s because when I sat in it, I knew I’d be taken care of.

The chair is my definition of the numen: a divinity or spirit that inhabits a place or an object.

It’s important to revere the numinous places and things in our lives, to look for them, to create them.

The chair was a place of “lectio divina,” of holy reading. In lectio divina, you don’t read for any practical matters like knowledge or information, but simply to deepen your life of faith.

I like that definition of a good reading experience—similar to how I once heard someone say they read to feel gentleness. What a wonderful reason to read. Lectio divina is about bringing your whole self to the text (something I rarely do now).

All of that time reading and writing in the chair is a little like Nan Goldin taking photos of the people she hopes to never lose. The chair is part of the sacred in my emotional psyche. It is the odd object that transcended being an object to become an experience.

We don’t give funerals for such objects, but they deserve mourning.

Writing prompt

Is there a place or a chair or a desk that is sacred to you, or was sacred to you?

What was numinous about it? What was sacred? Why? What words can you describe sacredness with? Do your words keep you from losing it?

Think of this excerpt from “Losses,” by Wesley McNair:

Left to ourselves,
we always go over and over what’s missing—
tooth, dog, money, self-control, and even losses
as troubling as the absence the widower can’t stop
reaching for on the other side of his bed a year
later.

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Because beauty

The beauty of catching a fly. The beauty of getting into a cab. The beauty of steak frites on a rainy night. The beauty of wearing a topcoat on a city street. The beauty of picking up the tab. The beauty of slicing a fresh apple. The beauty of not knowing the time. The beauty of a molding piece of cheese. The beauty of a stack of books. The beauty of staying up until dawn just because. The beauty of dried wine in the bottom of a glass.

Because a quote on beauty

“Beauty is an achieved state of both deep attention and self-forgetting: the self-forgetting of seeing, hearing, smelling, or touching that erases our separation, our distance, our fear of the other.”

~ David Whyte

Because beginnings

A beginning is always an ending.

Because endings

An ending is always a beginning.

Because middles

There’s a lot to be said about middles because they connect the beginning to the ending and vice versa. But, now that I think of it, they don’t really need to connect the beginning to the end. They just need to be in the middle.

Anyway, there’s a lot to be said about middles and not enough space to say it here in the middle of this newsletter.

Because contradictions

I wish we thought of people less as spokespeople of a neat and finished personal self and more as messy, variegated, inconstant, polyphonous creatures seeking and seeking and seeking for all kinds of things.

Walt Whitman had it all figured out: “Do I contradict myself?” he asked unselfconsciously. “Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

Somehow, by acknowledging the contradictions and the multitudinous within us, he dissolves the divisions between us. It’s better to speak to a person’s multitudes than their singletudes (i.e., their ideology), in other words.

It’s in our messiness where the illusion of our separateness can be disarmed. It’s in realizing our contradictions (and thereby our fallibilities) where our antagonisms weaken. We’re born messy and we’ll always be messy. So we should be messy together.

Free Class! The Art of Brevity

I’m teaching a free class with Domestika, where I just learned my class, Novel Writing: Bring Your Book Project to Life, is a best-seller.

I’m teaching The Art of Brevity, on Tuesday, August 12, from 8-9 Pacific.

We’ll dive into my book, The Art of Brevity, for a workshop that explores the power of writing with precision and purpose. Discover:

• How creative limits can unlock surprising ideas

• How to write with suggestion, tension, and subtlety

• How the art of omission can bring stories to life

Contact me about my one-on-one work with writers

Because a photo prompt

A song at a dinner party. Lonely notes late at night. I don’t know how to play a piano, but I’m so at peace when I can sit down alone at a piano and play my version of Chopin’s Nocturnes.

Tell a story about this piano. Maybe it’s related to a sacred space of yours.