Bible Eating

I am currently reading Eugene Peterson's book, Eat This Book, for my devotions. The subtitle is "a conversation in the art of spiritual reading." He addresses the practice of lectio divina which followers of Jesus have been practicing for the last 1500 years or so. Lectio Divina means "divine reading" the purpose of which is to get the scriptures inside of us.

Peterson is a wonderful writer and the person who translated the Bible into The Message. Words are precious to him, and he is passionate about opening up the Bible so that we can marinate in it and let it soak into the very core of who we are, letting it transform us from the inside out. As modern or post-modern people, we tend to read for information and keep ourselves at a safe distance from what we read. This way of reading applies to the way that we read our Bibles. He wants us to enter into the stories, let them flow in us and through us; he wants God to capture our imaginations through these texts that we read.

He writes,

Christian reading is participatory reading, receiving the words in such a way that they become interior to our lives, the rhythms and images becoming practices of prayer, acts of obedience, ways of love (p. 28).
The Bible is a most comforting book; it is also a most discomfiting book. Eat this book; it will be sweet as honey in your mouth; but it will also be bitter to your stomach [he is referring to Revelation 10:9-10]. You can't reduce this book to what you can handle; you can't domesticate this book to what you are comfortable with. You can't make it your toy poodle, trained to respond to your commands (p. 61).

Lectio divina consists of four parts: lectio (reading), meditatio (meditating), oratio (prayer), and contemplatio (contemplation). He distinguishes meditatio from contemplatio by saying that the former "moves from looking at the words of the text to entering the world of the text," by using the imagination to to enter into the text (p. 99). About contemplatio he writes, "It means living the read/meditated/prayed text in the everyday, ordinary world. It means getting the text into our muscles and bones, our oxygen-breathing lungs and blood-pumping heart" (109). In other words, the Bible is for eating, digesting, and metabolizing so that we have the energy and wisdom to live well and faithfully in the world.