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One: A one–page description of this method of Sustained Lectio Divina:

Lectio Divina is a way of praying using the revelatory texts of Scripture, Nature or experience.

This Encounter with God is to listen with the ear of your heart. Lectio Divina is our Burning Bush. We take off our sandals and bow our brow to the ground of our being.

We invoke the Holy Spirit to bring to mind our particular text to use for lectio divina in the coming months. We linger with this text for months, or until another text rises from underneath or consciousness.

We listen to the literal voice and study with our logical minds.

We meditate on the symbolic voice with our intuitive minds. (aesthetical)

We heed the moral voice with our personals senses of prayer and acetical practices.

We live the (inner voice …through our daily decisions and through the discipline of discernment.

We receive the mystical voice with our spiritual senses.

Each of these voices is distinct and is mediated through the revelatory text.

Our part in this encounter is to listen, meditate, heed with discrimination and receive.

This way of personal prayer becomes our way of life, a culture of God Consciousness.

This method depends on the Holy Spirit enlightening our minds and filling our hearts with desire.

The text is given to us as an individual and each of us take the necessary days, weeks, months to live into the revelation.

This is sustained lectio.

Skills of study, artistic appreciation, training of the mind for discipline and disposition of repentance prepares us for the deepest experience of the revelation of God.

Discernment becomes a way of life. We do this lectio as our default way of living in the world.

We do this practice when we are not doing anything else. This lectio is the culture under the river of our interior life providing us with directives of how to be loving above the river to all, especially the least.

Lectio Divina is an encounter with the living God within our loving hearts. This is our individual practice that prepares us for liturgy, self–less service, community life, friendships and ecclesial way of being in the world. Sustained Lectio Divina is a way of life.

Meg’s comments: I have received some wonderful commentary from readers of this site and email contacts.

Odette from Canada asks about the inner voice of the reader of the text that hears the moral directive and that still point from which that one's own inner moral voice rises from the true self.

That is a voice from our own being that can certainly be trusted. And the word “voice” is an appropriate word. Takes away my nifty definition of voice and senses, that of having the voice from the outside and senses being the receptivity apparatus.

But we also have a voice and that is what we can trust and act from our own center and live in our own skins. Thanks, Odette for the comment.

This sustained method of lectio divina is comprehensive. The trick is to have this lectio consciousness to do always when we are not doing anything else, but also, not to regress into mindlessness of not doing anything when we are not doing anything else!