Noodling While Doodling

The following personal reflection was written after I engaged in a two-week practice of Lectio Divina.  It is a paper I drafted as part of a course I took on Spiritual Practices for Healing and Wholenss at Andover Newton Theological School.

Lectio Divina: Noodling while Doodling

The urge to doodle came quite unexpectedly and early on in the two-week introduction to lectio divina.

My daily practice began with ten minutes of silencio, centering prayer, followed by a consecutive reading in Colossians.  I approached the reading, the meditatio, with the sense of reverence that Michael Casey speaks of in Sacred Reading, “the sobriety of spirit that stems from an experience of the otherness of God which makes us want to subdue self, remain silent, and to submit … reverence will cause us to surround our reading with safeguards to its seriousness … reverence for God’s word means respect for the text of the Bible.” (pages 26-27)  My daily readings corresponded with the passages coupled together in the annotations of The New Oxford Annotated Bible.  I read Colossians 1:1 through 3:11 over the course of the two weeks.

My meditatio included writing out my selected phrase from the reading along with other key words from my meditation.  Often word play happened – juxtaposing words within the phrase, and pairing them with other words that came to me during my prayer.  I never wrote more than six or eight phrases.  Writing simply served as a means to punctuate my prayer.

Oratio became a much-cherished part of my practice.  On the second day I began to jot down some word play in my Bible’s margin.  I then doodled a little graphic image that symbolized the message of my phrase and meditatio.  The same doodling experience happened on the third and fourth day.  By the fifth day I sat down with a drawing journal and continued with this form of oratio performance from then on.

Contemplatio was often very short.  Some days I forgot it altogether because I was so surprised and delighted with the result of my meditation and oratio that I tended to close my journal and launch into my day’s activities.  But, when I did remember I tended to pause, sitting with a smile on my face thanking God for the source of inspiration and joy that could be found in such a simple form of prayer.

My most challenging time over the past couple weeks involved the centering prayer portion of the practice.  On at least half the days I struggled to let go of thoughts, to really “subdue self, remain silent and submit…” One day when my thoughts were especially scattered I opened my eyes and spent ten minutes quietly focusing on the fire in the fireplace.  I sat still and watched the flames dance.  I found this practice of “noticing” helpful in quieting my thought and preparing me for lectio divina.

On another day I totally lost my purpose during centering prayer.  I was working away in my head solving a particular problem and it wasn’t until the timer buzzed that I realized what had happened.   After four or five days of this disturbed thought pattern I began to wonder if I had initially been experiencing beginner’s luck and now was in for a long season of not being able to let go of distracting thoughts during prayer.  But, pretty quickly I threw out the criticism and let the situation be.  I did make the observation that these thoughts were all about a single issue – the first paper I was preparing to write for Systematic Theology.  The next day I was able to settle down again having found another time to work on the paper.

The compilation of phrases I noted during meditatio is beginning to tell its own story:

• bearing fruit
• endure everything with patience
• in Him all things hold together
• continue securely established
• Word of God fully known
• continue to live
• self-imposed piety
• seated at the right hand of God
• clothe yourselves with love

So, too, are my doodlings:

Reconnecting with image-making and inviting it in to my prayer life is a new-found joy.  For the past several years I have relied on words only to express my prayers.  Doodling while I’m noodling in prayer has resulted in a variety of graphic images that begin to capture symbolically the essence of my experience with lectio divina.

To read a step-by-step guide for how to practice lectio divina CLICK HERE.