Reflection: spiritual reading in a group

If you are fortunate enough to have or motivated to start a group, you can also do spiritual reading and reflection in a group. You can use any common texts: the Psalms, devotional materials, poetry, books.

from Weavings Magazine Guide to Spiritual Reading:
SPIRITUAL READING (lectio divina) is the ancient practice of savoring a text with patient playfulness. This way of reading is alert with expectation that a transforming word of life will make its way from the written narrative of the author to the lived narrative of the reader. Spiritual reading holds out the promise of fresh meaning, insight, or truth emerging between writer and reader that transcends time and space. Yet this experience assists the reader to enter more reflectively and faithfully into his or her own time and space. In this respect, spiritual reading embodies the pattern of the Incarnation, where Word becomes flesh for the life of the world. Peter of Celle, the great twelfth century Benedictine abbot, describes spiritual reading this way: “Reading is the soul’s food, light, lamp, refuge, consolation, and the spice of every spiritual savor. It feeds the hungry, it illuminates the person sitting in darkness; to refugees from shipwreck or war it comes with bread. It comforts the contrite heart; it contains the passions of the body with the hope of reward. When temptations attack, it counters them with the teaching and example of the saints.... In the bread box of sacred reading are breads baked in an oven, breads roasted on a grill, or cooked in a frying pan, breads made with the first fruits and sprinkled with oil, and barley cakes. So, when this table is approached by people from any walk of life, age, sex, status or ability, they will all be filled with the refreshment that suits them." Remember the invitation heard by Augustine in the garden on the threshold of his conversion: “Take and read."