Opening to God

Lectio Divina and Life as Prayer

David G. Benner

• Publisher: IVP Formatio
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780830846863
• eBook ISBN: 9780830846870
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Most Christians want to experience spiritual transformation. But many are frustrated by the limited progress of our spiritual self-improvement efforts. We find our praying burdened by a sense of obligation and failure.

But prayer is not merely something we do; prayer is what God does in us. Prayer is not just communication with God—it is communion with God. As we open ourselves to him, God does the spiritual work of transformation in us.

Spiritual director and psychologist David Benner invites us to discover openness to God as the essence of prayer, spirituality, and the Christian life. Prayer is far more than saying words to God; all of life can be prayer when offered to God in faith and with openness. Using the four movements of lectio divina, Benner explores prayer as attending, pondering, responding, and being. Along the way he opens us to a world of possibilities for communion with God: praying with our senses, with imagination, with music and creativity, in contemplation, in service, and much more.

Learn how prayer can be a way of living. Move beyond words to become not merely someone who prays, but someone whose entire life is prayer in union with God.

This expanded edition includes a new afterword and an experiential guide with questions for individual reflection or group discussion.

More Than You
Can Imagine

IF WE ARE HONEST, MOST OF US HAVE to admit that prayer is often more of an obligation than something arising spontaneously from desire. Part of the reason for this, I think, is that prayer is frequently presented as a spiritual discipline. Disciplines are things that we do not naturally do but feel we should do because they are supposed to be good for us. As you will have noticed, most children don’t need to be told to play. It is only adults for whom play as a discipline might be necessary and potentially helpful! However, as we will see, prayer is the natural language of the soul. So there is something seriously wrong when it feels like something we should do.

But our problem is deeper than merely thinking of prayer as something we should do. The real problem and the core of the misunderstanding lies in thinking of prayer as something that we do. Understood more correctly, prayer is what God does in us. Our part has much more to do with consent than initiative. That consent, as we shall see, is most simply saying yes to God’s invitation to loving encounter.

Prayer is so much more than we could ever imagine because God is so much beyond what we can ever contain in our understanding—even in our imagination. This is why the apostle Paul prayed to the God who, “working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine” (Ephesians 3:20). And it is why Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, encourages us to think of the incredible beauty of a field of wildflowers when we worry about what to wear (Matthew 6:25-34). His point is that since not even Solomon was clothed in regalia as splendid as those wildflowers, we should trust that, since this is how God clothes the grass in the field, God’s care for us will be even more unimaginably extravagant.

Prayer includes saying things to God—either silently or vocally, whether this be worded petitions or intercessions that we put together ourselves or formal prayers that have been written by others. But it is so much more than this. It can also include

• reading a passage of Scripture and listening for God’s personal word to you in it
• meditatively walking the stations of the cross
• lighting a candle in church or your home
• allowing music to draw your spirit toward God’s Spirit
• affirming your beliefs by reading or reciting the creeds
• reviewing your day and noticing where and how God was present to you in it
• meditating on Scripture and thinking about its meaning for your life
• fingering beads as a framework for meditation
• allowing your hunger during a fast to draw your attention toward God
• recalling your blessings and responding with gratitude
• subvocal repetition of a mantra (e.g., “Come, Lord Jesus” or “My God and my all”) that moves prayer from consciousness to the unconscious and from mind to heart1
• celebration of the Eucharist (Communion)
• going for a long, rambling walk while repeating the Jesus Prayer (“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me, a sinner”)
• confessing your sins and asking for forgiveness
• smelling incense during a liturgy and having your spirit drawn toward God
• a contemplative walk in the forest that moves you from self-preoccupation to God consciousness
• making the sign of the cross or bowing before an altar or crucifix
• sitting in silence—allowing your heart to be drawn back to God by the periodic gentle repetition of a love name for God
• reading liturgical or other written prayers
• meditatively speaking the Lord’s Prayer
• attending to your breathing—drawing in God with each inhalation and releasing God to the world with each exhalation
• allowing your mind and spirit to turn toward God as you hear church bells or see a lit candle or any of an infinite number of reminders that can call your attention back to God
• singing or pondering the words of a favorite hymn or song
• meditating on an icon or a work of biblical art
• allowing your heart to soar in unworded praise in response to a sunset, a storm, a flower or a tree

Some of these may seem strange to you, possibly so far outside your spiritual comfort zone that you may wonder if they are worthy of being called Christian prayer. But all have been richly rewarding for Christians across the major divisions of the church and across the centuries of Christian history. All therefore are Christian forms of prayer, and because of this all have much to teach the person who desires to be attentive and responsive to God.

However, it is very important that we acknowledge that none of these things is automatically prayer. Nor, even, is addressing words or thoughts to God automatically prayer. But all these things—actually, all of life—can be prayer when offered to God in faith and with openness. It is the underlying orientation of the heart that makes something prayer. Without a heart that is open to God in faith, it may look like prayer and it may sound like prayer, but it won’t be genuine Christian prayer. Genuine prayer always begins in the heart and is offered by an act of opening our self as we turn toward God in faith.

The ways God can communicate with us are infinitely more creative and diversified than we could ever imagine. Because of this, the ways we can communicate with God are correspondingly broader and richer than most of us ever experience. Growth in prayer is learning to open more and more of our selves to God.

Prayer as Conversation

But what is prayer? The answer I was given as a young child was that prayer is a conversation with God. To encourage me to practice such conversational prayer, my parents gave me my first book on prayer for my thirteenth birthday. It was called Prayer: Conversing with God, and in it I learned that prayer could be as simple as speaking, silently or audibly, to God—just as I did to other people.2 This was quite a powerful awareness. It became the foundation of a practice that has served me extremely well since then, the practice of frequently talking with God as I go through my day. Often this is a quick prayer of intercession, asking God to bless someone who comes to mind or whom I encounter. Or it may take the form of a few words of gratitude as I become aware of some blessing—like, for example, just now as I thanked God for my parents, who gave me that book on prayer, and for its author, who taught me so much. Sometimes it involves only a single word—Help! But, regardless of its length or content, what I have learned through conversational prayer is that my relationship with God is strengthened as I speak with God throughout the day because it reminds me that I am, in fact, in relationship and that God is with me no matter where I am or what I am doing.

I must say, however, that it took me a long time to begin to truly treat the interaction as conversation. For decades my prayers were nothing more than a monologue. I did all the talking, and I never once considered that God might be doing more than listening. The problem was not with my understanding of prayer, but that I didn’t take it seriously enough. If I had really believed that prayer was conversation, I would not have been nearly as rude as I was. I would have talked less and listened more.

The good news is that God is ever reaching out in self-revealing love and has no more ceased being Revelation than being Love. The prayer conversation always begins with God. It does not begin with us. Prayer is our response to a divine invitation to encounter. The prayer conversation has already begun because God has already reached out, seeking our attention and response. Until we learn to attend to the God who is already present and communicating, our prayers will never be more than the product of our minds and wills. But prayer has the potential to be so much more. It can be the response of our spirit to God’s Spirit as we open the totality of our being to the God who resides in our deep center and longs to meet us there.

The problem with understanding prayer as conversation is that prayer is so much more than communication. Reducing it to conversation makes it simply a mental activity—words and thoughts being a product of the left hemisphere of the brain. Prayer includes the mind, but is not limited to it. God invites engagement with more of our brain and more of our being. The glorious truth is that I can be praying to God without speaking to God, or without even consciously thinking of God. If this wasn’t true, how could we ever hope to realize the ideal of continuous prayer that is encouraged in Scriptures (1 Thessalonians 5:17; Ephesians 6:18)? Obviously we cannot be thinking about God all the time. Nor can we be talking to God all the time. But prayer can be as foundational to our daily life as breathing. It can become a part of living, not just a religious practice or a spiritual discipline.

Prayer as Communion

A better starting point for an adequate understanding of the breadth of prayer is to view it as communion with God. Communion includes conversation but is much broader. Because it involves union, not just closeness and connection, it also entails much more intimacy than mere conversation. We are, as Paul reminds us, in Christ, just as Christ is in us. That language reflects the intermingling that is part of true communion. It does not get much more intimate than this—an intimacy that is based on the reality of a mystical union with Christ, in the present moment, not simply something to be hoped for in the future. Our experiential knowing of this reality may be limited. But the union is real, even now. And the communion that we can experience in prayer is also real—so real that, more so than anything else that I know of, this prayer communion has the power to transform us from the inside out.

The good news is that we do not need to be talking to God or even thinking about God to be in prayer. We can simply be with God. That is the nature of communion. It is not dependent on constant communication. Think, for example, of being with someone you love and with whom you experience deep communion. Words are undoubtedly part of your being together, but notice how easily they can also fall away as you slip into a comfortable experience of simply being together in unworded presence. The same can be true of prayer.

Love makes this possible, and it is love that makes prayerful communion so fulfilling and transformational. Communion with God is the answer to our heart’s deepest longings, because God is love. Prayer is a relationship. It is dialogue that is based on a deep personal encounter. And since God is love, God can only be truly encountered in love.

Prayer as Being in Love

We might say, therefore, that prayer is being in love.3 We can understand this in two ways, both of which are true, and each points to the other for its fullest understanding. In the first sense of this phrase we could say that prayer is being in love with God. As noted by John of the Cross, since God is love, God can only be known in and through love. Communion with God leads naturally, therefore, to a deepening of our knowing of God’s love for us and, in return, our love for God. But speaking of prayer as being in love also reminds us that in prayer we come to know our being-in-Love. Prayer is not simply what we do. It is a way of being. More specifically, it is resting in the reality of our being-in-God. This is our fundamental identity. It is the hidden but deepest truth of our existence. Our being has no meaning apart from its relationship to God’s being. The only possibility of being who I most deeply am rests in the eternal I AM. Because of the I AM, I can be. Because the eternal I AM is love, I can experience communion with God in love. This is what makes it possible for me to become truly and fully human, for me to become truly and fully who I am in Christ. And doing so has everything to do with prayer—not simply something I do but as a way of being in love, being in God.

This is why Teresa of Ávila says that the important thing in prayer is not to think much but to love much.4 The head is not a bad place to start our prayer journey. But if prayer stays there too long and does not begin to sink to the heart, it will inevitably become arid and frustrating. However, when we allow prayer to begin to seep from our minds to our depths, it gives God access to those depths. Then, and only then, can prayer spontaneously emerge as God’s action in us. And when it does, prayer becomes the overflow of the living waters that spring up from our depths. It becomes us listening in on a loving conversation of God with God as that conversation passes through us.

Our relationship with God may not begin in love, but it never deepens significantly until we enter into a personal encounter with L...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 More Than You Can Imagine
• 2 Preparing for the Divine Encounter
• 3 Lectio Divina and Four Classic Prayer Paths
• 4 Prayer as Attending
• 5 Prayer as Pondering
• 6 Prayer as Responding
• 7 Prayer as Being
• 8 Life as Prayer, Prayer as Life
• 9 Transformational Prayer
• Afterword: Trusting Openness
• Study Guide for Reflection and Discussion
• Notes
• Other Titles by David G. Benner
• Praise for Opening to God
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright