Make Me an Instrument of Your Peace
The monastic tradition oflectio divina--holy reading--is a discipline of extremely slow, phrase-by-phrase, meditative reading of scripture. Its desired effect is to plumb the Bible's depths in such a way that scripture's individual words and phrases come to permeate the reader's whole life. InMake Me an Instrument of Your Peace: Living in the Spirit of St. Francis, Kent Nerburn reads the Prayer of Saint Francis in a manner much likelectio, and the rewards of this strategy are rich. The prayer ("Where there is hatred let me sow love ...") is a familiar one, but Nerburn's reflections on its phrases--meandering through stories of his summer jobs as a teenager, his lonely expatriate days in Germany, his long walks on the beaches of Mexico--make the old prayer new again. Nerburn haslivedthis prayer, and the quiet example of this book will help many readers to do so as well. He unwittingly describes the strength and power of his own project while reflecting on a phrase from the prayer's final stanza, "For it is in giving that we receive." Nerburn writes, "Our spirits are nourished by giving, just as our bodies are nourished by food. This is not mystical; it is not high-minded. It is a simple truth about the way that the energy of life flows back and forth between people when a moment of giving takes place."--Michael Joseph Gross