Letters to the Editor

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Lectio divina can enhance your life of prayer

I want to talk about prayer because I know of so few who do, or who profess to receive any fruits from prayer.

I do not know many people who look forward to their time of prayer. When people pray, they want experience, but they don’t necessarily want to confront themselves.

“Self” is often the enemy (en-n-me) of growth, and prayer requires a relationship. The less your relationship with God, the more shallow your prayer life.

For many people, prayer has become a laundry list of inordinate desires, excuses for failure, and a conversation from the height of our pride and will. Yet, I truly believe that many people just don’t know how to pray.

I think the time-tested prayer of the monastic ages will serve us well in our age of modernity and stress. Monks pray as uncomplicated Christians with the good sense to base their prayer on the sacred Scriptures. What they have, which we are deficient in, is an ideal environment.

We don’t always need a quiet place. We do need the resolve to be still! It takes a little discipline.

Lectio divina is the dwelling on a scriptural text in the divine presence for the sake of far-reaching change in Christ. Lectio divina is prayer over Scripture.

Everything that many people seek to find in their eastern form of esoteric meditation can be—and is—found in lectio divina. In fact, lectio divina is both East and West prayer.

- Kirth N. Roach, Order of Carmelite Discalced Secular, Indianapolis

Newspaper’s priorities are out of line, reader says

I couldn’t help but notice the multiple times the name of the president of the U.S. was mentioned in your July 17 edition.

President Barack Obama was mentioned at least 49 times in that edition where our Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, was only mentioned 24 times. Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, was mentioned a mere 14 times.

It seems that your priorities are a bit out of line in giving such a preponderance of space to the most pro-abortion president in our history.

Your article on the U.S. surgeon general nominee, Dr. Regina Benjamin, focused on her Catholic roots and active participation in the Church, neglecting to mention that she shares the views of the president on “reproductive health issues” (abortion) and that in December 1996 Benjamin apparently spoke in favor of a vote by the American Medical Association’s governing body to “urge medical schools to expand their curriculum” to teach “more about abortion.”

Regardless of any “promises” this president may have made to Pope Benedict, his allegiance to Planned Parenthood’s policy of “any abortion, any time, for any reason” reveals his true allegiance as he continues to stock his administration with pro-abortion Catholics wherever possible.

- Michael A. Moroz, Terre Haute