Spiritual Hiccups - When They Cry

God gives to the animals their food,
   and to the young ravens when they cry.

Psalm 147:9

Both my church upbringing and my seminary training shaped me to look at Scripture in a certain way.  And while this way highly esteems the Bible, even treating it as God's self revelation, it often acts as though God's revelation were a fixed thing embedded in the text.  Handled this way, once you have figured out what a Scripture passage says and means, you "know" it.  I and other pastors sometimes lament when certain readings show up in the Sunday lectionary for preaching.  "What more is there to say on this?" we ask.

In more recent years, I have been introduced to different ways of approaching Scripture, things such as lectio divina.  This spiritual or holy reading of a Bible text is less interested in understanding what the text "means" and more focused on praying Scripture.  Part of this involves reading in a contemplative pose, paying attention to words or phrases in a text that stick out or claim your attention.  These words or phrases may or may not have much to do with "the meaning of the text," but they may be the way God speaks to you.

I won't claim to be terribly good at this practice.  (My long proficiency with the sort of reading practiced at seminary often gets in the way.)  But I still find that I often experience God much more directly in lectio divina than in more formal ways of reading Scripture.  

Reading Psalm 147 today, I found myself drawn to the last portion of the verse shown above, "when they cry."  For all I know the author of this psalm included this line simply to make the poetry work.  It may have had no particular significance beyond that, but still I found myself drawn to the line, captured by it in some way... when they cry.

I sometimes cry to God, but usually only when I've gotten pretty frustrated, only when things are going the way I think they should.  When I have done my best and not gotten the expected results, I will sometimes cry to God, but that seems to me totally different from what I envision those young ravens doing.

When young ravens cry, and for that matter when human infants cry, there is a profound dependence on those who hear the cry.  But as adults, we learn to take care of ourselves.  God is like the hammer for breaking the glass on some old fire alarms, to be used only in emergencies.  

Babies and young ravens seem to be born knowing that crying works.  Maybe that part of the reason Jesus says we must become like little children to enter the kingdom of heaven.

Click to learn more about the Daily Lectionary.