Food, Marination & Lectio Divina

Marination, also known as marinating, is the process of soaking foods in a seasoned, often acidic, liquid before cooking. This is a technique of adding flavor by immersion in liquid. It is commonly used to flavor foods and to tenderize tougher cuts of meat or harder vegetables. The process may last seconds or days.

During this process, the acid causes the tissue of meat to break down, allowing more moisture to be absorbed and giving a juicier end product.

There is a form of prayer that we can engage in that functions a lot like the process of marination... it's a form of prayer that adds flavor to our souls and tenderizes the hard areas of our hearts...that in the process of causing our inner-tissues to break down - becoming more absorbent and more saturated with the Presence & Life of God.

It's called Lectio Divina. In short, Lectio Divina is a slow, contemplative praying of the Scriptures which enables the Bible, the Word of God, to become a means of union with God.

For centuries, people of the text have understood that Scripture isn't merely meant to be read or even understood, as important as those components are - but Scripture is to be-lived.

Lectio Divina is a way of approaching the text that “...intends the fusion of the entire biblical story and my story. A way of reading that refuses to be reduced to just reading but intends the living of the text, listening and responding to the voices of that ‘great cloud of witnesses’ telling their stories…” (Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book)

Lectio Divina comprises four elements:

1. Lectio: to read the text,
2. Meditatio: to meditate the text,
3. Oratio: to pray the text,
4. Contemplatio: to live the text.

A European monk, Guigo the 2nd in the 12th Century elaborates on the form of prayer by saying,

“Reading, as it were, puts the solid food into our mouths, meditation chews it and breaks it down, prayer obtains the flavor of it and contemplation is the very sweetness which makes us glad and refreshes us.”