"Look at the Fish!"

The Abbess hopes you were curious about some of the warp strands on the loom of our monastic day in Cor Unum Abbey.  They are becoming fixtures to us . . . for instance: “Spiritual Rx.”  Take a look.

One of the most power-packed devotional practices available to us, “Spiritual Rx” is a daily prescription that catapults the Word of God into effect.  No one has to “make” God’s Word powerful, living and active, but we do have to employ it.  “Spiritual Rx” is the exercise of reading a passage of Scripture aloud three times every day, as one would take a medicine.  This remedy comes with no harmful side effects!  Quite the contrary, there are several amazing secondary results of this practice … it will begin to refresh and strengthen our souls within days, but beyond that, the truth that we speak day after day begins to bear its fruit!

Of course we read our Bibles and pray as usual, but this prescription is very much a concentrate, a remedy.   Whenever, in our daily reading, we encounter truth that speaks to our hearts or our circumstances, we stop to pray and give thanks, but this holy practice applies truth in the power of both “resisting the devil” and “speaking to the mountains” that need to be plucked up, as well as commanding our own souls.  For instance, we might read Colossians 3:1 and stop to pray about it:

If then you were raised with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ is, sitting at the right hand of God. (NIV)

 Imagine the difference it would make to read just that verse, not once but three times every day, and for forty days or more! 

The famous Swiss paleontologist and geologist, Louis Agassiz, was famous for his teaching techniques.  He would place a fish before his students and ask them to study the fish and make note of all they could learn through their observation.  Twenty minutes later, his students felt they had seen the fish through new eyes!  Then he would leave the room and commend them to the further study of the fish.  An hour or two later, when he returned, the student would be thoroughly exhausted by the fish  ... but he might place it before them the next day with the same instructions!  By the end of that day, still studying and examining the fish, his students would report that it was as if they had never really seen a fish before!  Professor Agassiz was an institutional monastic!

That’s what we’re about with “Spiritual Rx.”  It will be the same for us, but much better.  The fish hasn’t power to save our souls (James 1:21,) but Scripture does!  “Receive with meekness the engrafted word that is able to save your souls!”  We know in our Cor Unum hearts that the Living Word will always have a living affect; now we prove it!  To coin the Professor’s phrase, “LOOK – at the truth!”  We begin with the passage above, Colossians 3:1-3 or 1-17, as you wish.  Only remember, in Cor Unum we always choose what we WILL DO over what we think we might like to do!

Leafy Dragon
Wendy Rathey, by permission