Guigo II

And this worldly reality is inc- including suffering and grief, are part of that transfiguration.

And in chapter two, which you title Acrophobia, I love Guigo's Ladder, I thought.

[laughs] And the graphic that you have in there, it just creates such a great image.

It, it illustrates the process you're talking of, begins on the first rung of the ladder, and then you take the second, and the third, and the fourth.

So.

Yeah.

And it, with Guigo's Ladder, I, I loved how you laid this out in terms of the, this ladder of monks.

You say, "Closely ties the four rungs of the ladder," the, the reading, the meditation, the prayer, the contemplation, "to the traditional four levels of Biblical meaning."

And I grew up in the country, Jonathan, around cows.

This, this analogy, when I first heard that, uh, Guigo and others use this analogy, I was like, "Yes." Um, and so really one of the reasons that we turn to this in times of deep, deep, deep trouble is that in spite of the news headlines, in spite of them, and heartbreaking as they are, and heartbreaking in the lives of those we love, um, underneath everything is this goodness.

That's been my experience.

My friend Jim Finley, uh, says often that, "God is that presence that protects us from nothing, even as God unexplainably sustains us in all things." And in my experiences of deep despair, there was a goodness in that.

We have this long tradition in Christianity of eating scripture.

It's even compared by Guigo II and many others to a cow chewing its cud and other ruminants.

To ruminate means to chew.

And I think we've sort of gotten away from the fact that Scripture is to be eaten and digested.