Lenten feature: customize your daily reflection

The discipline of regular spiritual reading is a great way to enrich your Lenten observance. Between different methods of lectio divina, Lenten devotionals, and spiritual classics, there are a lot of options available. Logos can help you deepen your reading, and even keep you on track with a reading plan.

Let’s say you just want to follow along with the daily Mass readings this Lent. If you open up the Lectionary from the homepage sidebar, you get a simple layout with the Lectionary and the Bible.

You can just stick with this to focus on the text itself, or you can use a few tools to dig into your library for the spiritual insights of others.

One important but often overlooked tool is “Cited By”, located in the “Lookup” section in the lower right of the Tools menu. Cited By is the easiest way to search open resources, collections, and series for a reference. When you open it, you may find that, by default, all of your collections are listed, but if you want to focus your search, open the panel menu and, under “Show Collections,” uncheck everything you don’t want.

Here, I’ve limited the Cited By search to the Church Fathers collection and a collection I created containing the volumes in the Catholic Spirituality Collection. I’ve also set both the Bible and the Cited By tool to Link Set A in the panel menu of each. This means that the Cited By tool will follow along with the Bible, so that when I click the reference for the next reading, the Cited By tool will automatically be populated with citations from the Church Fathers and classics of Catholic spirituality.

 

Finally, a good commentary or set of notes can be very helpful for reading the Scriptures. I find that the Navarre Bible (Old Testament and New Testament) can be a particularly good choice for devotional reading, since it tends to not just comment on technical or theological issues in the text, but to draw out insights for one’s spiritual life, often quoting the Fathers and saints of the Church.

If you open a volume of the Navarre Bible and set it also to Link Set A, it will follow along (automatically jumping to the correct volume) with the Bible and Cited By. I’ve also dragged the tab down to the lower half of the middle panel so it displays below the Bible.

 

If you want to be able to go back this layout, open the Layouts menu in the upper right, click “Save as named layout,” and give it a name, such as “Lenten Mass Readings.” Then you can easily go back to it via the Layouts menu if you’ve been working on something else.

Of course, the challenge of this particular kind of task in Logos (as in so many other aspects of life today) is maintaining focus in the face of seemingly infinite information, but a simple layout like this that you can quickly open up can help—especially if you establish a routine and order of reading, starting with the Scriptures, then moving to the commentary, etc., that allows you to slow down without flitting from one thing to the next.

Today, at Mass, the Church prays Psalm 51, the Miserere. As the Navarre Bible points out, in the liturgy, Psalm 51 is “the penitential psalm par excellence,” so it’s not a surprise that we hear it several times at Mass in Lent and on Fridays at Lauds. Acknowledging our sins, let us make its prayer our own—offering to God our hearts, contrite and humbled.

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Written by
Louis St. Hilaire
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Written by Louis St. Hilaire