Daily Devotionals as Catalysts for Inspiration

As Julia Cameron’s famous work The Artist’s Way makes clear, creativity is a form of spiritual practise that we need to nurture on a daily basis. For several years now, my own creative practise has begun each morning with a meditation followed by an inspirational daily reading, which I call a secular devotional.

Lately I’ve been thinking about this because I recently bought next year’s secular devotional book, The Daily Laws, but in past years I’ve used others: The Daily Stoic, A Year to Clear, A Guide for the Advanced Soul, and A Calendar for Wisdom. I have enjoyed each of them immensely, and each brought a unique tone and mood to each day and to the year in which I read them. 

In many ways, I draw on what is known in the monastic tradition as lectio divina, Latin for ‘divine reading’. This is a traditional Christian practise of reading and meditation that dates back to the early centuries of the Christian church and it was St Benedict, the founder of the Benedictine order, who formalised and popularised this practise in a monastic setting. Lectio divina was then further developed and refined by other Christian mystics and theologians throughout the Middle Ages. 

There are break down the four main components of lectio divina: 

1. lectio or reading. This step is about reading a passage of text slowly and carefully, not being in a hurry or trying to get too intellectual, but consciously engaging with every word in every moment of the text.
2. meditatio or meditation. After the initial reading, we meditate on the words or phrases that stood out to us, reflecting on the meaning of those words and allowing them to resonate with us. 
3. oratio or prayer. While traditional lectio divina draws upon prayer to divinity, in a secular lectio practise we can use the third stage to connect with our own deepest inner self, allowing this part of our self to resonate with the reading.
4. contemplatio or contemplation. Finally in this moment of quiet receptivity we allow any thoughts that might arise from within us to draw our attention to the most meaningful aspects of the reading and the purpose that the reading can have in our own live. 

Secular lectio isn’t meant to be rigid or formulaic. Rather, it’s meant to be a flexible and personalised approach to engaging in short readings that can serve as inspiration for the day. And although the practise is traditionally associated with monastic life, it has also gained popularity outside of monastic communities and is now embraced within secular contexts as well. Ultimately, lectio is about the transformative power of reading and the inspiration that it can bring.

To bring secular lectio into our own creative practise, the text we choose must resonate with our own creative journey and be able to foster a deeper connection with one’s thoughts, ideas, and artistic processes. And perhaps most importantly, it invites us to create stillness and reflection in our creative practise. This will look different for everyone and while I have offered some recommendations above of secular devotional that have positively impacted me and my creative practise, there are also many others that can be discovered and explore.

We might then also think about extending our secular lectio with a practise of journal writing, perhaps using Cameron’s idea of morning pages as a way of doing this.

Through this daily secular devotional practise, we create a heightened awareness and presence, cultivating mindfulness and ultimately enhancing our ability to be fully present in our creative work. As I have found over the years, this leads to greater inspiration and imagination and ultimately strengthens our creative intuition by developing a deeper understanding of our own artistic voice and direction.

In the coming year, we all have the opportunity to better understand the relationship between creativity and spirituality and to utilise the opportunity that a daily devotional practise provides to create consistent inspiration for our creative work. In this way, we can explore the transformative power of the rhythms of creative live and continue to fill the well of inspiration.