Lectio, Lectio, and More Lectio

I had never heard of lectio divina before I came to Southeastern. I learned about it and participated in it during the first semester I was here. In every semester since then I have had a class that has used lectio as an assignment or lecture. All of those were religion classes, so when we used a literary text today for lectio I was a bit confused. Don't get me wrong, it was an interesting experience. But, something was a little off for me and I couldn't fully grasp how each step of lectio related to reading the text. I understand that the exercise was meant to push us to go deeper into the text. What I don't understand is how meditatio works. What if there is nothing in that text that you feel led to pray about? I think it is a little odd praying about non-Christian text that has very little to do with God. I am not being close-minded about using lectio this way; I am just trying to understand the point of it all. The only prayer I could think would be "God please let me get closer to you rather than pursuing this part of the world" or "thank you God for keeping me away from that" or "let me learn from this story". I know that God is in everything but in this exercise He was harder to find for me.

After all of my lectio issues in class, I won't lie, I was a bit... I don't want to say disappointed, because that isn't the word, about the reading assignment today. The thing I can think of to describe my reaction was that I was less than enthusiastic. The author of the passage, "Reading for Transformation through the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins", used lectio to better understand the poetry of Hopkins who, to my understanding, was a Christian writer. The author says, "When we pray with poetry, whether the biblical poetry of the psalms or non-biblical poetry open to Christian appropriation, we open ourselves up to the possibility of spiritual experience". I'm not saying that this is wrong or anything of that nature. I am just trying to understand how to get a significant spiritual experience out of literary texts like this. I'm open to learning about it. God knows that I have a lot to learn which, I am pretty sure, is why He sends things like this in my direction.