Each Submission is the Lord’s Gift to the Group

One of the real delights of Logopraxis group life is seeing how each person’s experience of the Word becomes woven together to form an integrated collective experience. This is a regular occurrence in Logopraxis that bears witness to how the intentional practice of the Word can form affections and deep connections between practitioners and create spiritual community. In Logopraxis group life, we experience how the Word leads, guides, and directs all things toward a fuller experience of the Lord in and through others, as the “living bread come down from heaven.” (John 6:51).

Step 6 involves creating a concise summary that we can offer to our Life Group of what happened as we worked with our task. This summary is known in Logopraxis as a ‘submission’, and typically, a submission includes the following:

• The number of the paragraph and the chosen piece of Text we worked with.
• The spiritual principle we drew from our chosen piece of Text.
• The task that was formulated from the principle, to give us a work focus.
• A concise summary of what our work revealed for us over the period.

For the Benefit of Others

The Logopraxis submission describes how we experienced the Word working in us, and the material that we gather individually in our practice, when shared with our group, is to support the spiritual lives of others in the group as well as the group as a whole. Each person’s submission is the Lord’s gift to the group, and in Logopraxis, we recognise the Lord’s Providence in what each person settles on from the Text to work with. So, in a sense the submission isn’t really ours but has been given to us as if it were ours. In this way, the Word is acknowledged as producing what’s needed for the life of the individual, for the life of others in the group, and for the life of the group taken as a whole.

Because Logopraxis is focused on the practise of truths, we try to avoid commenting on things in our submission that don’t fall within the range of our direct experience of the Text. It’s also good practise to keep any personal details, related to specific events or people to a minimum. We seek to offer only the essential aspects of our work, and a general description of the external details that framed our experience to provide context. This also provides a great opportunity to work, and notice any form of judgement, merit, self-condemnation, or ownership that can easily be running in the background.

As we share these experiences of the Word working in our lives with the members of our group, it creates a rich learning environment through which the Lord as the Word can teach us.  What has been worked into each member, through their willingness to engage with the Text, is what sustains the Logopraxis community; it is the bread which, when broken through being shared with others, opens our hearts so that we might see the Lord in our midst (See Luke 24:30-31).

Questions for Reflection

The key to preparing a summary or submission for our group is to focus on how our task influenced our mental state:

1. What did we actually experience?
2. What did we learn about our self?
3. About the Lord?
4. About the inner activity of our mind?
5. Were there any insights related to the contents of the reading that illustrate what was experienced?
6. How can I frame this, so it supports others in my group?