Florilegia

An unofficial florilegium is a good thing to keep in a journal, in a special section, or in the back. What are florilegia? They were collections or concordances of patristic writings on certain topics, for example--everything to date taught about Christ's consciousness. Read more here.

This is a practice helpful for prayer and spiritual reading. Sometimes books, like A Story of a Soul, have an index in the back for words like "baptism" or "suffering." Imagine how helpful if you kept your own record of words and topics significant to you. Something like:

• "Grief"--see that passage in Lewis, A Grief Observed, p.##; Therese of Lisieux, Last Conversations, p.##, "Jesus wept" (John 11:35).

Anything that teaches you--it would be nice to refer back to it when you needed to, in a few years or so. Furthermore, as you read Scripture, you can use footnotes or the following websites to follow a word's significance. Words like agape and hesed. It was striking to see clay and potter images come up more than once. The following websites helped me track them. Bit by bit, they would help you add to your written or mental florilegium.

• Vatican edition of The New American Bible with index and concordance. Click on the part you are reading, click to read it with the concordance, and then every word will be ready to search out in its other scriptural contexts.
• Bible Crosswalk with word search tool using Strong's Exhaustive Concordance for the KJV. This is helpful for finding the word in the original translation, and then tracking it. It also has an audio section for hearing the word pronounced.

Teaching Scripture this past year, I was able to begin developing my own mental concordance. But I wish I'd written it down somewhere handy. I always write down helpful quotations, but they are scattered at random throughout my notebooks. I wish I'd kept a florilegium.