SEEKING GOD IN HIS WORD:

Lectio Divina for Today

At the age of nineteen a young Australian describes being taken prisoner by the Japanese when Singapore fell in 1942.  His officer told them, each man should find room for a book.   He stuffed into his pack a Lin Yutang’s  The Importance of Living and began a reading habit  that was to keep him sane for the next three and a half years. “Previously , if I had been really interested in a book, I would race from page to page, eager to know what came next.  Now I decided  I had to become a miser with words and stretch every sentence like a poor man  spending his last dollar.”  He goes on to describe how he spent most of a day on the cover, three whole sessions on the preface, two whole evenings on the contents page, before eventually reaching page one.  “I had started with the practical object of making my book last. But by the end of the second week, still only on page ten, I began to realise how much I was getting out of this super-slow reading.  Sometimes just a particular phrase caught my attention, sometimes a sentence.  I would read it slowly, analyse it, read it again–perhaps changing down into an even slower gear–then sit for 20 minutes, thinking about it before moving on.  I was like a pianist studying a piece of music, phrase by phrase, rehearsing it, trying to discover and recreate exactly what the composer was trying to convey .  It is difficult to do justice to the intensity of the relationship. . .I read myself in so thoroughly that it became not a mass of words but a living experience.”  The pleasure and perspective of  super-slow reading, the savouring that he describes was something discovered by monks centuries ago.

The Rule of St Benedict encouraged monks and nuns in their use of books.  A monastery needed books as part of its essential furniture.  It is not necessary to ask  whether the ancient monks used all the books, though some monks almost certainly did, any more than we need to explain liturgy, prayer, architecture in exclusively utilitarian terms.  A monastery was not properly equipped  without a library.  A Carthusian once observed that “a monastery without books is like a state without resources, a camp without troops, a kitchen without crockery, a table without food, a garden without flowers, a field without grass, a tree without leaves.”  Until the 13^th c. most of the books made in Europe were made in monasteries, and it is a striking phenomenon that more manuscripts survive than any other artefact from the Middle Ages. But the association of monks and old manuscripts was about something more  than craftsmanship, the unhurried book production of the cloister, the making of vellum, ruling, calligraphy, mixing paints and applying gold.  What is less well known perhaps is that monks and nuns had a special way of reading the books they produced, a way of reading which was the foundation for all the activity of prayer.

This special way of reading is called Lectio divina, or sacred reading.  It is called divina because  its object was sacred Scripture. But for the ancient Church  Scripture was never separated from interpretation given to it by tradition.  So Lectio embraced not only the Bible but also commentaries written on it by the Fathers of the Church.  This was the content of Lectio.  But Lectio also denotes above all a method of reading, a slow, contemplative  reading which allows the Word of God to become a means of union with God.  This ancient practice has been kept alive  in the Christian monastic tradition and is one of our most precious treasures.  As Père Bouyer has written, “There is certainly no monastic practice  on which the St Benedict insisted so much as reading.  It might be said that such reading is the monastic practice.  It should be for the monk what the exercises are for the Jesuit, and methodical prayer for the Sulpicians, contemplative prayer for the Carmelites.”

St Benedict expected his monks to spend up to three hours a day in this sacred reading. The amount of time he allots to reading embodies an aspiration that he had in common with all his monastic predecessors: that monks should be incessant in their attention to God’s Word. He knew too that monks would find it difficult. During the middle ages, Lectio was typically done in common so that “seeing one another, they would encourage one another.” But Lectio was more than a weapon against idleness. The monks are to “vacare Lectionibus” – leave themselves free for reading. The purpose of reading is to “vacare Deo”, to be free for God. Lectio is an opportunity, a space, for encountering God. A 13th c. English customary urges monks to “love this holy leisure during which they undertake the business of their souls.” Lectio is strictly non-utilitarian time, time spent with the Word of God, time spent wholly with God and for God. It’s something practiced for its own sake. Lectio can never simply be a training ground for the mind; it must involve a transformation of the heart.

The early monks saw a profound connection between the word and the desert; the desert, for them, was the place to hear the word, to encounter the word.  Many of the early Fathers describe their conversion whether to Christianity or to monastic life in terms of a turning away from secular life to embrace Scriptures.  This concern with the word of God will demand leisure, freedom from worldly affairs; the flight from the world becomes a way of realizing Lectio.  In the Vita Antonii of St Athanasius, the monastic vocation is presented as a response to the Scriptures.  The monk thus took his place in the economy of salvation by responding to God’s word as did the great men of the Old Testament.  In the Vita, Antony is shown to have modelled his entire life on Scriptures.  To a brother who asks what he must do to please God, Antony replies: “Wherever you go always have God before your eyes; whatever you do, have before you the testimony of Scripture.”  Antony suggests that having Scripture constantly in mind is equivalent to always being in the presence of God.  The Bible filled the day-to-day existence of the desert monk: the word of God was considered to lead to the final objective of the monastic life which according to Cassian is purity of heart.

Abba John said, ‘We went to Syria one day to see Abba Poemen and we wanted to ask him about purity of heart.’ . . The old man said, ‘The nature of water is soft, that of stone is hard; but if a bottle is hung above the stone, allowing the water to fall drop by drop, it wears away the stone.  So it is with the word of God; it is soft and our heart is hard, but the man who hears the word of God often, opens his heart to the fear of God.‘ (Poemen 183)

The characteristic spirituality of the desert was a Biblical one; their contemporaries called them “bearers of the word”; Athanasius gave the early desert monks the title philologoi, lovers of the word of God.

This preoccupation with the Word occupied such an important place in the hierarchy of monastic values that Lectio could be considered to be the integrating activity which gives unity and point to all other monastic observances and becomes the rationale for all other ascetic practices.  Manual labour was intended to prolong the word; fasting was a means of self-purification for understanding Scripture; enclosure and silence provided the conditions to enable them to concentrate while reading; the chant, too, preserved a form of Lectio that has already become prayer.  The texts of the chant were prayed and savoured before being enshrined in melody.  The Office is Lectio-in-action.   “The unifying element of the monastic community,” wrote Dom Guéranger, “lies in the Word.  The monastery is a school, and the spirit which animates all within its walls proceeds from the Word of God in all its forms.”  However one might distinguish between reading, meditation, liturgy, prayer, the one interpenetrates with the others so powerfully that in actual practice it is more a matter of varying degrees of intensity of contact with the word than a matter of four or five distinct though related spiritual realities.  Lectio, in its widest sense, the uninterrupted rumination on the word of God and listening to God, becomes coextensive with the entire life of the monk.  For St Jerome, Lectio is part of a great dialogue: “If you pray you are speaking to the Bridegroom; if you read He is speaking to you.”   For the early monks, like Israel in the desert, it was the word that made the desert a place of special intimacy with God, a time of betrothal.  The desert prepares for and provokes an encounter with the word.  “So I will allure her, I will lead her into the desert and speak to her heart” (Hosea 2:16).

The art of Lectio begins with cultivating the ability to listen with the ear of the heart, as St Benedict says in the prologue. The cry of the prophets was: “Hear O Israel…  The Word of the Lord came to Isaiah”.  Israel’s God is a God who speaks. So much so that the silence of God was considered a dreadful punishment: “Yes, the days are coming, says the Lord God, when I will send a famine upon the lands not a famine of bread, or a thirst for water but for hearing the word of God” (Amos 8:1 1). “ In the Bible, the fundamental experience, the one that characterizes more than any other the relationship  of God and man is this, that God speaks and man listens. As the first condition of salvation God asks that we listen, that we hearken to Him and to His Word, be attentive to it. God in Lectio is speaking to us, grants us an audience, as it were.  He deigns to say something to us.  So often You hear about the incomprehensibility of God, the unknowability of God, but there is an even greater reason for speaking of knowing God.  With the Bible we are in possession of what God has said to mankind since the beginning of the world.  The Word of God was incarnated in Scripture before it was made flesh.  For this reason “the Church has always venerated the Scriptures as she venerates the Lord’s Body.. She never ceased to nourish the faithful on the bread of life, taken from the two tables, the table of God’s Word and the table of Christ’s Body, the Eucharist” (New Catechism, 103).

All this is at the foundation of Lectio Divina, that a slow, meditative reading, a “chewing over” the text in search of a personal contact with God. Lectio is a reading of God who for us is Christ.  It is a reading of Christ, in Christ, with Christ and for Christ. The early monks believed that in reading Scripture they were meeting Christ having a real encounter with Christ, analogous to sacramental communion with Him.  “We eat His flesh and blood in the divine Eucharist, but also in the reading of Scripture” said St Jerome.

The Catechism reminds us that Christianity, is not “a religion of the book”, it is a religion of the Word of God, not a written and mute word, but a word incarnate and living.  In order that Scripture does not remain a dead letter, it is necessary that Christ, Eternal Word of the living Father, open our minds as He did for His disciples after His resurrection.  Indeed the reason why we do Lectio is because of the resurrection: the Word of God is alive, risen and active. As Book and Reader, Christ gives us, gives the Church, the gift of reading.

It’s important to grasp that the Bible is not a riddle to be solved, but a communication from God.  God takes the first step in creation which is a word of God. The created universe reveals God to man.  Later God’s Word expresses itself as law as He begins to shape His people; it continues in the word of the prophets.  Finally, the place of God’s Word is Christ Himself Who speaks as the Word of God in Whom God’s plan is at once revealed and fulfilled.  All this is to say that God wished to become “readable” to us.  Christ Himself is God’s Book. It is in Him that we read what God has desired to do from all eternity. The eternal Word has come in Christ to give us His “reading” of God. As the prologue of St John’s Gospel tell us: “No one has ever seen God; the only Son who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known.”  The word translated her as make known means “to expound, to explain, to reveal.”  It is the verb from which the noun exegesis is derived. So what St John is saying here is that the Son became man to reveal his Father, to be his exegete.   Christ is both Book and Reader according to the Fathers. Blessed are they who hear the word of God and keep it” (Lk ll-.28) for God has manifested Himself to the world by means of His Word.

St Gregory the Great in the preface of his Moralia speaks of Scripture as a letter written by the Creator to his creature, dictated by the Holy Spirit to the prophets, evangelists and apostles.  The letters were written to us personally for the writer had us (and still has us) in mind. And in a letter he writes, “The Emperor of heaven has written you letters concerning your life, but still you neglect to read them ardently.  Study them, I beg you, and mediate daily on the words of your creator “(Ep 51). The ancients saw the Bible as a letter from God to man, revealing something of God’s own secrets.  When a monk embarked on Lectio Divina, he believed he was engaging in a conversation with God.  In this way, reading and prayer were but two stages of one and the same process.