READING the BIBLE for all YOU’RE WORTH
The practice of lectio divina
"Oh, how I love your law! It is my meditation all day long."
Psalm 119:97
“In the diverse, pluralistic, and multicultural society in which we live, with its many different
religious traditions, reading the Bible matters more than ever.”
Enzo Bianchi.
Psalm 119:97
“In the diverse, pluralistic, and multicultural society in which we live, with its many different
religious traditions, reading the Bible matters more than ever.”
Enzo Bianchi.
Reading the Bible has always mattered for followers of Jesus and never more urgently than in our 21st century culture. Sadly, people, including followers of Jesus, don’t read very much of anything anymore, including the Bible. When they do read it’s often something quick, easy or entertaining. The Bible isn’t an easy read, it can’t be read quickly and often isn’t entertaining.
It takes discipline, lots of it, to read this Book Christians believe to be God’s Word and claim to love, in ways that we hear God speak; hear, that is, in the biblical understanding of taking to heart and obediently living it. And it takes faith to believe that God does indeed still speak today through what God spoke so long ago and courage to obey it. We need help to read God’s Word and help to live it rightly. Good help is found in the ancient practice of Scripture reading known as lectio divina (pronounced lex-ee-o d-veena), which is probably one reason why it has had a remarkable revival in the 21st century among many Christians. As a regular discipline, it can help you read the Bible for all you’re worth and for all the Bible’s worth.
Lectio divina is a Latin term that literally means sacred or divine (divina) reading (lectio). As a spiritual discipline, it is a way of reading that emphasizes the sacredness of both what we read (the Bible) and why we read it (for spiritual formation, that is, for a loving encounter with the Living God that forms us into the image of Christ). The Italian spiritual writer, Enzo Bianchi describes this discipline as “an act of reading the Bible that opens into listening to God’s word, encountering the Lord who speaks through the biblical page, and entering into relationship with him.”[1] Put another way, we read Scripture, not in order to know more stuff, but in order to know Jesus Christ in the intimacy of a personal loving relationship that will transform our life. The primary intention of lectio divina is to facilitate a living and real encounter with God in Christ rather than fill our heads with nothing more than facts about God. The goal, in other words, is formation rather than information.
This goal is significant since it fully conforms to the ultimate purpose of Scripture itself. For this reason, before unpacking the movements of lectio divina, I’ll explain the primary purpose of Scripture, focusing on the question: Why did God want the people of God to have this Written Word of revelation? Frequently, in response to this question,[2] I’m given answers that suggest the only purpose of Scripture is to be a blueprint for good living. The Bible is read for no other reason than to learn a good code of conduct for Christians. People who think this way read the Bible with a focus on themselves as they look for practical and relevant applications for today. Since most of the Bible is difficult if not impossible to apply to personal lives, especially in the 21st century, this focus doesn’t encourage reading very much of the Bible. We call the Bible ‘God’s Word,’ but few read it because there is no answer to the question: What must I do? Scripture has to be more than a blueprint of good conduct if we’re supposed to read it all. So, what is the primary purpose of Scripture then?
In essence, Scripture, all sixty-six books, is the self-disclosure of the Triune God. Its primary purpose, therefore, is to reveal God—make God known as God chooses to be known—so that sincere readers experience a personal loving relationship with God that transforms them, bit by bit, into the image Christ. In his book, God Has Spoken, J. I. Packer asks the question about why God has spoken and writes, “The truly staggering answer which the Bible gives us to this question is that God’s purpose in revelation is to make friends with us.”[3] God desires to be known because God desires relationship, indeed friendship with humans created in God’s own image. Friendships can only happen when there is revelation, making oneself known to another. God chose to do this. We are to read Scripture in such a way that our focus is on knowing God in Christ better, experiencing real and loving encounters with the Living God. It is in these encounters that we will experience the transforming work of the Spirit of God within, conforming us, bit by bit into the image of Christ.
All of Scripture should be read with a focus on knowing God since all of Scripture is about God. The many little stories of the Bible are stories about God rather than the human characters who appear to dominate them. While the many and varied characters in each story are significant as they are witnesses to loving relationship with God, they are not the main point of the story. We don’t read the story to learn more about the human characters. We read the stories about Moses, Miriam, Ruth, David and the others, to learn more about God and how to live in relationship with God while at the same time live in this messy world so loved by God. Biblical stories present examples of men and women who dealt with God and their humanity, and lived to tell the tale, rather than examples for us to follow. As Eugene Peterson notes in his book, The Jesus Way, “The story of David is not a story of what God wants us to be but a story of God working with the raw material of our lives as he finds us.”[4] Each story directs our attention to God and shows how God characteristically relates and deals with his people, rather than the other way around. So too, Gospel stories are about Jesus, not Peter or John or Nicodemus or the Samaritan woman at the well. Peterson makes the same point, insisting that the stories of Nicodemus (John 3) and the Samaritan woman (John 4) are stories about Jesus, not the human characters.[5] We’re invited to fully enter each Bible story, identify with people and events, improvise on their stories in order to be drawn deeper into relationship with the Living God. Each and every story points us, albeit not always obviously, to God. Lectio divina is a practice that deliberately and consciously is focused on seeing this God to whom we’re pointed and experiencing real encounters with God.
In practice, lectio divina consists of four movements that form a logical sequence. Rigid adherence to the order isn’t necessary. However, the logic of the order makes sense, and most practitioners follow it in order. I have added two additional movements to the original four. The first at the beginning, space to give the pray-er time to prepare to listen to God’s Word. The second at the end. Since our reading of Scripture should be transformative, the final movement is a reminder to live out what we hear. Before you begin lectio divina choose a passage to read. It’s best to read a little not a lot, a short paragraph, or a few verses. Open to your passage and take the first step into a life transforming practice.
1st: Prepare to listen
Give yourself as long it takes to be still, silent, and aware of God’s presence closer to you than you are to yourself. Let this moment be one of intimacy with God and vulnerability as you make yourself fully available to be addressed by the Holy Spirit. You may choose to offer a prayer for enlightenment such as the prayer of Samuel: Speak Lord, your servant is listening (1 Samuel 3:9).
2nd: Lectio (reading)
Read your chosen biblical passage in a prayerful and super-slow manner. The goal is to hear and receive God’s Word and experience God’s transforming grace in our lives rather than to understand or use the Word. The reading is prayerful because it begins with invoking the Spirit to come and enlighten our hearts and minds to hear God speak in these words of Scripture. It is prayerful because it is also a reading that is focused on deep listening, what Dysinger calls “reverential listening.”[6] The heart of prayer is listening not speech. Our desire should be to hear God’s Word “with the ear of the heart,” as St Benedict put it.[7] Such listening leads to humble obedience, which, in Hebrew understanding as Ellen Davis states, “denotes acute listening”.[8] The reading is slow because this is the best, if not the only way to listen deeply. Slow reading allows the reader to savor every word, rather like sucking on hard candy until it gradually dissolves in the mouth and is digested. Slow reading helps us stay with a word and listen intently to the Spirit who speaks in and through God’s Word. In the fourth century, Saint Ephrem the Syrian affirmed that each word in Scripture is important and wondered, “Who is capable of grasping the richness of even one of your words, O Lord? ... The perspectives of your word are as many as the orientations of those who read it.”[9] Therefore, we read these words slowly and prayerfully to begin the journey of seeing the many perspectives of God’s Word.
Slow and prayerful reading means that we read a little deeply rather than a lot broadly. Enzo Bianchi maintains that reading spiritually (as in slow and prayerful) requires reading “between the lines” and reading “in depth,” so that “we enter into the text’s innermost chamber [that is] into the divine life hidden in the written words.”[10] Therefore it is important to temporarily set aside previous understandings of a text, suspend familiar analytical tools of biblical interpretation and let go desires for understanding, application and relevance. Practice knowing what you see rather than seeing what you already know. Read the text as if for the very first time; listening reverentially before falling back on familiar ways of reading and understanding.
3rd: Meditatio (meditation)
Lectio naturally leads into the movement of meditatio, that is, meditation. During the slow reading one’s attention may be drawn to single ideas, words, or phrases which then become the content of meditation. An essential act of meditation is repetition. A word or phrase is repeated over and over until it enters the heart, the place where real and lasting transformation takes place since the heart in biblical understanding, as Davis maintains, “is the organ of cognition and faith as well as emotion”.[11] Meditation can be likened to a cow chewing the cud. The cow grazes over the grass and after a while lies down and regurgitates little bits at a time, chewing each bit thoroughly before swallowing it again to be fully digested. In the same way during the slow reading of a biblical text, we take it in, that is, we ‘eat’ it, and then, in meditation we spend time ‘regurgitating’ and ‘chewing on’ little bits, those words or phrases that connected during lectio, carefully attending to them and discerning their meaning and their message for us today.
On other occasions, such as when reading a story, meditation can be practiced by imaginatively and creatively entering into the story, experiencing all that happens, identifying with the characters, connecting with an action and then visualizing and imagining our own reactions—what we feel and think and how we’d respond when the encounter with Jesus comes. At other times, meditatio may focus on what was omitted by the writer, imagining what might have happened. For instance, when a woman caught in adultery was accused before Jesus and the crowd (John 8), Jesus, “bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground” (v6). The writer fails to tell us what Jesus wrote and even our best guesses are not very helpful. But, imagine standing in the woman’s place as the accused, or as one of the accusers or a curious bystander and wonder what Jesus might write to you today. This is far more meaningful and redemptive than trying to figure out what he wrote then. We won’t discover a correct answer; we will discover God’s Word for us today. And that’s the point.
I began by suggesting that, as we begin practicing lectio it is helpful to temporarily suspend the familiar ways of Bible study, not because these are wrong, but simply to help us see newness in the text. There comes a moment, after spending time in deep listening and meditation, that questions arise and we may find it useful to fall back on our Bible study skills and some good tools for biblical interpretation. Studying the meaning of a text can enhance our meditation; making use of study aids may be beneficial. Meditatio, as Enzo Bianchi maintains, “is how we get to a text’s deeper meaning,” and he suggests using resources such as Bible dictionaries and commentaries.[12] But, only resort to this after your prayerful reflection.
4th: Oratio (prayer)
Oratio, has to do with making an oral response (the basic meaning of oratio) to God based on what we heard from God’s Word. Usually, this refers to what we often call prayer. Meditation on a passage will create within us a desire to respond to the word God has brought to our attention by offering our own words back to God. If lectio and meditatio have to do with silent listening to God speak through the Word, oratio has to do with offering our words back to God. We do this by taking what we heard, saw, experienced, or were challenged by and turning it into a prayer or some other appropriate response to God. Responses don’t need to always be words. They can take the form of things such as bodily movement, music, art, and more. In other words, in oratio we speak to God instead of listening to God speak to us as in the first two movements.
For example, one morning as I practiced lectio divina with a passage from Exodus 2 and 3, I observed the repetition of the word ‘see’ and its synonyms. My meditation on this frequent usage and its possible meanings eventually got me thinking about my desire to see more clearly in my own life. This personal reflection moved me into oratio, where my prayer became a request for my eyes and ears to be opened in order to be more observant to life around me, as well as to God’s Word in my present situation.
On other occasions a single line catches my attention in the first movement of lectio, sometimes because it acts as a rebuke of my present behavior. On those days, I skip meditatio, and jump directly to oratio. My oral response takes the form of confession. Once in a while, my response has been to get up and dance, silently and wordlessly, letting my bodily movement act as my prayer of worship and praise. Forms of response are only limited by our imaginations.
5th: Contemplatio (contemplation)
Our oral responses end, often quite naturally, and we find ourselves in the final movement of contemplatio (Latin for contemplation). This is our space to rest in loving and wordless (think silent) stillness in the presence of the God revealed and encountered in the biblical text. The word contemplation basically means a long loving look, the kind two lovers silently share. It is, therefore, as Dysinger explains, a “wordless, quiet rest in the presence of the one who loves us.”[13] This means that in this movement we temporarily suspend desire for activity in our response forms to God and practice being fully present to the loving presence of God in Christ. Many saints, past and present, remind us that being (meaning who we are in our naked essence) is more important than doing (meaning all the activities we so often think define us). The stillness and silence needs to be experienced both exteriorly (no unnecessary bodily movements or controllably sounds) and interiorly (controlling or merely ignoring the dust bowl of distractions that enter the mind). In other words, lectio divina concludes, as in the concluding words of Charles Wesley’s hymn, by being “lost in wonder love and praise.”[14]
6th: Operatio (living the Word)
Since we are to “be doers of the word, and not merely hearers” (James 1:22) lifestyle counts. God’s Word should affect the way we live, conforming us, bit by bit into the image of Jesus Christ. We encounter God, not merely for ourselves, but also for the world. Therefore, prayerfully reflecting on how the word read should affect how we live is essential. Take a few minutes for one further step after contemplation, to prayerfully consider operation (how to live) as you think about your day. There may not be (and often isn’t) a specific command to obey. There may simply be a reminder to live today more aware of Jesus alive and at large in the world and your life.
Conclusion
The four middle movements originated in this organized format in the 12th century with the Carthusian monk, Guigo II and are described in his book, Ladder of Monks. He summarized them with the use of a metaphor about eating, which forms a fitting conclusion to this process. “Reading, as it were, puts food whole into the mouth, meditation chews it and breaks it up, prayer extracts its flavor, contemplation is the sweetness itself which gladdens and refreshes. Reading works on the outside, meditation on the pith: prayer asks for what we long for, contemplation gives us delight in the sweetness which we have found.”[15]
[1] Bianchi, E., tr. by C. Landau. Lectio Divina: From God’s Word to our Lives. Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press. 2015, p. 95.
[2] I asked this question every year in my introduction to the Bible course. Each year the majority of responses focused on practical application and nothing more.
[3] Packer, J.I. God Has Spoken. London: Hodder and Stoughton. 1965, p. 32.
[4] Peterson, E. H. The Jesus Way. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. 2007, p. 88.
[5] Peterson, E. H. Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. 2005, p. 15-16.
[6] Dysinger, L. “Accepting the Embrace of God: The Ancient Art of Lectio Divina.” www.valyermo.com/ld-art.html. 2005, p. 2.
[7] See ‘The prologue’ in St. Benedict’s Rule. The Rule of St. Benedict can readily be downloaded from any Benedictine monastery web site.
[8] Davis, E. F. Getting Involved With God: Rediscovering the Old Testament. Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications. 2001, p. 101.
[9] Casey, M. Sacred Reading. Ligouri, MO: Ligouri Publications. 1995, p. 141.
[10] Bianchi. 2015, p. 19.
[11] Davis. 2001, p. 99.
[12] Bianchi. 2015, p. 104.
[13] Dysinger. 2005, p. 3.
[14] From his hymn, “Love divine, all loves excelling.”
[15] Guigo II, tr. by E. Colledge. The Ladder of Monks. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications. 1979, p. 69.
Jackie L. Smallbones 2015, updated in 2022©
Not to be copied without permission from Jackie Smallbones
It takes discipline, lots of it, to read this Book Christians believe to be God’s Word and claim to love, in ways that we hear God speak; hear, that is, in the biblical understanding of taking to heart and obediently living it. And it takes faith to believe that God does indeed still speak today through what God spoke so long ago and courage to obey it. We need help to read God’s Word and help to live it rightly. Good help is found in the ancient practice of Scripture reading known as lectio divina (pronounced lex-ee-o d-veena), which is probably one reason why it has had a remarkable revival in the 21st century among many Christians. As a regular discipline, it can help you read the Bible for all you’re worth and for all the Bible’s worth.
Lectio divina is a Latin term that literally means sacred or divine (divina) reading (lectio). As a spiritual discipline, it is a way of reading that emphasizes the sacredness of both what we read (the Bible) and why we read it (for spiritual formation, that is, for a loving encounter with the Living God that forms us into the image of Christ). The Italian spiritual writer, Enzo Bianchi describes this discipline as “an act of reading the Bible that opens into listening to God’s word, encountering the Lord who speaks through the biblical page, and entering into relationship with him.”[1] Put another way, we read Scripture, not in order to know more stuff, but in order to know Jesus Christ in the intimacy of a personal loving relationship that will transform our life. The primary intention of lectio divina is to facilitate a living and real encounter with God in Christ rather than fill our heads with nothing more than facts about God. The goal, in other words, is formation rather than information.
This goal is significant since it fully conforms to the ultimate purpose of Scripture itself. For this reason, before unpacking the movements of lectio divina, I’ll explain the primary purpose of Scripture, focusing on the question: Why did God want the people of God to have this Written Word of revelation? Frequently, in response to this question,[2] I’m given answers that suggest the only purpose of Scripture is to be a blueprint for good living. The Bible is read for no other reason than to learn a good code of conduct for Christians. People who think this way read the Bible with a focus on themselves as they look for practical and relevant applications for today. Since most of the Bible is difficult if not impossible to apply to personal lives, especially in the 21st century, this focus doesn’t encourage reading very much of the Bible. We call the Bible ‘God’s Word,’ but few read it because there is no answer to the question: What must I do? Scripture has to be more than a blueprint of good conduct if we’re supposed to read it all. So, what is the primary purpose of Scripture then?
In essence, Scripture, all sixty-six books, is the self-disclosure of the Triune God. Its primary purpose, therefore, is to reveal God—make God known as God chooses to be known—so that sincere readers experience a personal loving relationship with God that transforms them, bit by bit, into the image Christ. In his book, God Has Spoken, J. I. Packer asks the question about why God has spoken and writes, “The truly staggering answer which the Bible gives us to this question is that God’s purpose in revelation is to make friends with us.”[3] God desires to be known because God desires relationship, indeed friendship with humans created in God’s own image. Friendships can only happen when there is revelation, making oneself known to another. God chose to do this. We are to read Scripture in such a way that our focus is on knowing God in Christ better, experiencing real and loving encounters with the Living God. It is in these encounters that we will experience the transforming work of the Spirit of God within, conforming us, bit by bit into the image of Christ.
All of Scripture should be read with a focus on knowing God since all of Scripture is about God. The many little stories of the Bible are stories about God rather than the human characters who appear to dominate them. While the many and varied characters in each story are significant as they are witnesses to loving relationship with God, they are not the main point of the story. We don’t read the story to learn more about the human characters. We read the stories about Moses, Miriam, Ruth, David and the others, to learn more about God and how to live in relationship with God while at the same time live in this messy world so loved by God. Biblical stories present examples of men and women who dealt with God and their humanity, and lived to tell the tale, rather than examples for us to follow. As Eugene Peterson notes in his book, The Jesus Way, “The story of David is not a story of what God wants us to be but a story of God working with the raw material of our lives as he finds us.”[4] Each story directs our attention to God and shows how God characteristically relates and deals with his people, rather than the other way around. So too, Gospel stories are about Jesus, not Peter or John or Nicodemus or the Samaritan woman at the well. Peterson makes the same point, insisting that the stories of Nicodemus (John 3) and the Samaritan woman (John 4) are stories about Jesus, not the human characters.[5] We’re invited to fully enter each Bible story, identify with people and events, improvise on their stories in order to be drawn deeper into relationship with the Living God. Each and every story points us, albeit not always obviously, to God. Lectio divina is a practice that deliberately and consciously is focused on seeing this God to whom we’re pointed and experiencing real encounters with God.
In practice, lectio divina consists of four movements that form a logical sequence. Rigid adherence to the order isn’t necessary. However, the logic of the order makes sense, and most practitioners follow it in order. I have added two additional movements to the original four. The first at the beginning, space to give the pray-er time to prepare to listen to God’s Word. The second at the end. Since our reading of Scripture should be transformative, the final movement is a reminder to live out what we hear. Before you begin lectio divina choose a passage to read. It’s best to read a little not a lot, a short paragraph, or a few verses. Open to your passage and take the first step into a life transforming practice.
1st: Prepare to listen
Give yourself as long it takes to be still, silent, and aware of God’s presence closer to you than you are to yourself. Let this moment be one of intimacy with God and vulnerability as you make yourself fully available to be addressed by the Holy Spirit. You may choose to offer a prayer for enlightenment such as the prayer of Samuel: Speak Lord, your servant is listening (1 Samuel 3:9).
2nd: Lectio (reading)
Read your chosen biblical passage in a prayerful and super-slow manner. The goal is to hear and receive God’s Word and experience God’s transforming grace in our lives rather than to understand or use the Word. The reading is prayerful because it begins with invoking the Spirit to come and enlighten our hearts and minds to hear God speak in these words of Scripture. It is prayerful because it is also a reading that is focused on deep listening, what Dysinger calls “reverential listening.”[6] The heart of prayer is listening not speech. Our desire should be to hear God’s Word “with the ear of the heart,” as St Benedict put it.[7] Such listening leads to humble obedience, which, in Hebrew understanding as Ellen Davis states, “denotes acute listening”.[8] The reading is slow because this is the best, if not the only way to listen deeply. Slow reading allows the reader to savor every word, rather like sucking on hard candy until it gradually dissolves in the mouth and is digested. Slow reading helps us stay with a word and listen intently to the Spirit who speaks in and through God’s Word. In the fourth century, Saint Ephrem the Syrian affirmed that each word in Scripture is important and wondered, “Who is capable of grasping the richness of even one of your words, O Lord? ... The perspectives of your word are as many as the orientations of those who read it.”[9] Therefore, we read these words slowly and prayerfully to begin the journey of seeing the many perspectives of God’s Word.
Slow and prayerful reading means that we read a little deeply rather than a lot broadly. Enzo Bianchi maintains that reading spiritually (as in slow and prayerful) requires reading “between the lines” and reading “in depth,” so that “we enter into the text’s innermost chamber [that is] into the divine life hidden in the written words.”[10] Therefore it is important to temporarily set aside previous understandings of a text, suspend familiar analytical tools of biblical interpretation and let go desires for understanding, application and relevance. Practice knowing what you see rather than seeing what you already know. Read the text as if for the very first time; listening reverentially before falling back on familiar ways of reading and understanding.
3rd: Meditatio (meditation)
Lectio naturally leads into the movement of meditatio, that is, meditation. During the slow reading one’s attention may be drawn to single ideas, words, or phrases which then become the content of meditation. An essential act of meditation is repetition. A word or phrase is repeated over and over until it enters the heart, the place where real and lasting transformation takes place since the heart in biblical understanding, as Davis maintains, “is the organ of cognition and faith as well as emotion”.[11] Meditation can be likened to a cow chewing the cud. The cow grazes over the grass and after a while lies down and regurgitates little bits at a time, chewing each bit thoroughly before swallowing it again to be fully digested. In the same way during the slow reading of a biblical text, we take it in, that is, we ‘eat’ it, and then, in meditation we spend time ‘regurgitating’ and ‘chewing on’ little bits, those words or phrases that connected during lectio, carefully attending to them and discerning their meaning and their message for us today.
On other occasions, such as when reading a story, meditation can be practiced by imaginatively and creatively entering into the story, experiencing all that happens, identifying with the characters, connecting with an action and then visualizing and imagining our own reactions—what we feel and think and how we’d respond when the encounter with Jesus comes. At other times, meditatio may focus on what was omitted by the writer, imagining what might have happened. For instance, when a woman caught in adultery was accused before Jesus and the crowd (John 8), Jesus, “bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground” (v6). The writer fails to tell us what Jesus wrote and even our best guesses are not very helpful. But, imagine standing in the woman’s place as the accused, or as one of the accusers or a curious bystander and wonder what Jesus might write to you today. This is far more meaningful and redemptive than trying to figure out what he wrote then. We won’t discover a correct answer; we will discover God’s Word for us today. And that’s the point.
I began by suggesting that, as we begin practicing lectio it is helpful to temporarily suspend the familiar ways of Bible study, not because these are wrong, but simply to help us see newness in the text. There comes a moment, after spending time in deep listening and meditation, that questions arise and we may find it useful to fall back on our Bible study skills and some good tools for biblical interpretation. Studying the meaning of a text can enhance our meditation; making use of study aids may be beneficial. Meditatio, as Enzo Bianchi maintains, “is how we get to a text’s deeper meaning,” and he suggests using resources such as Bible dictionaries and commentaries.[12] But, only resort to this after your prayerful reflection.
4th: Oratio (prayer)
Oratio, has to do with making an oral response (the basic meaning of oratio) to God based on what we heard from God’s Word. Usually, this refers to what we often call prayer. Meditation on a passage will create within us a desire to respond to the word God has brought to our attention by offering our own words back to God. If lectio and meditatio have to do with silent listening to God speak through the Word, oratio has to do with offering our words back to God. We do this by taking what we heard, saw, experienced, or were challenged by and turning it into a prayer or some other appropriate response to God. Responses don’t need to always be words. They can take the form of things such as bodily movement, music, art, and more. In other words, in oratio we speak to God instead of listening to God speak to us as in the first two movements.
For example, one morning as I practiced lectio divina with a passage from Exodus 2 and 3, I observed the repetition of the word ‘see’ and its synonyms. My meditation on this frequent usage and its possible meanings eventually got me thinking about my desire to see more clearly in my own life. This personal reflection moved me into oratio, where my prayer became a request for my eyes and ears to be opened in order to be more observant to life around me, as well as to God’s Word in my present situation.
On other occasions a single line catches my attention in the first movement of lectio, sometimes because it acts as a rebuke of my present behavior. On those days, I skip meditatio, and jump directly to oratio. My oral response takes the form of confession. Once in a while, my response has been to get up and dance, silently and wordlessly, letting my bodily movement act as my prayer of worship and praise. Forms of response are only limited by our imaginations.
5th: Contemplatio (contemplation)
Our oral responses end, often quite naturally, and we find ourselves in the final movement of contemplatio (Latin for contemplation). This is our space to rest in loving and wordless (think silent) stillness in the presence of the God revealed and encountered in the biblical text. The word contemplation basically means a long loving look, the kind two lovers silently share. It is, therefore, as Dysinger explains, a “wordless, quiet rest in the presence of the one who loves us.”[13] This means that in this movement we temporarily suspend desire for activity in our response forms to God and practice being fully present to the loving presence of God in Christ. Many saints, past and present, remind us that being (meaning who we are in our naked essence) is more important than doing (meaning all the activities we so often think define us). The stillness and silence needs to be experienced both exteriorly (no unnecessary bodily movements or controllably sounds) and interiorly (controlling or merely ignoring the dust bowl of distractions that enter the mind). In other words, lectio divina concludes, as in the concluding words of Charles Wesley’s hymn, by being “lost in wonder love and praise.”[14]
6th: Operatio (living the Word)
Since we are to “be doers of the word, and not merely hearers” (James 1:22) lifestyle counts. God’s Word should affect the way we live, conforming us, bit by bit into the image of Jesus Christ. We encounter God, not merely for ourselves, but also for the world. Therefore, prayerfully reflecting on how the word read should affect how we live is essential. Take a few minutes for one further step after contemplation, to prayerfully consider operation (how to live) as you think about your day. There may not be (and often isn’t) a specific command to obey. There may simply be a reminder to live today more aware of Jesus alive and at large in the world and your life.
Conclusion
The four middle movements originated in this organized format in the 12th century with the Carthusian monk, Guigo II and are described in his book, Ladder of Monks. He summarized them with the use of a metaphor about eating, which forms a fitting conclusion to this process. “Reading, as it were, puts food whole into the mouth, meditation chews it and breaks it up, prayer extracts its flavor, contemplation is the sweetness itself which gladdens and refreshes. Reading works on the outside, meditation on the pith: prayer asks for what we long for, contemplation gives us delight in the sweetness which we have found.”[15]
[1] Bianchi, E., tr. by C. Landau. Lectio Divina: From God’s Word to our Lives. Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press. 2015, p. 95.
[2] I asked this question every year in my introduction to the Bible course. Each year the majority of responses focused on practical application and nothing more.
[3] Packer, J.I. God Has Spoken. London: Hodder and Stoughton. 1965, p. 32.
[4] Peterson, E. H. The Jesus Way. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. 2007, p. 88.
[5] Peterson, E. H. Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. 2005, p. 15-16.
[6] Dysinger, L. “Accepting the Embrace of God: The Ancient Art of Lectio Divina.” www.valyermo.com/ld-art.html. 2005, p. 2.
[7] See ‘The prologue’ in St. Benedict’s Rule. The Rule of St. Benedict can readily be downloaded from any Benedictine monastery web site.
[8] Davis, E. F. Getting Involved With God: Rediscovering the Old Testament. Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications. 2001, p. 101.
[9] Casey, M. Sacred Reading. Ligouri, MO: Ligouri Publications. 1995, p. 141.
[10] Bianchi. 2015, p. 19.
[11] Davis. 2001, p. 99.
[12] Bianchi. 2015, p. 104.
[13] Dysinger. 2005, p. 3.
[14] From his hymn, “Love divine, all loves excelling.”
[15] Guigo II, tr. by E. Colledge. The Ladder of Monks. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications. 1979, p. 69.
Jackie L. Smallbones 2015, updated in 2022©
Not to be copied without permission from Jackie Smallbones
