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 for the purpose of gaining the information needed to get by or for distracting themselves or for communicating in brief messages via the many available social media sites. When they do read they read what’s 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 he spoke so long ago and then courage to obey it, lots of it. We need help to read God’s Word and help to live it rightly. Lectio divina (pronounced lex-ee-o d-veena) is an ancient practice of reading Scripture that can help us, 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 personal 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” (2015: 95). 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. Its primary intention is to facilitate a living and real encounter with God in Christ rather than fill our heads with more facts about God and nothing more. 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 begin by describing the primary purpose of Scripture, focusing on the question: Why did God desire for us (by which I mean the people of God) to have this Written Word of revelation? Frequently, in response to this question, I’m given answers that suggest the only purpose of Scripture is to be a blueprint for good living and therefore only useful for gleaning a code of good conduct. The Bible is then read for no other reason than to learn good conduct code. People who think this way read the Bible with a focus on themselves as they look for practical and relevant applications and very little else. This belief about the Bible doesn’t encourage reading much of it since it limits the purpose of Scripture to personal application. Most of the Bible is difficult if not impossible to apply to personal lives, especially in the 21st century. Just think of the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew—seventeen verses of Jesus’ genealogy; a boring list of mostly unknown people with hard to pronounce names. We call it ‘God’s Word,’ but few read it because there is no answer to the question about what to do. Scripture has to be more than a blueprint of good conduct if we’re supposed to read it all.
At its very heart, 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. In response to his own questions, he claims, “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” (1965: 32). God desires to be known because he desires relationship, indeed friendship with the humans God created in his 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 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 is to be read with this focus on knowing God since all of it is about God. The many little stories of Scripture 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, they are not the main point of the story. We don’t read the story to learn more about the human character and nothing more. We read the stories about Moses, Miriam, Ruth, David and the others, to learn more about God and how to live in relationship with him 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 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” (2007: 88). 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 describes the stories of Nicodemus (John 3) and the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4) and insists that both stories are about Jesus, not Nicodemus or the woman (2005: 15-16). We’re invited to enter each Bible story fully, identifying with people and events, improvising in order to be drawn deeper into relationship with the Living God. Each and every story always points us, albeit not always obviously, to God. Lectio divina is a practice that has a deliberate and conscious intention to be focused on seeing this God to whom we’re pointed and experiencing real encounters with the living Christ Jesus.
In practice, lectio divina consists of four movements that logically follow each other. Rigid adherence to the order isn’t required. However, following the order, even loosely, is encouraged.
1. Lectio
The discipline begins with lectio, that is, reading. Choose a biblical passage and read it in a prayerful and super slow manner. The goal is to hear and receive God’s Word so that we experience God’s transforming grace in our lives rather than to understand. 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 Fr. Dysinger calls “reverential listening” (2005: 2). The heart of prayer is listening more than speaking. Our desire should be to hear God’s Word “with the ear of the heart,” as St Benedict put it. Such listening leads to humble obedience, which, in Hebrew understanding as Ellen Davis states, “denotes acute listening” (2001: 101). 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” (In Casey, 1995: 141). 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. Deep reading has to do with listening and seeing behind the words on the page, reading between the lines, as it were. For this reason, lectio is best practiced with reading one brief passage, repeatedly, rather than many chapters at one time. Lectio helps us practice the discipline of knowing what we see, resisting the temptation to see only what we already know. The outcome often means that we come to know a lot about a little instead of a little about a lot.
As Enzo Bianchi affirms, reading spiritually (as in slow and prayerful) requires reading “between the lines” and reading “in depth,” and he adds, so that “we enter into the text’s innermost chamber [that is] into the divine life hidden in the written words” (2015: 19). 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 application and relevance. Read the text as if for the very first time; listening reverentially before falling back on familiar ways of reading and understanding.
2. Meditatio
Lectio naturally leads into the second 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” (2001: 99). 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, imagining standing in the woman’s place as the accused, or standing as one of the accusers or even as a curious bystander and wondering what Jesus might write to you today is far more meaningful and redemptive. 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 begin to rise within and we may find it useful to fall back on our Bible study skills and some of those 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,” as he also suggests using resources such as Bible dictionaries and commentaries (2015: 104).
3. Oratio
The third movement, 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 his 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 aren’t always words. They can take the form of things such as bodily movement, music, art, and so much 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’ in its various forms (saw, looked, and so on). My meditation on its frequent usage and possible meanings eventually, as I kept meditating, got me thinking about my ability to see more clearly in my 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 into 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.
4. Contemplatio
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” (2005: 3). This means that in this final movement we temporarily suspend desire for activity in our response forms to God and practice being fully present in 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.”
These four 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” (Guigo II, 1979: 69).
Jackie L. Smallbones, ThD. 2015©
Not to be copied without permission from Jackie (please contact me if you want to use this).
Works Cited
Bianchi, E., tr. by C. Landau. (2015). Lectio Divina: From God’s Word to our Lives. Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press.
Dysinger, L. (2005). “Accepting the Embrace of God: The Ancient Art of Lectio Divina.” www.valyermo.com/ld-art.html. This article is in public domain and was last updated 12/9/05.
Casey, M. (1995). Sacred Reading. Ligouri, MO: Ligouri Publications.
Davis, E. F. (2001). Getting Involved With God: Rediscovering the Old Testament. Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications.
Guigo II, tr. by E. Colledge. (1979). The Ladder of Monks. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications.
Packer, J.I. (1965). God Has Spoken. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
Peterson, E. H. (2005). Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.
Peterson, E. H. (2007). The Jesus Way. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.
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 he spoke so long ago and then courage to obey it, lots of it. We need help to read God’s Word and help to live it rightly. Lectio divina (pronounced lex-ee-o d-veena) is an ancient practice of reading Scripture that can help us, 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 personal 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” (2015: 95). 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. Its primary intention is to facilitate a living and real encounter with God in Christ rather than fill our heads with more facts about God and nothing more. 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 begin by describing the primary purpose of Scripture, focusing on the question: Why did God desire for us (by which I mean the people of God) to have this Written Word of revelation? Frequently, in response to this question, I’m given answers that suggest the only purpose of Scripture is to be a blueprint for good living and therefore only useful for gleaning a code of good conduct. The Bible is then read for no other reason than to learn good conduct code. People who think this way read the Bible with a focus on themselves as they look for practical and relevant applications and very little else. This belief about the Bible doesn’t encourage reading much of it since it limits the purpose of Scripture to personal application. Most of the Bible is difficult if not impossible to apply to personal lives, especially in the 21st century. Just think of the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew—seventeen verses of Jesus’ genealogy; a boring list of mostly unknown people with hard to pronounce names. We call it ‘God’s Word,’ but few read it because there is no answer to the question about what to do. Scripture has to be more than a blueprint of good conduct if we’re supposed to read it all.
At its very heart, 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. In response to his own questions, he claims, “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” (1965: 32). God desires to be known because he desires relationship, indeed friendship with the humans God created in his 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 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 is to be read with this focus on knowing God since all of it is about God. The many little stories of Scripture 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, they are not the main point of the story. We don’t read the story to learn more about the human character and nothing more. We read the stories about Moses, Miriam, Ruth, David and the others, to learn more about God and how to live in relationship with him 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 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” (2007: 88). 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 describes the stories of Nicodemus (John 3) and the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4) and insists that both stories are about Jesus, not Nicodemus or the woman (2005: 15-16). We’re invited to enter each Bible story fully, identifying with people and events, improvising in order to be drawn deeper into relationship with the Living God. Each and every story always points us, albeit not always obviously, to God. Lectio divina is a practice that has a deliberate and conscious intention to be focused on seeing this God to whom we’re pointed and experiencing real encounters with the living Christ Jesus.
In practice, lectio divina consists of four movements that logically follow each other. Rigid adherence to the order isn’t required. However, following the order, even loosely, is encouraged.
1. Lectio
The discipline begins with lectio, that is, reading. Choose a biblical passage and read it in a prayerful and super slow manner. The goal is to hear and receive God’s Word so that we experience God’s transforming grace in our lives rather than to understand. 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 Fr. Dysinger calls “reverential listening” (2005: 2). The heart of prayer is listening more than speaking. Our desire should be to hear God’s Word “with the ear of the heart,” as St Benedict put it. Such listening leads to humble obedience, which, in Hebrew understanding as Ellen Davis states, “denotes acute listening” (2001: 101). 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” (In Casey, 1995: 141). 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. Deep reading has to do with listening and seeing behind the words on the page, reading between the lines, as it were. For this reason, lectio is best practiced with reading one brief passage, repeatedly, rather than many chapters at one time. Lectio helps us practice the discipline of knowing what we see, resisting the temptation to see only what we already know. The outcome often means that we come to know a lot about a little instead of a little about a lot.
As Enzo Bianchi affirms, reading spiritually (as in slow and prayerful) requires reading “between the lines” and reading “in depth,” and he adds, so that “we enter into the text’s innermost chamber [that is] into the divine life hidden in the written words” (2015: 19). 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 application and relevance. Read the text as if for the very first time; listening reverentially before falling back on familiar ways of reading and understanding.
2. Meditatio
Lectio naturally leads into the second 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” (2001: 99). 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, imagining standing in the woman’s place as the accused, or standing as one of the accusers or even as a curious bystander and wondering what Jesus might write to you today is far more meaningful and redemptive. 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 begin to rise within and we may find it useful to fall back on our Bible study skills and some of those 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,” as he also suggests using resources such as Bible dictionaries and commentaries (2015: 104).
3. Oratio
The third movement, 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 his 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 aren’t always words. They can take the form of things such as bodily movement, music, art, and so much 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’ in its various forms (saw, looked, and so on). My meditation on its frequent usage and possible meanings eventually, as I kept meditating, got me thinking about my ability to see more clearly in my 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 into 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.
4. Contemplatio
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” (2005: 3). This means that in this final movement we temporarily suspend desire for activity in our response forms to God and practice being fully present in 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.”
These four 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” (Guigo II, 1979: 69).
Jackie L. Smallbones, ThD. 2015©
Not to be copied without permission from Jackie (please contact me if you want to use this).
Works Cited
Bianchi, E., tr. by C. Landau. (2015). Lectio Divina: From God’s Word to our Lives. Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press.
Dysinger, L. (2005). “Accepting the Embrace of God: The Ancient Art of Lectio Divina.” www.valyermo.com/ld-art.html. This article is in public domain and was last updated 12/9/05.
Casey, M. (1995). Sacred Reading. Ligouri, MO: Ligouri Publications.
Davis, E. F. (2001). Getting Involved With God: Rediscovering the Old Testament. Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications.
Guigo II, tr. by E. Colledge. (1979). The Ladder of Monks. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications.
Packer, J.I. (1965). God Has Spoken. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
Peterson, E. H. (2005). Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.
Peterson, E. H. (2007). The Jesus Way. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.
