to meet God in prayer...
The method of lectio divina presented here is the one taught and practised by Fr. Michel deVerteuil of Trinidad. He taught in a seminary in Nigeria for some years. For ten years he was rector of the Regional Seminary for the English speaking Caribbean in Trinidad where he also lectured in theology. In 1980 he set up the archdiocesan pastoral centre to promote the faith formation of adults in the archdiocese. It was at that time that he discovered lectio divina and found it to be an excellent way of enabling people:
to meet God in prayer,
to do theology and to grow in wisdom.
He was struck by the fact that this method was available to all, whether or not they had money or
formal education.
Lectio divina has to be learned slowly. It can only be learned in the doing, like cycling or swimming are learned by getting up on your bike or getting into the water.
SECTION I. THE METHOD OF LECTIO DIVINA.
1.1 We read the Bible in order to meet God.
She was a Good Shepherd sister in her late seventies when I knew her forty years ago. I remember only one story she told. When she was twenty years old she had a job in Tralee and was renting her own flat. Her plans for a bright future were falling into place. Then one day as she was passing the Dominican church she dropped in and knelt at the back. She looked up and noticed the cloth that was hanging on the front of the altar. On it was written: ‘The Master is here and calleth for thee.’ The words had a powerful and completely unexpected impact on her. She felt that they were addressed directly to her and she sensed they would cut across the plans she had made. The words —words which Martha once said to Mary when Jesus came to their home after the death of Lazarus—these now became the same Lord’s words spoken to her in Tralee, and were the beginning of her vocation to the Good Shepherd sisters.
This is a dramatic example of what Bible reading is: a personal meeting or encounter with God. The Second Vatican Council put it this way: ‘In the sacred books, the Father who is in heaven comes lovingly to meet his children and talks with them.’ (Decree on Revelation n.21). It is an extraordinary thing that God has chosen to meet us through a book. The Bible is available to everybody; the one who cannot read can listen as another reads aloud. As Catholics we are not accustomed to opening the Bible and reading it in order to meet God. And yet, though our experience may not be as dramatic as that of the Good Shepherd sister, most of us may recall some words of scripture which touched us deeply at some time of our lives: we may not have named that moment for what it was: a personal encounter with God
1.2. We read the Bible in order to do theology and grow in wisdom.
The experience of the young people reading the story of the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt highlights another reason for reading the Bible: to understand God, our lives and the world in which we live, in other words to grow in wisdom.
Theology is ‘faith seeking to understand’ – seeking to understand God and all that God has revealed, seeking to understand our own lives also and the world around us. The young people, in the light of their faith, were trying to understand their new found freedom from drug addiction, the obstacles they faced and the real possibilities they had to retain that freedom. They were doing theology and they were growing in wisdom. They were expressing their faith in their own language and playing their own indispensable part in transforming their society into a civilization of love. This is a crucially important function of Bible reading in our time.
1.3 Reading the Bible as story, not as text-book.
There is a difference between text-book reading and story reading. We read a text book to get information and objective facts. A geography textbook informs me that the highest mountain in Ireland is Carrantouhil and that it is 3,414 feet high. The human faculty which I bring to bear on a textbook is my mind, my intellect.
The first part of myself that I bring to a story is my imagination; my feelings are touched, I become excited or sad or angry as I read a story. One other faculty that comes into play is my memory; a story reminds me of something in my own experience – something that happened to me or to someone I know about.
Every story has characters, at least one; and it has movement, a plot. Without consciously deciding to do so, we identify with one or other of the characters. The movement of the story reminds us of something similar in our own lives or in the lives of people we know of. A child in our modern can identify with Cinderella eventhough so much in her story – the coach, the ball, the prince charming, the glass slipper – are alien to the child’s experience. All children, even in the best adjusted families, know from their experience, how it feels to be the smallest and weakest, how it feels to be unfairly treated or to be left out. The story reassures the child that the one who experiences all these things can still become the belle of the ball.
If God had asked us what kind of book we needed him to give us as Bible, we could have made a good case for a textbook, with a good index at the back. When we needed answers and information, we could look up the particular subject or issue in the index. But God chose to reveal a book of stories:
‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…’
‘The Lord said to Abraham, ‘Leave your country, your family and your father’s house…’
‘The Lord said to Moses, ‘I have seen the miserable condition of my people in Egypt…’
‘The word of the Lord was addressed to Jeremiah…’
‘By the rivers of Babylon there we sat down and wept…’
‘The angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee named Nazareth…’
‘When Pentecost day came round…’
Paul wrote to the Corinthians, ‘At the time when you were called, how many of you were wise in the
ordinary sense of the word, how many were influential people, or came from noble families…?’
‘Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth…’
Since God gave them to us as stories, we need to read them as stories, not as a textbook. That is to say, we bring our imaginations to them, we allow them to stir our feelings and evoke our memories.
We are so accustomed to reading the Bible with our minds in order to get its message and to discover its moral demands, that it may take us a considerable time to learn how to read it as story, allowing it to evoke our memories and lead us to wisdom.