When I walked into a church a number of years ago and saw on the pre-service slides that they were promoting “lectio divina” groups, it gave me some pause. I wondered how these groups functioned and why they were especially set apart as something different from a Bible study. I found myself reacting a little.
In my work as a historian of Christian spirituality, I am well aware of the centuries-old patterns of prayerful reading of Scripture, especially in Benedictine monasteries, that were described in the Latin language as lectio divina. But what was this modern evangelical church doing? How had they come to understand lectio divina? Was it something novel or exotic with a Latin name to set it apart from normal Bible study? Did it involve special techniques: read the passage three times, close your eyes, keep silence, pay attention to what you feel? Was it a little bit like magic?
Despite my initial reaction that Sunday, I have come to appreciate a proper use of the term lectio divina not so much to suggest something exotic as to signal a deep connection to the past. How can we read Scripture prayerfully in a way that has deep roots in the long centuries of the church? Whether we call this prayerful reading or spiritual reading or lectio divina, we want to acknowledge that we are not simply analyzing a text in the way we might decipher a translation of something from Herodotus.
For Christians, these are our holy scriptures. This is not just any text. In fact, this is one of the original ways the term lectio divina or sacra pagina was originally used. These compound expressions referred not in the first instance to a way of reading but to the material being read—a noun, not a verb. What I hold before me is holy Scripture. This is a divine lection. This is the sacred page. The verbal use naturally followed from this. Words from God himself (“lectio divina”) should be received and read in a certain way and with appropriate intention. I read such words in an attitude of receptive prayer and humble devotion: “Speak Lord, your servant is listening.”
Lectio divina ought really to be the normal reading of the Bible for Christians who believe these words to be the words of God.A century of hermeneutics and critical theory should be enough to remind us how important our intentions are as readers. Lectio divina ought really to be the normal reading of the Bible for Christians who believe these words to be the words of God.
What is the deepest intention we bring to our reading of Scripture? In a sermon on the psalms, Augustine once described the Scriptures as “the face of God for now,” and he urged us to “gaze intently into it.” What did he mean?
You and I, each of us, were made to see the face of God, and every Christian heart longs to be able someday to look into the face of love itself. In this is the very fulfilment of our nature. The great promise is that someday by grace, washed, cleansed, and restored, we shall be made capable of this. Meanwhile, where do we look to find the face of God turned toward us? It is in the union of the word written and the word made flesh that we encounter God himself today. Here still we may find Jacob’s ladder joining heaven and earth.
We must look to Jesus. And where do we find him today? We turn to the Scriptures. It is in the union of the word written and the word made flesh that we encounter God himself today. Here still we may find Jacob’s ladder joining heaven and earth.
The Carthusian monk Guigo II described centuries of Benedictine reading in an almost offhand way. Thinking one day about what they were doing when reading, he wrote about a series of steps that lift one from earth to heaven: lectio, meditatio, oratio, and contemplatio. Here we have Latin words again, but I really don’t think there is anything exotic about these steps. Christians who read Scripture with devotional intent will naturally do something like this.
If you are not persuaded, let me give you an evangelical and Reformed example. The eighteenth-century Calvinist William Romaine urged his readers frequently to mix faith with the reading of Scriptural promises: “Meditate on them. Pray to him for increasing faith to mix with them; that he, dwelling in the temple of thy heart, thou mayest have fellowship there with the Father and with the Son.” There it is! Read, meditate, pray, and “have fellowship.” Lectio, meditatio, oratio, and contemplatio.
Another way in which devotional intent shaped Bible reading for past Christians was in the desire to read not only as “brain work” but with “all our powers.” For both Jesuits and Puritans, this meant employing “memory, reason, and will.”
It is perhaps the first element of “memory” that makes some people wary of a certain approach to lectio divina as just making stuff up. Although there is a danger here of pure fantasy, we do actually use our imagination all the time when we read. We may read more or less passively, without making much effort to see, hear, and feel what is happening, but we are drawing on images in our memories all the time to recall what that the words describe.
When my wife Carolyn and I wrote a devotional book recently to help people pray out of the Gospels, we asked the readers to engage their imaginations to see, hear, and feel as vividly as possible the Gospel accounts. It really happened. We are not imagining whatever we will but recalling as much as we can. One would have smelled the food in the kitchen. The light would have come in at an angle through the window and lit up Jesus’s face as he taught. A fly might have crawled along the windowsill. Simon Peter perhaps cleared his throat, and a cart clattered by on the cobblestones of the street outside.
As Christian believers, we want to remember Jesus Christ as vividly as we can. As Peter wrote, “Though you have not seen him, you love him; even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy” (1 Pet 1:8).
As we do this “with all our powers,” we are inevitably pulled into the frame and absorbed into the scene. The horizon line that divides the past and present is erased. When Jesus speaks, I am the one he is addressing. I am the one who touches the hem of his garment. It is my grief that I feel when Jesus’s coming seems delayed. It is my storm that must be calmed. My bent body that must be raised upright.
Lectio divina is simply the union of prayer and Bible reading. What God has joined together, let no man put asunder.In the monastic centuries, many writers expressed how a deep reading of God’s Word would open out into prayer like this. Arnoul of Bohériss writes, “The Holy Scripture is the well of Jacob from which the waters are drawn which will be poured out later in prayer. Thus there will be no need to go to the oratory to begin to pray; but in reading itself, means will be found for prayer and contemplation.”
This was not something lost on the early evangelicals. The evangelical clergyman John Newton wrote in the same spirit of the relationship of Scripture and prayer, “The one is the fountain of living water, and the other the bucket with which we are to draw.” These were two interpenetrating acts of devotion. Reading the Scriptures would therefore lead Newton often to “turn them into a prayer form.”
Lectio divina is simply the union of prayer and Bible reading. What God has joined together, let no man put asunder.
