Lectio Divina is the method of contemplative prayer that evolved in the monastic milieu. It is primarily a way of listening to the Scripture. The Christian community is essentially a scriptural environment. This is also what a parish is supposed to be. A monastery is a place where one is constantly immersed in a scriptural environment: the offices at different times of the day, solitude, places of silence, and a community of similarly minded people. In listening to the Scripture in the liturgy and reading it in private, there seems to be a dynamic inherent to the word of God that gradually moves one from one level of faith to the next.

The monks of the Middle Ages called these different levels the "four senses of Scripture." The senses of Scriptures are not four ways of discussing a particular text on a rational level. They are four levels of listening to the same passage. The teaching presupposes that Scripture contains a mysterious dynamic that moves one to ever deeper levels of understanding the word of God. These are the literal, the moral, the allegorical, and the unitive (sometimes known as the anagogical). Modern exegetes focus primarily on the literal sense of Scripture, seeking out the philological meaning of the words and the cultural background in order to understand how to interpret these words. This research is valuable for ferreting out more precisely what God was trying to say through the sacred writers. But that is not the purpose of Lectio Divina. Divine reading as the monks conceived it was not done for the sake of information but for insight. It was not to learn something but to encounter Christ. A friendship was developing.

Before printing was invented, there were only a few manuscripts available. Monks would read one book of the Bible such as Isaiah or one of the gospels for a whole year. They were expected to learn the psalms by heart so that they could run blocks of Scripture through their memory all the time. When they gave time to Lectio, it was something special. They would start reading the Scripture and when something struck them, they would stop, reflect on the text, and then pray over it, asking God for the good things they read about. They would move from discursive meditation to affective prayer or aspirations of the will, then to repeating the same aspiration over and over again, and finally they would experience resting in God. This was the goal of the whole process. Some monks might spend most of the time with just a word or two, resting in the presence of God. The whole monastic environment, since it was so steeped in Scripture anyway, encouraged this movement toward contemplation. When you are constantly in contact with the world of God, you don't have to read extensively in order to be restimulated or to be restored to a state of recollection. The monks were more or less held in the presence of God by their environment and the structure of their lives.

Lectio Divina was not just a mental or purely spiritual activity. The monks of the middle Ages used to whisper the words so that their bodies were engaged in the conversation. They would also read very slowly, the whole process of Lectio taking at times a couple of hours. In our day, we are almost completely desensitized to sacred reading because we are so used to newspapers, magazines, and speed reading. We tend to read the Scriptures as if they were just another book to be consumed. Lectio is just the opposite. It is the savoring of the text a leisurely lingering in divine revelation.

What is so remarkable about the process of Lectio is that one can move from one level of relating to Jesus to the next in the same period of prayer, experiencing a variety of responses to the divine initiative. And gradually, as friendship with Jesus deepens, the "four senses of Scripture" begin to unfold as a dynamic within one's own life. The word of God is within us. It is an action, not just a statue inside us.

How does this dynamic work? The first, or literal, sense of Scripture is the historical message and example of Jesus. But when we engage the gospel through Lectio Divina, we begin to put what it says into practice. Augustine writes that we understand more by doing what it says than by how much of it we read. When we begin to put into practice and live by the Scripture, we have reached the moral sense. The message of Jesus is understood much more fully by putting it into practice than be reading and reflecting on the philological meaning of words, however valuable that study may be.

When the moral sense has been experienced for awhile, a new realization begins to emerge. As we read the gospel and interiorize the events in which Jesus brings his disciples and friends to new levels of faith, we ourselves move beyond the moral sense into the allegorical sense of Scripture. It slowly dawns on us that the gospel is about us; that our own life is mirrored in its pages. The same sort of experience of God that we have encountered, now by grace, now in the mystery of the Spirit, was happening historically to those people who actually contacted Jesus and experienced his ministry. And this sense of mirroring applies not only to the New Testament, but to the Old as well.

When I came  out of the novitiate in Valley Falls, Rhode Island, my confessor said, "You should read the whole of the Old Testament." I was more interested in reading St. John of the Cross at that time in my life, but being an obedient monk in those days, I said, "Sure," and I started with a heavy heart to read Genesis. That wasn't too bad. There are some wonderful stories in it. Then I picked up Exodus. I said, "Do I have to read this word for word?" I started reading it, and all of a sudden a mysterious light appeared, so to speak, on the other side of the page; the words started jumping out at me, and I got very excited. I said, "This book is talking about my life. Whoever wrote this book must have been my psychiatrist." Here I was reading about how the Israelites were murmuring against their leader, and this is what I was doing. They were going through the Red Sea and struggling with the slavery of sin, and that was the story of my own conversion. A few words would set off huge vistas of meaning and understanding; it became one of the most exciting books I ever read.

That is what the allegorical sense does to you. It enables you to identify your own personal spiritual journey with the events in the Old Testament that record salvation history: Noah, the passage through the Red Sea, crossing the Jordan--all those classical biblical events are made available in the sacraments and accessed through prayer. Salvation history is the same grace at work in us. It was present in the Old Testament, saving God's people in virtue of Christ's future coming. The fullness of grace was present in the gospel, and the fruits of that grace are treasured up in the sacraments of the church. At the allegorical level, we are now listening  to the voice of Christ speaking through the readings we hear in the liturgy, savor in Lectio Divina, and recognize in the events of our own lives. It is the same saving grace at work, just as available now as it was then, and more so. When you begin to experience this, you listen to the Scriptures in a very different way. They are not historical documents anymore, but stories about your own experience of the spiritual journey.

Continued . . .

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Excerpted from Intimacy with God by Fr. Thomas Keating

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