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Barnes in Commonthe magazine of Churches Together in BarnesWinter2011
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The Use of Scripture in our personal lives Saint Benedict in his monastic rule has an elegant phrase 'Listen with the ear of your heart'. The word ‘heart’ includes several layers of meaning, such as inner understanding, feelings, will, desire, conscience. It is the core of our being. When we listen with the ‘ear of the heart’ we are listening for God to break through to our innermost chamber. As Christians, we approach scripture through the love of Christ’s presence, and there are many ways of allowing his life to flow and touch us through the words that we are reading. I simply want to introduce one very traditional method of approaching scripture: Lectio Divina. Lectio Divina begins by selecting a short passage such as a few sentences from the writings of St Paul. We approach a passage in four different ways: Lectio, Meditatio, Oratio and Contemplatio. Lectio is a very slow reading, preferably aloud, savouring the words as if they were delicious morsels on our tongue, letting the ‘honey’ of God’s words drip gently into our soul. We are not acquiring information here, rather we are waiting for that gift of inner formation which arises subtly with a single word that seems to strike our heart. When such a word impinges upon us, we allow the word to engage with our life experience. This is now Meditatio. How does the word speak to us with the concerns that we have in our lives now? We should alert ourselves to the richness of new insights that may be given through the single word which seems to have caught our attention. The word may simply be a gentle affirming of something we already know about God’s enduring love towards us. With this sense of the faithfulness of God coming to us through the word, we respond in prayer. This is Oratio. This prayer of Oratio can take many forms. We may want to sing, or dance, using our bodies as a vehicle of responding. The art is to have our hearts set free so that we can enter fully into an honest and deep conversation with God through the word. This then leads to Contemplatio, where we are drawn into the silence of God, resting in his presence, not striving to do anything or make anything “spiritual” happen. In the resting in the silence of God, we are trusting that God is at work deep within us, bringing healing and refreshment. Lectio Divina has a natural rhythm of its own. We may find ourselves being taken by the single word immediately into the stillness of God, or we may simply want to stay with the element of praise and prayer. What often happens is that the four elements form a circle where we simply journey round, letting ourselves slow down and enabling our spirit, the ‘ear of our heart’, to attune itself to God’s presence with us now. Fr Paul Holland  |
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