Transcript

In the first chapter of the Gospel of John, we witness a scene in which John the Baptist, Andrew, and an unnamed disciple are standing by when the Lord passes.

John the Baptist says, Behold the Lamb of God.

At that point, Andrew and the unnamed disciple follow after Him.

Jesus turns and says, What do you seek?

And then they reply, Master, where are you staying?

Jesus says mysteriously, Come and see.

At that point, they went with Him, and it was the 10th hour.

After they had visited with the Lord, Andrew comes back to his brother Peter and says, without nuance, without introduction, without any clarification, just simply, We have found the Messiah.

In his encounter with Jesus Christ, he derived certainty.

He derived a real knowledge.

He was built up in his relationship with the Lord.

In the Christian life, we seek to cultivate habits of mind and heart whereby we can encounter Jesus in this certain and real way.

We know that we are made to the image of God.

We have intellects with which to know Him, and wills with which to love Him.

And so, building up of these faculties, building up of these spiritual powers is part of our sanctification.

So when it comes to the building up of our minds, we speak of virtues like wisdom, and knowledge, and understanding.

And so the Church commends to us the practice of an intellectual engagement with the faith in order to grow our hearts and encounter Jesus Christ in a way that is permanent, fixed, certain, and real.

One of the ways in which we can do this is a practice called Lectio Divina.

Lectio Divina just means sacred reading, and what it describes is a meditative reading of sacred Scripture.

God, we know, is the author of all of Scripture.

He Himself works through human agents, inspiring and preserving the texts from error.

As a result, all of Scripture has a real revelatory character.

It communicates to us the truths about God.

Scripture has a kind of infinite fruitfulness of meaning, for with God as its author, we always discover within it further and further sources of grace and truth.

Now, Lectio Divina is given its classic form by a certain Guigo the Carthusian.

He describes four stages to actually conduct us to the heart of the Scripture's meaning.

We begin by reading.

At this stage, it's just a, a slow reading of the passage, noting features of the text that stick out.

It may be helpful to begin with the Gospels.

'Cause in the Gospels, Jesus Christ is working in a way, obviously, that is very clear and distinct.

You might pick out a handful of verses, nothing too long, nothing too short, and read through those slowly and meditatively, just pausing to recall, think about what you may know about those Scriptures and what strikes you for the first time.

From reading, we pass to the second stage, which is meditation.

At this stage, we begin to ask questions of the text.

Where is Jesus in the passage?

How is He saving?

What is He doing to communicate His grace?

In this process, we engage with the text and grapple with it.

It becomes a kind of encounter.

It becomes a conversation.

From meditation, we pass to our third stage, which is prayer.

Here, we ask God to enlighten us, to deepen our desire for the things described in the text, and to make Himself more known.

From questions, we pass to praise, and from praise to glory.

The fourth and final stage is contemplation.

This is something that the Lord does in His own good timing.

Here, He acts in a simple way, shedding a ray of light divine on our minds and giving us a kind of passive appreciation of the very mysteries themselves.

It's not something that we do.

It's something done unto us.

It's also helpful to notice that we don't just spend maybe a number of minutes with the first stage, and then a number of minutes with the second stage, and on down the line, as if we could proceed through the steps on our own timetable.

Sometimes, the stages intermix and intermingle, and we pass from one to the other as the Lord dictates the tempo.

So, They don't occur in relative isolation, but it moves more organically, more personally.

Lectio Divina isn't about systematically working through the steps according to our own preconceived timetable.

Rather, the point is to become better disposed to the working of God in sacred Scripture and to create a kind of contemplative disposition towards life more broadly.

We want to get better at being done unto by the Lord.

We wanna get better at suffering divine things, to be moved more readily by His inspiration and grace.

Scripture is the very soul of theology, and so our study of the faith begins with Scripture, but it goes beyond Scripture to embrace all of the Church's life and teachings.

So, it can also be helpful to read what others have said about or discovered in Scripture.

Here, it's very helpful to consult the Fathers of the Church, the theologians of the Middle Ages, perhaps modern saints.

The lives of the saints are living manifestations of Scripture throughout history.

You can think, for instance, of St. Anthony of the Desert.

When St. Anthony attended mass one day, he heard the text proclaimed from Matthew 19 that told him to go, sell all that he had and give to the poor, and to come follow after the Lord.

And having heard that word, his heart was changed, and he became what was the beginning of the whole monastic movement.

So, from reading what others have said about Scripture, we can expand into the Church's history and theology, its spirituality and liturgy, and what many holy people have said about her prayer.

What we want is a kind of steady habit of inquiry.

When brought into dialogue with the experience of our lives, the Church's teachings prove infinitely fruitful and enriching.

Through a greater appreciation of the Church's history, her Scripture, her theology, her liturgy, her prayer, one discovers many ways of diving more deeply into the infinite sea of being, into the infinite riches at the heart of God.