Whatever other methods of prayer we may at times find helpful, we must never forget and always turn back to the Scriptures as the Christian prayer book par excellence.
Lectio Divina – Divine Reading
In vocal prayer, despite the time given to brief moments of silence, we have been doing most of the talking. However, for prayer to lead on to generate the quality of love that will alone permanently change us for the better, we must learn to listen. If our spiritual life is to deepen we need to learn to stop talking and listen, to be silent and to allow ourselves to be loved. This is why all authentic Christian prayer begins not by flinging ourselves into obscure states of transcendental awareness, but by trying to listen to God’s words as embodied in the words of Jesus Christ. This is how the early Christians used to pray in a method of prayer that later came to be called Lectio Divina or the divine or sacred readings. It was so called, not just because they believed the words they read were inspired, but because they also believed that they too would be inspired by the Holy Spirit as they read them. They believed that through these sacred readings they would be led on and into a profound dialogue with Jesus that would lead them on and into “the love of Christ, which is beyond all knowledge, where we are filled with the utter fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:18–19).
Whatever other methods of prayer we may at times find helpful, we must never forget and always turn back to the Scriptures as the Christian prayer book par excellence. In the Middle Ages, a Carthusian monk called Guido coined four Latin words that have been used ever since to describe the four steps of Lectio Divina or Christian Meditation. They show how they can lead serious-minded Christians onward to experience the love that surpasses all understanding. These Latin words are only used to sum up the way ordinary Christians prayed from the earliest of times, enabling people who had not known Jesus personally to love him. The words are Lectio – Reading, Meditatio – Reflecting on what is read, Oratio – Reacting in prayer to the sacred texts and Contemplatio – Relishing, while reacting in fewer and fewer words, and then in silence, to the love that is experienced. Many of the early Christians knew whole passages, if not all the Gospels by heart. They had no other prayer books to hand, nor did they have need of them. When the first Christians used the scriptures, most particularly the New Testament, they were not interested in how much they read, but in how deeply they penetrated the sacred texts in their search for wisdom.
