Lectio Divina

Transformative Engagement with Scripture

A rich practice of biblical spirituality, or transformative engagement with the Word, that is ancient but is enjoying a renaissance in our own time is lectio divina. The practice is described in the episode in Acts 8:26–39 in which the Ethiopian court official of Queen Candace is reading and meditating on the Servant Song of Isaiah (cf. 53: 7–8), which he does not understand. He appeals to Philip for enlightenment. Philip’s teaching results in the official’s conversion and subsequent baptism.

The origin of the practice of lectio divina among Christians can be traced back to the desert fathers and mothers whose spirituality consisted primarily of prayerful rumination on biblical texts. Later, in the Benedictine monasteries organized around the Rule of St. Benedict (c. 540), the practice was both legislated and to some extent formalized. The Carthusian Guigo II (d. ca. 1188) finally supplied a carefully articulated “method” for the practice of lectio divina in his spiritual classic, Ladder of Monks, which has been adapted by contemporary spiritual teachers for our own times.

Lectio divina is a four-step process that begins with the slow, leisurely, attentive reading (lectio) and re-reading of a biblical text. Often the text is committed to memory in the process. By internalizing the text in its verbal form, one passes on to a rumination or meditation on its meaning (meditatio). The medieval commentaries on scripture bear witness to both the spiritual depth and the imaginative breadth to which this process could lead.

Today this second step might involve study of the text through consultation of commentaries, or reading of the text in the context of the liturgy and thus of other biblical texts from both testaments that the church sees as related, or other forms of study that open the mind to the meaning of the passage. The purpose of meditatio is deepened understanding of the text’s meaning in the context of the person’s own life and experience.

Because the text is engaged in experiential terms, the meditation gives rise to prayer (oratio) or response to God, who speaks in and through the text. Prayer of thanksgiving, adoration, praise, sorrow, repentance, resolve, petition, indeed all the kinds of prayer one experiences in the Psalms, are elicited as response to the Word. Finally, fervent prayer may reach that degree of interiority and union with God that the great masters of the spiritual life have called contemplation (contemplatio). Contemplation has acquired many meanings in the history of Christian spirituality, but in this context it indicates the full flowering of prayer in imageless and wordless union with God in the Spirit.

Lectio divina is a form of biblical spirituality in practice that, over time, can transform a person into the image of Christ encountered in scripture. I have found that many people who have never heard of lectio divina practice this kind of prayer on a daily basis using the New Testament, the daily lectionary, a collection of biblical texts, the Psalms, or even biblically based music. In other words, even though the term “biblical spirituality” may be unfamiliar to many people, the reality of biblical spirituality as a practice is not.