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Ch. 2 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE
and the WORD of GOD
Louis Bouyer, Cong. Orat.

OUR spiritual life will be Christian to the degree to which we realize therein a life of personal relationship with God. This already implies that our spiritual life must be constructed on the basis of the Word of God and of faith: the Word by which God calls man to Himself - the faith by which man recognizes, accepts this call.

To this basic principle, we have added - more as an explanation than an addition - the other principle that our spiritual life will be Catholic to the extent to which our personal relationship with God is developed in the Church. For the Word of God is spoken to us in the Church, and it is inseparable from the Church to the point that we cannot truly receive it except as it is communicated to us by the Church. If the Word of God is to be for us not a dead letter but a vivifying Spirit, it must be brought to our understanding in the living light of the magisterium of the Church. But, according to a golden phrase of Pius XI, the principal instrument of the ordinary magisterium of the Church is the liturgy. The first task we must undertake is, therefore, to explain how our spiritual life must and can nourish itself from the Word (If God through the liturgy.

The Word of God as Source of the Spiritual Life

WHAT has already been said should have sufficiently brought out how essential it is to the Christian spiritual life that it should be nourished by Christian truth. This point is generally admitted without any difficulty. But sufficient attention is not always given to the importance, if that Christian truth is to nourish the spiritual life, of receiving this truth in a form that we can assimilate.

The assimilation of Christian truth is effected by meditation--a subject on which we need to dwell at length. For Christian truth cannot be assimilated in any kind of way. Modern studies of spirituality, since the end of the Middle Ages, have concentrated particularly on the subjective methods of meditation. But, in contrast to the more ancient tradition, they have often attached little or no importance to the objective form in which Christian truth should preferably be encountered in meditation so as to be assimilated fruitfully. This may be the reason why in our modem era, meditation appears constantly to be threatened by a twofold danger seldom evidenced in earlier times either it dries up in ratiocination, or it drowns in sentimental musing.

When we are supposed to be meditating on a Christian truth in order to develop our spiritual life, too often we are actually only indulging in a rational (not to say a rationalistic) consideration of this truth, from which we come away still more dry or spiritually impoverished than we were when we began. Or, when this does not happen, we lose ourselves, along with the truth we are trying to meditate on, in a kind of waking dream of which this truth seems to be more the pretext than the source. The spiritual sterility of such a revery is in proportion to its artificiality.

We should pay attention to the fact that if so many people, after a loyal attempt and often a prolonged one, declare frankly that they cannot meditate, it is ordinarily because such rational reflection exhausts them, while fantastic musing distracts (or disgusts) them. But true meditation is neither of these things.

The on]y way to avoid the Scylla of the one and the Charybdis of the other is to begin by turning to Christian truth under the form in which God has given it to us, the form in which it was proclaimed by His chosen messengers. For God has given us this truth in the form in which it is immediately assimilable by the life of the soul.

In speaking to us, He wills to make us live, not to give us food for thought or pleasantly to occupy our imagination. We can therefore be quite sure that He knew how to present His revelation in such a way as to have it, of itself, suit the purpose for which He gave it to us.

In actual fact, it is only through a secondary process that this revelation became rationalized, and it is only by a quite understandable, though inadequate, reaction that later on it seems to have become sentimentalized, in some manner, through the play of the imagination. This is not to say that it is wrong or illegitimate to think about the truths God has made known to us so as to organize them for coherent reflection; it may likewise be good to have our imagination engaged, so that these truths can take full hold of our sensibility. We should, certainly, investigate rationally all the implications of divine truth, if only to safeguard ourselves from adulterating it with all kinds of errors. And our imagination should certainly allow itself to be reshaped by this truth, if only to rid or purify itself of sinful imaginings.

Nonetheless, revealed truths have been given us by God primarily to make us live the life that God has destined for us, not primarily to equip us for the acquisition of speculative knowledge. And when we come more or less confusedly to feel that a habitual approach to divine truth through such a systematic apprehension of it is not the most normal nor the most efficacious way to gain a vital grasp of it, the best remedy is certainly not to fall back on an effort of the imagination nor on the artificial sentiments which this can awaken in us. We thereby risk adding a second mistake to the first, with still more discouraging results. The only serious remedy and, quite simply, the normal way of preventing our meditation from losing itself in a dead-end is to begin by returning to divine truth as it has been presented to us by the Word of God itself.

For God, in His Word, gives us His truth precisely as a living truth, suited to making us live. Is it not, as we have said, the characteristic of every “word” to be a personal communication? The word, properly speaking, is the revelation of a person to a person, of an “I “ to a “you. “ It is the first act whereby someone enters into the life of another someone. Consequently, it is the Word of God which is the revelation of God to us, His personal revelation. And it is by this same Word that God intends to enter into our life.

THE Word of God, in the very expressions, the immediate expressions that God Himself chose, is preserved for us in the Bible, that is to say, in the collection of all the divinely inspired words that have been given fixed form in writing.

Catholics have tended for too long to think that the Bible should be left to Protestants. This idea, or rather this prejudice, must be uprooted. The error of Protestantism lay not at all in the belief that the Bible is the Word of God and that it should be received as such. This is no error; it is pure Catholic truth, witnessed to by the whole tradition of the Church. The error was to wish to go back to the Bible while getting rid of everything that is essential to keep it living: so that we would have it reduced to a dead letter no longer vivified by the Spirit.

It is in the Bible, then, that we should look for the primary nourishment of our spiritual life, as the Protestants insist. But we should not use it as they do. That is, we should not make use of it as a dead letter into which our individual interpretation is to infuse a new life. We should use it where it is still animated by the presence of the Person Who spoke it, where the Spirit Who inspired it is still active.

But nowhere, except in the Church which is the Body of Christ, does the living Word of God in Christ continue to be present among us and to speak to us today. Nowhere except in this same Body of Christ does the Spirit of Christ dwell on as a continually life-giving Spirit.

This is what we experience in a very particular way in the celebration of the liturgy. For the liturgical assembly of the Church is the assembly of the people of God called together by God Himself, called first of all to hear His Word.

It should be noted that this convocation of the People of God to hear His Word is not something artificial, something which had to be brought into being, as it were, after the event in order to restore its youth to an ancient document. On the contrary, it is the very way in accordance with which the biblical texts were produced and then gathered together, the way in accordance with which they are always to be received, as they were given. To convince ourselves of this fact, it is enough to consider the decisive turning points in the history of the People of God, which are found at the same time to be the decisive turning points in the history of the Bible, as it presents this history to us.

It might be said that the People of God were created by the Exodus, and more particularly by the Covenant which God made with His own on Mount Sinai, when He led them out of Egypt. Here the chaotic, unorganized horde of refugees were for the first time gathered together in a spiritual unity. Here it was that they became conscious of themselves as a people, the People of God.

How was this carried out? The Word of God, speaking through the intermediation of Moses, called the people together on the mountain. This was the first assembly of the people, what the Hebrew called the Qahal, a word which is found translated in the Greek version of the Septuagint as Ekklesia, and which is therefore at the very origin of our notion of the Ecclesia, the Church. But why was this Qahal, this embryonic Church assembled? Precisely to hear the Word which convoked it, and, having heard the Word, formally to accept it in faith, collectively pledging obedience to it.

On the same range of Horeb-Sinai, God had already revealed to Moses His Name, that is to say, His intimate nature. And now, still through the mediation of Moses, the People came to receive the Law of God, the Ten Commandments, and to welcome this Law as the basis of their whole future relationship with God. The revelation of the Law flowed from that of the Name: the Law had as its purpose not only to mark the People as belonging to the God Who revealed Himself to them, but to shape them in conformity to this God Who had made them His adopted people, to stamp them with the imprint of His Name, that is, what He Himself is. Is not the leit-motif of the Mosaic Law the formula: “Be ye holy as I am holy”?

Such was the first act of the Qahal, the first assembly of the People on Sinai: to hear the Word of God, to receive it in the prayer of an adoring faith.

Yet this acceptance of the divine Word could not remain purely intellectual or simply passive. It implied a self-offering on the part of the People, to meet the requirements of the Word they had heard, on the basis of the promises included in the revelation of the divine Name. Confidence in the promises, in the great promise of the divine intimacy opened out to man, and obedience to the revealed will of God were both to be expressed in the second act of the Qahal, to which the first led of its own accord. This second act was the sacrificial offering, the offering just prescribed by God through His Word; thus the “ service of the Word “ led, as its direct consequence, to the service of the sacrifice. In the latter, the People pledged themselves to obey the Law of God, believing in His promises - that is, that this People should be specifically His People promises to which God at the same time put His seal by accepting their sacrifice. Thus was concluded the Covenant between God and Israel (see Ex. 3, 19, 20 and 24 particularly).

And the Covenant thus concluded was later to be renewed under exactly parallel conditions. Settled in Palestine, Israel experienced both its own unfaithfulness to God’s demands, and the faithfulness of God to His promises. It was on the basis of that experience, and as shedding light upon it, that the teaching of the ancient prophets was given to Israel. The meaning of the primitive Law was found to be as it were renewed because interiorized. Then King Josias convoked a second Qahal in which again is to be found the structure and, so to say, the dynamism of the first.

Again there was the proclamation of the divine Word - here in the form of Deuteronomy, that is, a re-framing of the primitive Law made in the twofold and reciprocal light of experience and of the prophetic teaching of which this experience had been the occasion. And the People, having re-affirmed their adherence to the covenant by pledging themselves in obedient faith to the renewed Law, once more bound themselves to it by sacrifice -here, a particularly solemn celebration of the paschal sacrifice, commemorating and re-actualizing the first Pasch (2 Kings :23).

A third time, after the supreme experience of the Old Testament the trial of the Exile, the apparent abandonment by the God of the Covenant - the Qahal was convoked, still according to the same pattern. When the scribe Esdras led back from Babylon into the ruins of the holy city the little community, the “remnant” purified in the furnace of that mysterious ordeal, what did he do? He gathered together the exiles and the dispersed for a solemn reading of practically the whole Old Testament Bible, as it has come down to us today. And, on this basis of this preparatory revelation with its accomplishment in the ordeal of the faithful “remnant” - a foreshadowing of the saving ordeal of the “Servant” - the People once again pledged themselves to the service of God.

But this time, it should be noted, while the promise was made to resume the ritual sacrifices when the holy city and the Temple had been rebuilt, while looking forward to this time, the Qahal was not concluded by such sacrifices. In their place appeared a prayer of a new kind: the prayer of blessing or thanksgiving, the herahah, which we translate as “eucharist.” The people, gratefully acknowledging in this prayer everything that the divine Word had done for them, consecrated themselves to God as their response to His gifts, and especially to that supreme gift of the still mysterious ordeal from which their own response had come forth. This “eucharistic” prayer first looked to the past in a memorial, an anamnesis, which included that past in its whole unity now finally revealed; then it turned quite naturally toward the future: let God Himself renew, achieve, bring to final completion in the eschatological future - that is, in the last times - what He had prepared, foreshadowed, sketched out in the times of old, the memory of which was sustaining the present... (Neh. 8:10).

Clearly, we have here, as it were, the prehistory of the Christian Mass, where it is sketched out and where we discover its meaning in its providential preparations. Here we understand how the Mass achieves the creation of the definitive People of God. At the same time, we grasp the reason why the Mass is so essential to the life of the Church, as it is to that of each Christian in her: it is here that that life takes shape. But, above all, we see here how the People of God is created on the foundation of a collective and progressive hearing of the Word of God. As the Word is proclaimed little by little in the living tradition of this People, and, more particularly, of what we might call its liturgical life, we see that People, under the influence of that Word, being formed by sacrifice and perfected in the discovery of “ eucharistic” sacrifice.

The deepening of the lessons of the Old Testament in the experience of the New, which they prepare for and illuminate in advance, shows us how we should welcome the Word of God in that liturgical celebration in which the People of God is made, and made perfect.

EVEN in the Old Testament, the Qahal, the Assembly of the People where they were formed as God’s People through hearing the divine Word, was perpetuated, so to say, in the religious service of the synagogue. And this service was already in some way a summary, a condensation of all the teaching and all the progressively formative power of the successive and decisive gatherings we have just recalled.

The synagogue service did not actually consist of one reading of the Bible each time, but of a series of readings completing and perfecting one another. First came the reading from the Torah, the five books of Moses, in which was to be found the first and fundamental revelation of God in His people, the primary and fundamental events of the intervention of God in the life of that people. Then came the reading of the Prophets, giving not only their commentary on these basic truths, a commentary arising from experience, itself guided by the hand of God, but also a new and creative Word of God, leading from the primary experiences of the People to higher ones.

These ancient readings were continued in the New Testament. But the living teaching of the apostles, which took the place of the teaching of the rabbis and continued it, came to proclaim the new and definitive accomplishment in Christ of what the Old Testament had merely heralded and sketched out. This was the procedure which Christ had inaugurated in the synagogue at Nazareth: He read a passage from the book of Isaias prescribed for that day by Jewish liturgical tradition, then He put down the book and said: “What you have just heard is today accomplished” (Luke 16:14.21).

Later on, the reading of the letters of the apostles took the place of their oral teaching, and this led up to the final reading of the Gospels, containing the very letter of the words of Jesus and His actions. as the apostolic catechesis had kept and interpreted them.

The more the scientific studies of our four Gospels are multiplied and deepened, the more clearly it appears that the three synoptics, and St. Matthew in particular, were conceived in a way particularly designed to show how the teaching and the life of Our Lord were the accomplishment of what the Old Testament had prepared. It even seems that the Gospel according to St. Matthew, with its constant references to the Scriptures, was laid out in such a way that the presentation of the Gospel of Christ is modeled on the sequence of scriptural lessons in use at that time through the Jewish liturgical year.

All this shows us how the revelation of God to man in His Word is at once organic and progressive. This revelation is never a mere collection of abstract truths, which only need to be linked logically together. It is, through a succession of living experiences, the illumination given us by Him Who has engaged us in these experiences. As the Fathers of the Church call it, it is a divine pedagogy.

Like any wise teacher, God does not content Himself with saying once for all what He has to say, nor with doing (and, above all, with having us do) everything all at once. Still less does He mechanically repeat the same things, like a record or a film. Instead, He makes use of experiences which are analogous, but always increasingly profound, increasingly engaging, not only our minds but our whole being, so as to have us penetrate little by little into the central truth which He has held in His heart from the beginning, waiting until we are capable of embracing it in its fullness, and, above all, of truly making it our own.

This is why the first experiences which He caused His people to go through already enclosed, in a certain way, the definitive truths of the Gospel. In the first Pasch by which the People were delivered from Egypt, the passage of the Red Sea, the settling in the promised land, God already indicated that He willed to be the Redeemer of His own: the One Who would deliver them by freeing them from slavery, Who would set them free by adopting them, making them as it were the inheritors of His own goods.

But this truth, to be rightly understood, called for a new experience: that of a more profound ordeal, in which the People would come to understand the necessity for deliverance, not only from external enemies like the Egyptians, but also from interior enemies: their own egoism and idolatry. After the first Pasch, consequently, there had to be another Pasch prepared for by the teaching of the greatest prophets: the sorrowful trial of the Exile, the prelude to that veritable resurrection of the People which was the new deliverance. In this second experience, the People discovered that there is indeed no radical deliverance for man which is not the fruit of an interior struggle, in which suffering, distress accepted in faith, is the condition of a truly new life.

But the supreme value of this second experience lay in the guide lines it in turn laid down for a still more profound discovery. It opened out on the perspective of another death and another resurrection, no longer in figure but in all reality: the death and resurrection, no longer of the community passing through the furnace of trial, the “ remnant “of Israel, but of the unique” Servant of the Lord.” Thus the hope was sketched out of finding even the unjust justified in the death of the Just One, of rebuilding Jerusalem not merely for a handful of Jews returned from dispersion and exile, but for all the pagan nations, “the fullness of the Gentiles” (Rom. 11:25).

And now, as in the Jews of the synagogue so in us of the Church, there must be carried out spiritually what is described by physiology as the law of all organic life. According to the well known formula, ontogenesis must reproduce phylogenesis. This means that the same process which has brought a certain race to its present state of development must be reproduced, as if in an abridged and condensed form, in the life of each individual.

The way by which God has led His People to its fullness, by which He leads us all together toward what St. Paul calls the “fullness of Christ in His mature age “ (Eph. 4:3), is the way which we must all in some way take and traverse each on his own account. We must all, by the organic progressive teaching of the Scriptures given us by the Church in her liturgy, relive interiorly the entire history of the People of God. The Church herself lives on by “keeping and going over all these things in her heart,” as the evangelist St. Luke tells us of the Virgin Mary. In the Church, in giving ourselves over to the maternal pedagogy of her liturgy, in which she continually repeats, in order to “edify” us in the strongest sense of the word, the fatherly pedagogy that God realized once for all in the great events of sacred history, we discover in the Gospel the fullness of the meaning of the Scriptures; the fullness of the message which God addresses to us from the times of the Patriarchs and Prophets, and finally discloses in His only Son.

THE goal of the divine pedagogy in sacred history, and the goal of the pedagogy of the Church in the liturgical celebration is to bring us to understand that the unity of revelation, the unity underlying the infinite diversity of the Scriptures, is the unity of the mystery of Jesus.

It is in docilely giving ourselves over to this pedagogy that we recognize that this living unity is not to be sought in any form of rational reflection, however sublime. Still less can it be the product of an aesthetic imagination delighting in its own exercise It is the unity of a living exchange, or more exactly of a divine action, but of one which seeks us and engages us as a whole completely. In bringing God to us, it must bring us to Him.

The liturgy, which causes us to read the whole Bible as oriented to Christ in the way in which the apostolic teaching presents it to us, thus makes it clear, then, that this unity is the unity of what St. Paul calls simply “the Mystery” (cf. Col. 1:26-27). To the apostle, the Mystery is finally Christ Himself and, in particular His cross. Yet it is by no means Christ and His cross simply set up in front of us. As St. Paul says again, it is “Christ in you the hope of glory! “ (Col. 1:27).

This amounts to saying, first of all, that the Mystery is Christ and His cross seen as “fulfilling the Scriptures,” as completing the expression, realizing the manifestation in act of that Word complete and final, which God from the beginning wishes to say to us, throughout the manifold preparatory words of the prophets But this equally means that the Mystery is the cross of Chris discovered as the key both to the whole of human history and to the history of each particular man.

More deeply, the Mystery is the cross of Christ seen in al its perspectives - including the resurrection, the outpouring of the Spirit on all flesh, our incorporation into the risen Christ and finally, in Him, “God all in all.”

The Mystery is, then, Christ living in us, causing us to partake in all the reality of His life, of His new being, and thereby restoring in Himself, “recapitulating” as says the Epistle to the Ephesians, the whole of creation, the whole history of a mankind dismembered by sin but now reconciled, renewed, in a world delivered from its slavery to the powers hostile to God, powers which the cross has overcome, so as to be free in the glory promised to the children of God. ..(cf. Eph. 1 and 2).

It is when we have come to this point that we discover the true meaning of the spiritual interpretation of the Scriptures, so essential to all Christian tradition. Here also we are enabled to disengage this interpretation from the expressions of it which are more or less unfortunate, or from the fallacious imitations which still too frequently interfere with our understanding it.

Properly understood, the spiritual interpretation of the Scriptures means simply the way in which the Church, the People of God, understands them, relives them particularly in her liturgy. And this is also the interpretation which should, as its name indicates, enable us to live by them, to live them in the very Spirit who inspired them.

Contrary to the more or less fantastic caricatures by which it may have been supplanted, this authentic spiritual interpretation of the Scriptures in no way sets aside their historical interpretation. It is not even enough to say that it presupposes the latter as its indispensable basis. We have to go further and say that it is itself the only historical interpretation of the Scriptures which is integrally historical. For it is, as we have said, the only interpretation which enables us to attain their full meaning: all that is included in their most completely objective interpretation when such an interpretation takes sacred history as including all its prolongations up to our times and beyond, prolongations as yet accessible only to faith, but to the faith which the Scriptures themselves formally teach.

Following the movement of the inspired thought of the last prophets and thus flowing in a development interior to holy Scripture itself, this spiritual interpretation has us first go forward from the original Pasch to the Exile and to the captives’ return. It leads us, that is, from a collective and external “redemption” to another which is already interiorized and to that extent individualized. In fact, one of the most characteristic traits of Osee, of Ezechiel, or of the second part of the book of Isaias, is to make use of all the expressions, the images, the ideas first connected with the Exodus, in order to express and interpret what we might call the spirituality of the Exile and of the new deliverance to which it gave place.

We have here a literary method of composition that has happily been called the anthological style: one in which the innumerable citations of classic texts become the medium of the newest, the most original revelations. But this goes far beyond a mere literary method. Behind it, in the use of it, we follow the progress of a thought nourished by a history in which truths, like the providential deeds in which they are discovered by inspired reflection, beget one another in a truly vital continuity.

Yet this first development is but a sketch of the second--a new creation, but one which is at the same time always organically linked with what has preceded and prepared for it: the fact and the proclamation of the Gospel.

From the sacrifice of the “remnant,” of the few Jews who remained faithful during the ordeal with which God had winnowed them, we now go forward to the sacrifice of the one “faithful Servant,” obedient to death, even the death of the cross. The evangelist St. Luke described the voluntary death of Christ as “His Exodus which was to be accomplished in Jerusalem.” And there is no doubt that Christ Himself had explained to His own the meaning of His death by a twofold reference: to the paschal lamb which “takes away” the sins of the world by the shedding of its blood, and to the lamb (cf. the 53 rd chapter of Isaias) led to the slaughter which “carries” those sins in its broken body....

Yet the Gospel of Christ now invites us to carry our own cross and to follow Christ. “If we suffer with Him, “ says St. Paul, “we shall reign with Him “ (2 Tim. 2:12). And it is in this sense that he says of himself: “I fulfill in my flesh what remains to be suffered of the sufferings of Christ, for His Body which is the Church” (Col. 1:24). It is in this sense, because Christ is to live His mystery in us, that the mystery is “Christ in you...” and that, consequently, a new transposition needs to be made of all the truth of the Scriptures - a transposition from Christ to the Church, from Christ to each of us as His members in the Church.

But here, finally, the same glorious perspectives are opened out to us that His cross opened out to Christ He Who, according to an interpretation commonly given by the ancient commentators to a phrase of the Epistle to the Hebrews, “Did not hesitate to suffer in view of the joy that was proposed to Him” (Heb. 12:2). The total interpretation of the Scriptures, that is, should always lead us to the eschatological perspectives of the “ Jerusalem from on high which is our mother” according to the phrase of St. Paul (Gal. 4:26), of that “Bride of the Lamb, coming down from heaven like a wife adorned for her husband,” according to the final vision of the Apocalypse (Apoc. 21:2). Thus it is revealed that the mystery is not only Christ and Christ in us, but “the hope of glory....”

THE little that has just been said indicates clearly how the Jews already legitimately saw the full sense of the Scriptures as developing in a moral sense interiorized for each believer, and in an eschatological, apocalyptic sense in which “the figure of things to come” was discerned in the features of the events of old. And our discussion should suffice to make clear, above all, the soundness of the threefold significance which Christian tradition recognizes in Scripture now that Christ has come: going from the allegorical sense properly so called (as St. Paul defines it in the Epistle to the Galatians and all the Fathers after him) to the tropological sense, and finally to the anagogical sense - one single spiritual meaning opening out all its depths in a strict continuity

The allegorical sense of St. Paul and the Fathers means that in Christ is definitively realized everything that foreshadowed Him in ascending towards Him and preparing us for Him. This meaning is transferred to us by the tropological sense, which is not simply any kind of moral application of Scripture to each of us, but that very definite application resulting from our faith in the life of Christ in us. And, in turn, this tropological meaning, by virtue of the perspectives it opens out to our hope - of the fullness of Christ becoming our own fullness - finds its final flowering in anagogy, the anticipated attainment of the eschatological realities. As we shall see later on, this anagogical sense becomes - in the final meaning given to the term by the Fathers, the mystical sense of the Scriptures - the meaning which causes us to discover to the degree which is possible here below, the experience by anticipation of everlasting life

These two last transferences, of tropology and of anagogy, to which we shall also return later on, are, it should be noted, intimately connected with the sacramental life of the Church. This life, as we shall soon see, is where we are to find the Mystery of Christ as the life of,’ Christ in us, the hope of glory.

This is the teaching particularly of the Fourth Gospel. Scientific exegesis has clearly brought out the fact that, for St. John, in the sacrament, baptism or eucharist, “what takes place on earth” (3:12) actually has as its content, “what takes place in heaven”: birth of water, birth of the Spirit; not only new birth but birth from on high - eucharistic bread, bread of heaven; the flesh of the Son of man, but that flesh become” Spirit and life,, by the cross and the resurrection.... It is for just this reason that the reading of this Gospel traditionally took place during Passion and Easter-tide: to reveal to us how the cross of Christ, relived by us in the sacramental liturgy, leads us like Him, with Him, in Him, by suffering to glory, by the elevation on the cross to the elevation of the Ascension

THE liturgical life of the People of God not only teaches us objectively about the Mystery of Christ in which all the Scriptures converge and from which their intelligibility shines forth. This life also gives us the subjective method, as it were, whereby the divine Word is to be assimilated, the only method which enables our understanding to be an assimilation, not only intellectual, but truly vital

Indeed, the manner in which the Church, in her liturgical assemblies and above all in the Mass, reads the Bible and meditates on it teaches us in action how all spiritual reading of the Holy Scriptures should be pursued and how an appropriate meditation should be carried out so that we assimilate the Scriptures as we ought

The tradition of the Church does not limit itself simply to bringing together texts of the Old and of the New Testaments in such a way as to illuminate their meaning by having us go from one flowering of the divine Word in sacred history to another, from Moses to the Gospel of St. John by way of the prophets and the apostles. It surrounds each reading of a particular text with everything apt to facilitate the living assimilation required. It is in the most ancient forms of the liturgy of the Word, those which have best preserved the primitive pattern, that what might be called the Church’s classic method of meditation can most easily be grasped. The finest examples are provided by the great reading-service of Good Friday and the Easter Vigil as it used to be, before the recent abridgement reduced it to a form almost as condensed as that of most of the other Masses.

In these examples we see how all the ancient vigils of reading the divine Word were conceived. A basic element was simply repeated a greater or smaller number of times in succession, following the ascending progress of revelation, according to the rhythm we have already explained, from the Torah to the prophets, from the prophets to the teaching of the apostles, finally culminating in the Gospel. And this last was always given a timely commentary in the homily preached by one of the successors of the apostles or one of their collaborators, a priest of the second rank.

In the structure of the basic element thus repeated, a structure which is practically invariable, is contained what we have just called the Church’s own method of meditation.

Each reading is accompanied by three elements, harmoniously associated with it in such a way as to ensure its full flowering in the believing soul. These elements are responsorial chant, personal silent prayer (guided if necessary by a discreet directive from the deacon), and finally the collect prayer, in which the bishop or priest presiding over the liturgical celebration gathers together, in a brief formula publicly pronounced in the name of all, what should have been the object and the fruit of the private meditation.

As we go on to examine responsorial psalmody, the first of these complementary determinants of biblical reading, it may not be irrelevant to recall the fact that, in the tradition of the synagogue, the reading of the holy Word itself was a chant, a musical recitative. We know that the Hebrew text of the Bible in the recension called the Massoretic (that is, traditional) includes, together with the vowel-points indicating the correct pronunciation, a series of accents to make the public reading of the text a true liturgical chant. This method of chanting the sacred text is explained in part as a measure for making sure that everyone in a fairly sizable gathering would be able to hear the reader clearly

But such an explanation alone is obviously inadequate. We need to add that, in the traditional conception, first Jewish and then Christian, the reading of the sacred text is never a simple “lesson” in the sense in which we understand the word today. It cannot be reduced, that is, to the merely didactic, to a form of instruction, like that given in a class or a seminar. The reading of the divine Word in the Church is necessarily a celebration: in the simple proclamation of His Word to the world, God is glorified. To re-form this Word on our lips and to repeat it in any spirit other than this would be to profane it. It is not a word which a man can repeat in order to examine and dissect it rationally, as can be done with human words. It is a Word which of itself calls for sacred song: which is not to be uttered by any but pure lips, lips which express the holy joy, the religious fear of a heart that is not only believing and submissive, but adoring.

Under these conditions, it seems quite natural that the response aroused by the divine Word in the heart of the man who hears it should, from the outset, take on the form of a chant, and also that this chant, no less naturally, should take its formulas from those of inspired prayer. Pascal said: “Only God is able to speak fittingly about God.” We might add, “Only God is able to speak fittingly to God.” St. Paul emphasizes the fact that, of ourselves, we do not know what we ought to ask of God. This is why, he adds, the Spirit Himself comes to the aid of our weakness and intercedes in us, for us, by ineffable sighs (Rom. 8:26). If these sighs are to be expressed, how ought they to be, except first of all in the words which the Spirit Himself has dictated to us

Once again, in the dialogue between ourselves and God it is He Who takes the initiative in speaking to us. It is He alone, again, Who can create in our heart the response that His Word expects from us. This is precisely the reason why prayers are included in His Word, those prayers which are the models of all others, the Psalms and other biblical canticles.

It is normal, therefore, that the first response aroused by each reading of the Word should habitually be taken by the Church from the collection of Psalms, or, more generally, from among the scriptural canticles. And it is typical that these inspired prayers should in fact be songs, words in which faith does not reason, does not even describe, but sings what it believes

For this faith which the Word wills to create in us and which should be the first and the last utterance of the prayer that responds to the Word is neither a cold judgment nor the expression of artifically elaborated sentiments. It is the exultation of our whole being, ravished in the contemplation of the Mystery discovered in the Word. For this Mystery is essentially the gift of God, and this is to be understood not so much in the sense of its being one or another particular gift that God has given us of what is His, but in the sense of its being the gift of Himself a gift in which it is He Who gives and He Who is given

The contemplation of this gift, a contemplation which cannot remain detached from what it contemplates, a contemplation which prostrates us in grateful adoration only to lift us up at once into a pure gladness wholly open to, wholly given over to Him Who has given us everything - such a contemplation is at the heart of a faith that is truly living. The Word is not truly welcomed for what it is, by a true faith, except when the prayer that welcomes it, that adheres to it, takes on this character.

This is why, although as we shall see, contemplation is the term which should be used to describe the highest states of Christian prayer, nevertheless no prayer is truly Christian unless it is fundamentally contemplative from the outset. The contemplation of which we are speaking here, it must be clearly understood, is not some kind of aesthetic exercise; this would not wholly engage us in our prayer. It is that” giving of thanks “by which, recognizing in faith the gift of God, we joyfully cry out to Him in gratitude with a love responding to His own, a love that is His own love poured out in our hearts by the Spirit He has given us - the abandonment of the whole created being to the Creator Who has given him everything.

Whether the responsorial chant be of the type found in Matins or the Gradual of the Mass (which is related to that of Matins), or one like the Tract (the continued chant of a whole psalm), or simply an alleluia verse (summing up in one word the joy caused by the gift of God), this chant is always one which has been selected by the Church. This means that the living consciousness of the People of God causes us to discern in this chant, more or less clearly, more or less formally, the major theme of what has just been proclaimed to us - the theme which is to be the object of our “eucharist,” of our prayer which is at once grateful and obedient, in the joy of faith.

As things are at present after the many rearrangements of the lectionary and of the Graduale Romanum, the continuity of theme is sometimes very loose. But if we take the series of responses at Matins still in use along with the reading of each book of the Bible, we find here the spiritual essence of each of these books as it were distilled... .And the Alleluia, into which the linked responses before the proclamation of the Gospel usually develop, is no less revealing in its own way than the most subtly interwoven series of responses. It shows us that every meditation of the divine Word, every contemplation of His mystery, finds its goal in what is beyond expression. The “jubilus” - that is, the musical vocalization of the “a” of the Alleluia - this, and this alone, can finally translate the ecstasy of the believing soul in the face of revealed truth, truth which is ultimately not an idea but a Person…

This is also why, just as the Word proclaimed and received tends toward the chant of praise, this chant in turn tends toward silence. After the burst of exaltation evoked by the singing from a spiritual understanding of Scripture, a silent, wholly personal prayer must be completed and consummated in us, in each one of us - the recognizing of the truth, the thanksgiving which is our only fitting response to the Word addressed to us.

This silence invites us, first of all, to make fully our own the prayer in which the Church engages us. It urges us to go with our whole selves to Him Whom His Word has revealed to us. Until this contact has been established there is no prayer properly speaking. Without question, this meeting with God is to be brought about in the Church, and for that matter, properly speaking, it is always the Church who is the interlocutor with God in the dialogue of prayer. But the Church, as believing and loving, exists only in us. The Church welcomes the divine Word and gives herself to it only to the degree to which each soul in her effectively does so. Here the task of each person is irreplaceable: no one can substitute for anyone else; the community, while transcendent to the individuals composing it, lives only by the grace in each one of its members.

Our personal assimilation of the gift of God, our personal association with the prayer of all in unity, can take many forms which we shall examine at length. It may be nothing more than the simple appropriation of a word, of a phrase of the liturgical prayer; it may give free rein to an outpouring all our own, set in motion by this phrase but overflowing it; it may lose itself in the simple gaze of mystical contemplation. This matters little; what matters essentially is that not only our mind - our intellectual attentiveness - be engaged, but also our heart: that core of our whole personality, that centre not only (nor primarily) of our emotions and our feelings, but of our most intimate decisions, those most thoroughly involving our whole being....

While such a prayer normally needs silence for its birth or at least its development, it should normally, a]so, end in silence. As with all conversation between persons in whom mutual affection, knowledge and comprehension have attained a certain depth, so in such an exchange there must soon come a moment when no word can suffice to express what is in our hearts, a moment in which all words are by the same token unnecessary, being both inadequate and superfluous. It is this moment in prayer which we usually call “mystical.” And there is no true prayer which does not tend toward it....

Yet, so long as we are here on earth, we cannot lose ourselves completely in this silence which is one with a perfect exchange of the Word that has gone beyond the bounds of speech. If our silence is to remain charged with spiritual substance, it needs here below, sooner or later, to resume contact with distinct words. Otherwise, the peace of the soul forgetting itself in God might, perhaps, insensibly degenerate into a simple torpor, into that vague kind of dream the emptiness of which so soon becomes equivocal and which is prey to all kinds of unhealthy “quietisms.”

If only for this reason, after such silent and wholly personal prayer, by means of the “collect” which she has the priest, pronounce, the Church brings us back, touching earth again as it were, to a well-defined traditional expression, however simple, of what she expects from God, and especially of what she has given to Him of herself in her gratitude for His own gifts. And, for souls who are not yet raised so high, whose personal prayer is only a babbling, quite as much as for those whom an ardent facility has launched into a passionate dialogue with God, this final return to a prayer which is collective, hierarchical, formulated by the very voice of tradition, is beneficial and necessary. It alone preserves prayer both from sterility and from garrulousness.

Not that the Church wishes in any way to hold down the inspiration of her children or in any way to substitute for it. But the Spirit, within her, never ceases to teach us first of all how to pray truly, in a heart-to-heart dialogue, according to the heart of God.

Unceasingly also, the witness that He gives to Himself in the assembly of His own affords us a test of our own inspirations, one which we cannot do without. The Christian who takes without distinction, as divinely inspired, every spontaneous impression, every more or less developed interior reaction of his own spirit face to face with the divine Word, is in greater danger than anyone else of stifling the Spirit by confusing Him with his own unconscious caricature. Continually referring to the sense of the Church helps such a person better than anything else to distinguish what is authentically spiritual” in himself from what is fallacious, and thus strengthens him and assures his further progress in the ways of the Spirit. Thus - by continually going back and forth between the prayer which is most personal, least reducible to any formula however excellent, and one which makes use of the most sober and pure formulae of the living tradition of the people of God-- is true prayer woven, the prayer of the Christian who in one movement becomes more fully the child of God in becoming always more fully the child of the Church.

THESE last considerations lead us straight to the heart of one of our chief concerns: that of “methods of prayer,” or, if you prefer, of the ways which lead to the systematic development of fully personal prayer. But these considerations also suggest that the problem preliminary to that of methods of prayer is that of spiritual reading: what the ancients called lectio divina.

Actually, if Christian prayer is to be nourished as it should be by the Word of God, it should always proceed from reading. This is true even when we immerse ourselves in prayer at the outset. For such prayer will be truly Christian only to the extent to which it is fed from the living store left in our memory by the divine Word, previously read or heard. And the same prayer will remain Christian only if, throughout our lives, it is constantly renewed by the persevering practice of well-made spiritual reading.

This necessity explains the misunderstanding into which people today regularly fall when they come to study the spirituality of ancient Christianity. And it indicates also why it is that so many modern efforts toward a life of prayer, however ingeniously designed from a psychological point of view, too frequently prove spiritually sterile.

In the first place, when people today read the great spiritual texts which might be called classic, such as the Rule of St. Benedict, they are surprised to find so little said in them about prayer and this little said so unsystematically.

The reason for this apparent lack is twofold. On the one hand, the Rule of St. Benedict particularly presupposes a living liturgical celebration of the type we have just described and explained: one designed to be the most practical and effective school of prayer possible. On the other hand, the Rule insists at length on the lectio divina, by which the Divine Office is as it were extended into our most personal interior life - this reading constituting the most favorable opportunity for the full assimilation in individual prayer of the riches offered to us in the liturgy.

Too frequently today, by contrast, the most carefully worked-out methods of prayer have an unhappy tendency to operate in a vacuum. Even when the Divine Office and spiritual reading go along with one of these methods, only very rarely do they form an integrated whole with it. The Office remains as it were on the margin of personal interior life. And “spiritual reading” serves more as a means of feeding or distracting the intellect with religious themes than as a direct nourishment of prayer. In these conditions, the best-made prayer, from the viewpoint of psychological techniques, has little to chew on. Let us repeat these are the conditions in which prayer begins to waver between arid ratiocination and sentimental dreaming, the conditions in which it feels frustrated by both the one and the other. The sole remedy is the return to a spiritual reading which is what it should be, carried out within the framework of a liturgical life which has been rescued from a fossilizing formalism.

AS is obviously necessary, then, we shall take up the question of methods of reading the Word of God before going into that of methods of prayer. We should realize, first of all, that there are several methods of reading - three or even four - among which we are not so much to choose as to alternate. It is from the slowly accumulated and concordant effects of these various ways that a truly fruitful prayer will finally be born - or reborn.

The first method of reading the Scripture is the one exemplified in the oldest liturgical tradition, that called lectio continua, that is, a complete reading of the whole Bible, book by book, each book being read as a whole and the whole Word of God being read each year. This way of reading might be called the foundation on which all the rest is to be built up. The Word of God, as the Bible gives it to us, is really a whole world. This world, especially for us today, unquestionably requires considerable introduction and explanation. It demands even more strictly an illumination, or orientation, the living continuation in our midst of everything that constitutes it. This is what can be provided only by the liturgical life, and this is undoubtedly far more important to the spiritual life than cultivating a type of biblical study complete with historical and philological techniques.

But this world of the Bible demands above all and beyond all that we immerse ourselves and become absorbed therein. When we have done this, and done it perseveringly, this world begins to explain itself, to a great extent at least. In any event, as a result of our having done this, many false questions, many artificial difficulties which seem embarrassing at first sight and which, frequently, are never dissipated by the most expert exegesis, simply disappear. For we must be attuned to the Bible to hear therein the Word of God as it wishes us to hear it. And this profound accord can only be the effect of long and complete familiarity.

But we need to have this familiarity become all-embracing. And we need also to make sure that the principal details and especially the contours of each of the great masses which go to make up this vast world, do not get lost in confusion. It is good, therefore, from time to time, to substitute for or to supplement the continuous reading - which is necessarily done by fragments, if not little pieces - with the reading of one or another whole book of the Bible, and insofar as this is possible, of a whole book at a time. This will prove to be the best remedy against a deceptive sense of mechanical progress, somewhat artificial, which may be engendered by the routine of a daily reading, a little too uniform in length, of one book after another, all broken up into almost equal small sections.

This is because the Bible is not a book but a whole library, admirably harmonized and coordinated, to be sure, but with each book having its own personality, each having an irreplaceable tonality like that of each individual instrument in even the largest symphony. Our understanding of the whole is, then, in many respects, in function of the renewed perception that we gain of the life proper to each element.

From time to time, it is necessary, therefore - perhaps during a period of recollection or retreat - to take one book and read it as we would read any book: as a unit and as a living whole. It is hard to believe how greatly the habitual reading of the whole Bible, progressively carried out and untiringly repeated, will be enlivened by such occasional reading, delivering us from routine and bringing out before our eyes, so to say, the individual glory of each flower in that immense garden.

But both the first and second kind of reading should, properly, be guided by liturgical tradition, especially as to the order followed in reading, so that each book will benefit from the clarification provided by the different phases of the liturgical year.

The season of Septuagesima, preliminary to the great annual retreat of Lent in which we prepare ourselves to relive the mystery of the redemption, is appropriate for the reading of Genesis: for reading, that is, about creation, sin, the first foreshadowings of judgment and salvation in the story of Noah, ending with the appearance of the people of God in the person of Abraham and the patriarchs, our fathers in the faith

The first and the greater part of Lent is then to be devoted to Exodus, to the account of the first Pasch and what followed: the wandering in the desert and the entrance into the Promised Land. Passiontide proper is dominated by the reading of Jeremias and of the “Servant Songs” in the second part of Isaias, as our immediate introduction to the Gospel narratives of the Passion and the commentary on them given by the Epistle to the Hebrews.

The Paschal season is then appropriate for the reading of the Acts, the first steps of the Church in the light of the resurrection and Pentecost, and then of the Apocalypse, in which we catch a glimpse of the heavenly glory into which the Son has preceded us. To this season also belong the Epistles of St. Peter, the first being a paschal liturgy and homily, as well as the Epistles of St. John and St. James.

The time after Pentecost immerses us first in the historical books, then the sapiential and, finally, the prophets. Isaias is reserved for Advent and Christmas time (its second and third parts are as fitting to Christmas and Epiphany as its first is to Advent). Lastly, St. Paul’s Epistles, the classic explanation of the Christian mystery, are more than ever in place during the weeks after Epiphany.

As for the Gospels - these should be the object of constant rereading, going along with all other reading. But the first part of the Gospel of St. John, dominated as it is by echoes of baptism and the eucharist, is especially appropriate to the end of Lent, and its second part, concerned with the resurrection of Lazarus and the Lord’s last conversations with His disciples, to Easter-time.

It is by way of embroidering on the basic pattern of these great types of reading that quite another kind should be introduced; that of studious reading. This is most important, without any question, in order to deepen the basic readings and to prepare for their assimilation in prayer through the ultimate kind of reading, not yet discussed, which leads directly to prayer or, rather, already is prayer. But studious reading will not be a preparation for prayer unless we are prepared for it by the, “lectio continua” consistently carried out within the living context of the liturgy. Lacking this, a more or less scholarly study of Scripture runs the risk of wandering off towards a historicist intellectualism, or toward philology for its own sake, and this the more easily when such study is pursued at second-hand. A real science of exegesis, when it is fully formed and developed - as we see from the evolution of biblical exegesis in the last fifty years even outside the Catholic Church - leads to the most spiritual rediscoveries of the Word of God. But a science derived from manuals - which is, unhappily, the science of the vast majority - unless it is ruled by the simple human vision of Scripture, guided by the tradition of the Church and illuminated by it, almost invariably degenerates into a pretentious pedantry which raises an insurmountable wall between us and the divine Word. Nothing is worse than to become amused with, wrapped up in, the mere process of stripping away the coverings from inspiration, coverings which thus come to obscure it for you.

On the other hand, a study that is solid and pursued as thoroughly as the general culture and intellectual powers of the individual permit, if it remains an instrument of the spiritual search and is not pursued in a proud and sterile isolation from the living tradition of the Church, can be of priceless benefit to spirituality. This benefit may not be immediately evident. But it will reveal itself little by little in a sense of the authentic, the essential, which will preserve us from reading our own fancies into the Word of God or from retaining merely some dry scrap or first impression of it.

It is in words, bound up with deeds, that God has spoken and never ceases to speak to us. Anything which sheds light on these words, anything which places these deeds in their true perspective is, therefore, of priceless benefit to the most truly spiritual understanding of His Word.

One of the most precious benefits of modern scientific exegesis is, in particular, to give us an exact understanding of the literary genres in which the Word of God expresses itself. To be able to distinguish what is expressed in poetic form from what is conveyed more literally, history from parable, or, again, the substance of history from its figurative clothing while discerning the meaning and the import of this clothing - all this “focusses” us for understanding the divine Word, for avoiding asking it any questions which it does not mean to answer and, at the same time, for giving ourselves effectively to what it does say, to what it does mean to say to us. And not less important is the correct historical perspective which allows us to appreciate each stage of revelation in its place in the whole and in function of the whole, and, equally, in the realization of the divine plan.

When we first begin to make use of the modem exegetical studies that have provided us with such resources, it may seem as though a gap were opening out between the vision of the Bible they provide and the one we have formed by means of immediate contact with the Bible in the heart of the liturgical life of the Church. But, if the study is pursued patiently and is deepened, this impression will be dissipated after a time. Or, better, it will become transformed into an impression of renewal and deepening with regard to those great central perspectives opened out to us in the Bible by the liturgy perspectives which meditation according to the school of Catholic tradition has already allowed us to discern.

This mutual adaptation will be the more effective, the more we avoid any one-sidedness in our study - whether it be more or less scholarly - of Scripture. Sometimes it will be helpful to apply ourselves, with the aid of a good commentary, to one particular book or to a group of books, such as those of St. Paul or St. John, and, at other times, with the aid of a book of “biblical theology” or a concordance, to follow one great biblical theme throughout the whole Bible.

This latter kind of study can result in something substantial only. on the basis of the former. But then, as if of its own accord, we might say, it enables us to integrate the historic and philological vision of the Bible with the traditional understanding of it, often regenerating the latter in such a vital way as to transfigure our whole personal spiritual understanding of the Bible. In watching ripen under our eyes, as it were, themes such as those of the Exodus and the redemption of Israel; the wandering in the desert and the search for the promised Land; the expectation of the divine Kingdom and the revelation of the Lord’s Anointed; or of the heavenly Jerusalem finally substituted for all the cities that are only of the flesh - we enter into that spiritual understanding of the Scriptures towards which all tradition guides us. And this, not by groping blindly, or by the more or less successful balancing off of approximations or mistranslations, but by the ways taken by inspiration itself to reach and touch our heart.

It is then that we are fully prepared for the final and capital form of reading Holy Scripture: the true lectio divina which leads forthwith to prayer, which already is prayer. For this lectio is fruitful in proportion to the spiritual culture of the person who gives himself to it. And it is to this culture that all the other methods of reading just described should contribute. It is the fruit which can only result from the slow, patient, persevering growth of all their interwoven fibres. Or, rather, this culture is the tree, and its fruit is the lectio divina in the strict sense of the word. Without the full growth of the tree, how can any fruit be produced which is not sick and savorless? But, by the same token, the most luxuriant growth will be like that of the sterile fig-tree if it does not finally produce this very fruit

THE lectio divina is the prime concern of the reflections and counsels of ancient spiritual literature, especially that of monastic origin. Here it appears as being the basic food (and we might also say the basic element) of all spirituality.

Such reading must always have the divine Word as its object. Yet the material does not necessarily have to be provided by the very letter of Scripture; it can equally well be a liturgical text or any other great spiritual text of Catholic tradition. It is essential, however, that the text proceed from Scripture and lead back to it; that it resemble the faithful echo which sometimes enables us to hear a far-off voice more distinctly, and which transmits only that voice, not charging it in any way with its own resonances.

This text should preferably be brief as compared with the length of time we are to devote to it. The idea is not to launch into a swift voyage of discovery, but to trace and retrace our path, to explore thoroughly, to make truly our own some part of the country hitherto known but superficially and assimilated imperfectly. Normally, we would choose a text contained in the lectio continua for this season of the liturgical year. Or else we could take a text more or less directly connected with the season, so as to have the benefit of all the atmosphere, the environment which the liturgical life provides for our meditation.

Having made our choice, we should enter upon the reading with a quiet effort to recollect ourselves, to gather ourselves together, preparing us to approach it with the attention of our whole soul. The idea here is that of reading in order to read - not what we usually do: read in order to have read. Our greatest difficulty, perhaps, in trying to appreciate and to practice lectio divina as the ancients did is that we are spoiled with regard to reading, any reading. For them, books were a rarity. It was a great thing to have a book at one’s disposal, and one made the most of it like a miser, or, better, like a gourmet who slowly savors his small portion so as not to lose the least crumb of it. Again, papyrus or parchment was expensive. Space, then, was not to be wasted, the words followed one another with no space in between; to read a text like this was a task in itself. This is why, as we see in the Acts, the eunuch from Ethiopia, reading the book of Isaias while riding in his chariot, was overheard by the deacon Philip as he walked along the road - people always read at least sotto voce. The proper sense of the Latin meditari, from which our word meditate is derived, is precisely this vocal rumination - obviously much better adapted to the purpose of impregnating us with what we read than is our kind of reading, the mere rapid running of the eyes across the printed page.

But the concentration, the special quality of attentiveness, required by lectio divina must take on a sacred motivation. What is said to us is the Word of God: in fact, it is God Who speaks to us, Who never ceases to speak to us in these words. Even though they have been fixed in their phrasing for thousands of years, He Who makes us hear them today already had us in mind when He inspired them of old, and He is always present to address Himself to us through them, as if they were at this instant pronounced for the first time.

Our reading should, then, be engaged in, pursued and ceaselessly renewed, as an act of faith in this God Who speaks to us, faith in His actual presence, faith in the present reality of what He says to us and of tile way in which He says it. While reading, we should be all adherence, all abandonment, all self-donation, in this faith, to what we hear and to Him Whom we hear behind the words being read or reread.

But this presupposes also that we give, together with this faith in the divine presence behind the text, our own presence, the presence of our whole selves, before Him Who is present to us. If we believe, as we ought, that the Word is addressed to us, to each of us, in continuing reality here and now, we must also believe that it takes into account everything we are, with all our problems, our needs, our deficiencies, and our joys as well, everything that oppresses or gladdens us, everything we do or fail to do. All this, and not merely our understanding, should be present in our reading. The Word we read is not made to remain in the head, but to descend into the heart - taking the word , “heart”, of course, in the biblical sense: not as the source of the emotions only, but as the core or focus of the whole personality at its deepest, that intimate sanctuary in which our eternity is at stake because here is where our ultimate decisions are woven and taken.

It is in this spirit, then, that we must assimilate each word, each thought of the text, going over them unceasingly until they open out and the current of the Spirit Who chose them flows freely into us. Te totum applica ad textum, rem totam applica ad te, as the exegete Bengel said: “Apply yourself wholly to the text, and apply its matter wholly to yourself.”

If we hesitate about the best way of approaching a particular text with this aim in view, it might be well to ask ourselves: what does He promise, what grace does this text offer me? What prescription does it lay down for me? The two, indeed, ultimately form but one. It is the divine promises that set us in the way of carrying out God’s commandments. And these commandments in turn have no meaning other than to open us out to His promises.

Yet we must go even further. What is true of liturgical reading is also true of lectio divina. However great the importance of the obedience God requires of us and of the faith that nourishes itself on the divine Word so as to make this obedience truly possible, every divine word summons us beyond both commandments and promises. And even in the commandments and the promises, something more than themselves draws us and moves us, something without which our faith would be vain, our obedience a formality.

This something more, the seed of which is also at the basis of everything, is what we might call the simple contemplation of the divine Word, of the revelation of Himself that God is making to us herein. In every Word of God, what matters most is God’s opening His own heart to us in it, and it is by this that our heart should be touched, changed from top to bottom. When we arrive at this point, we have truly attained something at least of that “knowledge of God” which is the sole purpose of the whole of revelation, of the whole Word of God. This” knowledge “is contemplation, the absorption of self in what we contemplate, conformation to Him Whom we contemplate, adherence, union.

When our lectio divina is worthy of its name, contemplation does not come as a kind of superstructure, as if from without. Contemplation is, even if obscurely, the prime mover of this lectio with regard to our faith, and its crown with regard to the love nourished by that faith

On the Christian reading of the Bible today, see especially C. Charlier Christian Approach to the Bible (Newman, Westminster, Md., 1958).

On the Patristic interpretation of the Bible in connection with the liturgy, see Jean Danielou, The Bible and the Liturgy (Notre Dame, 1956); see also Dom Jean Leclercq, Love of Learning and the Desire for God (Fordham, 1960).

On the Word of God in the liturgy, see the collection The Liturgy and ihe Word ol God (Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Minn., 1959) and my own book Liturgical Piety (Notre Dame, 1955).

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