Lectio Divina
A Grace-filled path to resting in God
By Thomas Keating
(Page 2 of 2)
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This is already a deep form of receptivity. Those
who practice Lectio in this way are already moving toward the fourth moment of
this dynamic process which is resting in God. In response to a new insight, they
might be inclined to express silently interior movements of love, praise or
gratitude. As this listening attitude stabilized, they might experience moments
of contemplative prayer in which they are just present to God, or quietly
engulfed in the divine presence. In this situation, one's attentiveness to God
expands into sheer awareness of the divine presence. One breaks through the veil
of one's own ways of thinking. The external word of God in scripture awakens one
to the interior Word of God in one's deepest self. When that awareness
dissipates, one may go back and read more of the text.
This monastic way of doing Lectio Divina begins with
prayer to the Spirit. The four moments along the circumference of the circle are
the same as in scholastic Lectio--reading in the presence of God, reflecting in
the sense of pondering (not in the sense of discursive meditation), responding
with spontaneous prayer, and resting in God beyond thoughts and particular acts
of the will.
By "pondering" I mean sitting with a sentence,
phrase or even a word that emerges while reading the text, allowing the Spirit
to expand our listening capacity and to open us to its deeper meaning; in other
words, to penetrate the spiritual sense of the scripture passage. This leads to
listening with the heart, with one's whole being. This in turn leads to the
experience of the living Christ and increases the practical love for others that
flows from that relationship.
As we repeat the phrase, sentence, or word slowly, a
deeper insight may arise. For example, take the words of Jesus, "I will not call
you servants but friends." All of a sudden, it might dawn on us what it means to
be the friend of Christ. Our awareness expands without our having done anything
but allow the Spirit to act. We think the text but we do not think about the
text. If we are thinking in the sense of reflecting, we are dominating the
conversation. That can be done fruitfully at another time. Here it is a question
of receiving the Spirit and resting in Christ's presence.
To benefit fully from Lectio its integrity has to be
respected. The ripe fruit of the practice is assimilating the word of God and
being assimilated by it. It is a movement from conversation with God to
communion with God. It enables us to express our deep experience of union with
God in words and symbols that are appropriate. There is thus a movement not only
into silence, but from silence to expression and action.
In the Trinity, the Eternal Word is always emerging
from the infinite silence of the Father, and always returning. The persons in
the Trinity live in each other rather than in themselves. The Father knows
himself only in the Son, the Son only in the Father, and the Spirit expresses
their unity, bringing together in oneness relationships that are infinitely
distinct. The Trinity is the basis for the oneness and diversity that we see
around us. In this way of doing Lectio, one is recognizing the presence of the
Word of God in everything and in every occurrence, experiencing what the author
of Saint John's gospel wrote in the Prologue, "Without Him was made nothing that
has been made." In contemplative prayer, we are in touch with the source of all
creation; hence, we transcend ourselves and our limited worldviews. As a result,
we feel at one with other people and enjoy a sense of belonging to the universe.
The fullness of the Godhead dwells bodily in Jesus, according to Saint Paul. The
Divinity dwells in us bodily in proportion to our capacity to receive it as we
grow in union with Jesus, the Eternal Word of God made flesh. This process needs
to be nourished both by the interior silence of contemplative prayer and the
deep listening of Lectio Divina.
The scholastic method is a good way to learn Lectio
Divina whether privately or in a group, but at a certain point when people have
developed a certain ease doing it, we would do well to explain the monastic
method of Lectio, which is oriented from the start toward resting in God and
establishing us in a listening attitude. The dynamic interaction between the
four "moments" of monastic Lectio--reading, reflecting (in the sense of
pondering a particular text, phrase or word), responding with acts of the will,
and resting in God--puts us more and more at the disposal of the Spirit.
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