The method of lectio divina presented here is the one taught and practised by Fr. Michel deVerteuil of Trinidad. He taught in a seminary in Nigeria for some years. For ten years he was rector of the Regional Seminary for the English speaking Caribbean in Trinidad where he also lectured in theology. In 1980 he set up the archdiocesan pastoral centre to promote the faith formation of adults in the archdiocese. It was at that time that he discovered lectio divina and found it to be an excellent way of enabling people:
to meet God in prayer,
to do theology and to grow in wisdom.
He was struck by the fact that this method was available to all, whether or not they had money or
formal education.

Lectio divina has to be learned slowly. It can only be learned in the doing, like cycling or swimming are learned by getting up on your bike or getting into the water.

SECTION I. THE METHOD OF LECTIO DIVINA.

1.1 We read the Bible in order to meet God.

She was a Good Shepherd sister in her late seventies when I knew her forty years ago. I remember only one story she told. When she was twenty years old she had a job in Tralee and was renting her own flat. Her plans for a bright future were falling into place. Then one day as she was passing the Dominican church she dropped in and knelt at the back. She looked up and noticed the cloth that was hanging on the front of the altar. On it was written: ‘The Master is here and calleth for thee.’ The words had a powerful and completely unexpected impact on her. She felt that they were addressed directly to her and she sensed they would cut across the plans she had made. The words —words which Martha once said to Mary when Jesus came to their home after the death of Lazarus—these now became the same Lord’s words spoken to her in Tralee, and were the beginning of her vocation to the Good Shepherd sisters.

This is a dramatic example of what Bible reading is: a personal meeting or encounter with God. The Second Vatican Council put it this way: ‘In the sacred books, the Father who is in heaven comes lovingly to meet his children and talks with them.’ (Decree on Revelation n.21). It is an extraordinary thing that God has chosen to meet us through a book. The Bible is available to everybody; the one who cannot read can listen as another reads aloud. As Catholics we are not accustomed to opening the Bible and reading it in order to meet God. And yet, though our experience may not be as dramatic as that of the Good Shepherd sister, most of us may recall some words of scripture which touched us deeply at some time of our lives: we may not have named that moment for what it was: a personal encounter with God

1.2. We read the Bible in order to do theology and grow in wisdom.

The experience of the young people reading the story of the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt highlights another reason for reading the Bible: to understand God, our lives and the world in which we live, in other words to grow in wisdom.
Theology is ‘faith seeking to understand’ – seeking to understand God and all that God has revealed, seeking to understand our own lives also and the world around us. The young people, in the light of their faith, were trying to understand their new found freedom from drug addiction, the obstacles they faced and the real possibilities they had to retain that freedom. They were doing theology and they were growing in wisdom. They were expressing their faith in their own language and playing their own indispensable part in transforming their society into a civilization of love. This is a crucially important function of Bible reading in our time.

1.3 Reading the Bible as story, not as text-book.

There is a difference between text-book reading and story reading. We read a text book to get information and objective facts. A geography textbook informs me that the highest mountain in Ireland is Carrantouhil and that it is 3,414 feet high. The human faculty which I bring to bear on a textbook is my mind, my intellect.

The first part of myself that I bring to a story is my imagination; my feelings are touched, I become excited or sad or angry as I read a story. One other faculty that comes into play is my memory; a story reminds me of something in my own experience – something that happened to me or to someone I know about.

Every story has characters, at least one; and it has movement, a plot. Without consciously deciding to do so, we identify with one or other of the characters. The movement of the story reminds us of something similar in our own lives or in the lives of people we know of. A child in our modern can identify with Cinderella eventhough so much in her story – the coach, the ball, the prince charming, the glass slipper – are alien to the child’s experience. All children, even in the best adjusted families, know from their experience, how it feels to be the smallest and weakest, how it feels to be unfairly treated or to be left out. The story reassures the child that the one who experiences all these things can still become the belle of the ball.

If God had asked us what kind of book we needed him to give us as Bible, we could have made a good case for a textbook, with a good index at the back. When we needed answers and information, we could look up the particular subject or issue in the index. But God chose to reveal a book of stories:
‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…’
‘The Lord said to Abraham, ‘Leave your country, your family and your father’s house…’
‘The Lord said to Moses, ‘I have seen the miserable condition of my people in Egypt…’
‘The word of the Lord was addressed to Jeremiah…’
‘By the rivers of Babylon there we sat down and wept…’
‘The angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee named Nazareth…’
‘When Pentecost day came round…’
Paul wrote to the Corinthians, ‘At the time when you were called, how many of you were wise in the
ordinary sense of the word, how many were influential people, or came from noble families…?’
‘Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth…’

Since God gave them to us as stories, we need to read them as stories, not as a textbook. That is to say, we bring our imaginations to them, we allow them to stir our feelings and evoke our memories.

We are so accustomed to reading the Bible with our minds in order to get its message and to discover its moral demands, that it may take us a considerable time to learn how to read it as story, allowing it to evoke our memories and lead us to wisdom.

1.4 The Method of Lectio Divina.

If we are to meet God and grow in wisdom as we read the Bible, we need a good method of reading it. Lectio divina a good method. Its Latin title reminds us that it is an old method, the oldest we may say in the Church. It was the principal way of reading the Bible in the first thousand years of Christianity. Lectio divina translates as ‘divine’ or ‘sacred reading.’ It is done in three stages: reading, meditating and praying.

1.4.1 READING. We read a passage slowly, reverently. We give our whole attention to the text itself; at this stage we are not concerned with its relationship to our lives. Our attitude is one of openness and listening. We allow ourselves to enjoy the story, to grow to love the story and to love the words of the text We can do lectio divina on any part of the Bible.

It is best not to concentrate on a large amount at one time in order to allow ourself to go deeply into the text as we read it over and over. It is usually done on the current Sunday Gospel; this puts us in communion with our sisters and brothers throughout the world who are meditating on this same passage at this time. It is recommended to read the words aloud as was the custom in the ancient monasteries.

This kind of reading is itself counter cultural. In our culture we are taught that we should have something to show for our efforts. After reading it a few times we may be tempted to say, 'I know what is in this now and it doesn't have anything more to say to me.' We may feel discouraged when we read a passage over and over and find it says nothing to us. This may be a good spiritual experience if it makes us aware of our poverty and our total dependence on the Holy Spirit to bring the words to life for us. St. James’ advice is timely when we feel we are getting nowhere, ‘Be patient… think of the farmer; how patiently he waits for the precious fruit of the ground until it has had the autumn rains and the spring rains!’ (Jas. 5:7-10).

1.4.2 MEDITATION. The reading flows naturally into the meditation. You may do your meditation with the text in your hands. Likewise you can do it as you go about the activities of the day. At this stage your interest is in the present: where is this text happening – ‘being fulfilled’ – in your life and world? You find the answer to this question in a natural spontaneous way.

Either: something in the text reminds you of something in your experience,
Or: something in your experience reminds you of the text.

In the first instance, you are reading the text, or you call it to mind as you go about your day. As you ponder over it, something in the text strikes you, catches your attention, and you ask: what does this remind me of? Suppose you are meditating on the words of Jesus at the Last Supper and you are struck by his statement, ‘No one has greater love than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.’ You ask yourself, what does this remind me of? Where have I seen this happening? At this moment, you are not waiting for the text to give you a message for your life, or to tell you what you should do. You are waiting for the text to evoke a concrete memory. You may recall a neighbour who has been looking after a sick relative with great generosity for a long time, and you recognize that there is a person who is doing what Jesus spoke of, she is laying down her life for her friend.

In these examples, we begin with the text and are reminded of something that has happened or is happening in our experience. We find an example of this in the Bible itself (Lk. 4: 16-22). Jesus read a passage of scripture from the prophet Isaiah in the synagogue in Nazareth and then said to the people present, ‘This text is being fulfilled today even as you listen.’ We believe that the Bible text we read is also being fulfilled today even as we listen.

At other times you are going about your business quite oblivious of the Bible when you see something happening which reminds of the text on which we had earlier been meditating. You see a shop assistant go to a huge amount of trouble to help a customer, and to your surprise, the words come back to you, ‘There is no greater love than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.’ We see an example of this also in the Bible. When Jesus joined the two disciples on the road to Emmaus on the first Easter Sunday evening, he did not start talking to them about the scriptures. Instead he asked them what were they concerned about in the present time. ‘What are these things you are discussing as you walk along? (Lk.24:17). When he had listened to all they had to say, he used the scriptures to enable them to understand the experience they had been living through since Good Friday.

1.4.3 THE TEXT IS FULFILLED AT FIVE LEVELS.

i) Directly between God and an individual person – as in the case of the sister who recognized the voice of God speaking directly to her in the words, ‘The Master is here and calleth for thee.’

ii) In relationships between people – e.g. the words of Jesus, ‘There is no greater love than this…’ are fulfilled in the the relationship between the generous woman and the sick family member for whom she is laying down her life.

iii) Within the individual person – e.g. as we meditate on the Pharisees condemning the woman caught committing adultery, we may recognize both the woman and her accusers within our own selves.

iv) Between a community and the wider community – e.g. a Church community or a voluntary group like Alcoholics Anonymous lays down its life in the service of the wider community.

v) Within nature (sometimes) – e.g. Jesus’ parables on sowing, mustard seeds, grains of wheat falling into the ground and dying, birds of the air and flowers of the field etc.

1.4.4 PRAYER. Prayer occurs spontaneously. As we read or meditate we are moved to pray.. In our meditation, when we are reminded of something in our experience, we pray. The prayer will be of three kinds:
thanksgiving,
repentance (or humility) and
petition.
When the text reminds us of the goodness we have seen, we pray in thanksgiving; when it makes us aware of the wrong we have done or the good we have failed to do, we ask for forgiveness. We are moved to pray for ourselves and for others. If we stay long enough with our reading and meditating we may be led to a deeper moment of prayer when we are no longer thanking or repenting or asking, but are leaving ourselves trustingly in God’s hands. This is contemplative prayer.

1.4.5 PRAYING IN THE WORDS OF THE TEXT. This is part of our Christian tradition: to pray in the words of the Bible. The most obvious examples are the Our Father and the Psalms. Here we take the words of the Bible and without changing them we use them as our own prayers. Sometimes we take words of Scripture and weave them into our prayers: we do this in the celebration of the Eucharist in the Gloria, Holy Holy, Lamb of God. We combine texts of scripture and add our own words, as in the Hail Mary. We also take a text out of its original context and with slight changes, we use it to express our prayer where we find the text fulfilled in the here and now. We do this before we receive Communion. The centurion told Jesus that he was not worthy to have him under his roof, but asked him to say the word and his servant would be healed. We recognize that these words are being fulfilled at this moment and pray: ‘Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed.’ We follow this same practice as we pray in lectio divina. You may find this difficult at first and even a little forced, but with practice and without pressurizing yourself, you will grow accustomed to it.

SECTION II. EXAMPLES OF LECTIO DIVINA.

1.1 THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS.

I would like to illustrate how the method works by applying it to the Parable of the Talents (Mt. 25:14-30). Please have the text of the Gospel in front of you. You may like to begin with a prayer for the guidance of the Holy Spirit and then read the text.

As you read this passage for the first time, see if everything in it makes sense to you. Verse 29 ('Everyone who has will be given more...') may puzzle you; we will return to this verse later. The master's attitude to the third servant may strike you as harsh. Don't jump from that to attribute to God a harshness that would go against all we know of God from the rest of the New Testament.

Now you can divide up the passage, eventhough it is all one parable:
- verses 14 to 16 set the scene;
- verses 16 to 18 describe how the three servants responded;
- verses 19 to 27 describe the time of accounting;
- verses 28 to 30 give the master's final judgment.

Now over a period of time, read this passage over and over, feeling free to stay with any part of the parable or with the parable as a whole.

1.2. MEDITATING AND PRAYING THE PARABLE.

Suppose you are meditating on the text and you are struck by the willingness of the man to entrust all his property to his servants for a long time. You admire his ability to trust people and to give them responsibility. As you ponder over this you are reminded of someone you have known who was like that. It may be someone for whom you have worked. Spontaneously you are moved to pray in thanksgiving: ‘Lord, I thank you for that person who entrusted her property to me, may she be rewarded for her readiness to trust me.’ At this point you have read, meditated and prayed.

You may continue to meditate on this same point in the story and this time you remember a time in your childhood when you were given a particular responsibility by your teacher and trusted to carry it out. You are moved to pray in thanksgiving. If you are a parent you may recall the trust you place in your own children and the benefit this has been for them. Again you thank God. You may remember a time when your teenage child complained, ‘You don’t trust me’ and you pray in petition for the wisdom to know how much responsibility to give to your children. You may think of times when you have been controlling when you should have been trusting, and you pray for forgiveness.

Notice what you are doing in this meditation: you are allowing the text to remind you of a particular person or a concrete situation. Do not be surprised if it takes you some time to learn to do this; we are accustomed to allowing the text to evoke ideas, not memories. When you ask yourself, ‘what does this Gospel text remind me of? you may answer: it reminds me that it is important to trust people with responsibility. That is an idea or an insight, not a memory. A memory recalls a concrete situation when you saw someone trusted with responsibility. Or you may say: it reminds me that I should have more trust in my children. This may be a moral obligation; it is not a memory. A memory recalls a particular time when you failed to trust your child. That memory might evoke other similar memories and you might become aware of a pattern of distrust in your way of relating to your children. We are often inclined to say: this text reminds me of what I should (or should not) do. Certainly the text has moral implications, but we impoverish our meditation if we go from the text to moral obligations instead of going to our concrete memories.

You widen your meditation to look at the world around you. You may think of a development project in your local community or one you have heard about in Africa or Asia, a project that not only gives the people what they need but also gives them an active part in making the decisions that affect their lives in that place. You pray in thanksgiving.

You may think of the whole world of nature, which God has entrusted to human beings for a long time; as you think of the ways in which we are abusing and destroying this world, you are moved to pray that we will repent and change our ways.

You began your meditation with something Jesus said. As you end your meditation you come back to him. When did Jesus entrust his ‘property’ to others? You remember the time that he sent seventy-two disciples out to preach and to heal on their own (Lk.10. 1-20). At the Last Supper he assures them that those who believe in him will perform even greater works than he himself has performed. (John 14:12) And as he ascends into heaven after his death and resurrection he entrusts his mission to them, ‘Go, therefore, make disciples of all nations….’ (Mt. 28:19).

1.3. A WISDOM MOMENT.

As you look back on your meditations you recognize a pattern: wise people in positions of responsibility are willing to share that responsibility with others and to trust them with it. If you were asked how you know this you could answer: ‘This is not something which I thought out in my head, but something I know in my heart from my own experience.’ That is a wisdom moment to which your meditation has led you. This may be a truth that strikes you for the first time or something you knew but are now seeing with a new clarity . And it invites a commitment: now that I see this, I want to live accordingly.

1.4. A CONTEMPLATIVE MOMENT.

As you moved from one meditation to another you prayed in thanksgiving , in repentance and in petition. As you come to a wisdom moment, you may find your prayer deepening, you no longer feel to make prayers of thanks or petition, you simply rest in the words of the passage. You may feel to repeat over and over a few words like, ‘He entrusted his property to them.’

You are not likely to experience a wisdom moment or a contemplative moment each time you do lectio divina, but it is always useful to ask at the end of your meditation: what wisdom did I become aware of in this passage?

1.5. A SECOND MEDITATION ON THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS.

In your first meditation you identified with the man who owned the property. In another meditation you might identify with one of the servants. Suppose it was the servant in the middle that caught your attention, the one who received the two talents. You may see yourself as a person of average ability, with two talents maybe, certainly not five. You may remember a teacher in school who encouraged you; you were not among his brightest students but he knew that you were doing your best and was always quick to say, ‘Well done’! You pray in thanksgiving.

You remember a promotion you received at work; you were not the most gifted person in the company but your faithful use of your talents was recognized and rewarded. You pray, ‘Lord, I thank you that you enabled me to be faithful enough with small things, so that you trusted me with greater things.’
You may think of your own parents or grandparents who are now deceased; you remember their long years of hard work and quiet faithful service and you are comforted to think of the Lord saying to them in the next life: ‘Well done good and faithful servant, you have shown you can be faithful in small things, I will trust you with greater; come and join in your master’s happiness.’ You may think then of the countless number of women and men down though the ages and in the present time who use their modest talents faithfully and have kept our world going; I am reminded of the words of the Anglican theologian, John Macquarrie, ‘Obscure unspectacular service is at the heart of ministry.’

1.6. A THIRD MEDITATION.

This is a very common story, even in successful families where there is always one child who is not as gifted as others. It is very common today with people who have a ‘chip on their shoulder.’”

Fr. Michel goes on to remind us that this is a story that Jesus told to challenge the people who were listening to him. Who does Jesus remind us of in this third meditation? In our world tody who is being challenged and who is doing the challenging? He goes on:
“I could think of people who challenge others in two contexts:
In the first scenario Jesus is speaking to people who are successful in life. He is saying to them, ‘You must try to understand where people who are afraid to take risks are coming from, how the fear of failure paralyzes them. Don’t condemn them. Don’t call them ‘lazy and good- for- nothing.’ Remember that what ‘they have heard’ that given this message, that life cannot be trusted. Rather than condemning them, ask yourselves whether they have heard that message from you. In any case, set about building a culture )or a family) where people don’t hear that message.’

In the second scenario, he is speaking to those who have the self-pitying mentality. He is firm with them. He says to them, ‘I understand you, but you must get off your butt; otherwise you will end up in the dark weeping and grinding your teeth. What you have heard is not true. Don’t let anyone make you try to be like anyone else.. Make the best of whatever talents you haveand that is all anyone can ask of you.’ I can think of parents who tell their children that

I saw Jesus living out the parable in his own life, when he was before Pilate. Pilate mocked him that he did not have followers to prevent him being arrested. Jesus could have answered like the servant and given into self-pity, but he didn’t.He said in effect, ‘The Father must not have intended me to have too many followere, so I know he won’t expect anymore from me. He knows that I have done my best and this will be enough for him and it is enough for me too.’ Pilate, on the contrary, wanted to achieve more than he could. So Jesus is speaking from his own experience.

I thought of black people who testify that they have made the journey to self-trust, graduates of St. Dominic’s Children’s Home who come back to help the children grow in self-confidence; I thought of members of Alcoholics Anonymous. It is a crucial message for people who suffer from victim syndrome, very common in Trinidad and Ireland too, I suppose, at least before the Celtic Tiger days. We celebrate those who have been Jesus for us: leaders, parents, teachers, etc.

1.7. MEDITATING ON A DIFFICULT TEXT.

For to everyone who has will be given more, and he will have more than enough;
but from the man who has not, even what he has will be taken away. (Mt. 25: 29).

I promised to return to this verse. Is Jesus advocating that the rich should get richer and the poor get poorer? It is essential to the method of lectio divina that you see yourself as a partner in dialogue with another partner, the text. You are not a passive listener. You come to the dialogue with your own experience and with your convictions. However, the dialogue must be between the text and what is best in yourself, not with what is worst. A selfish and greedy person could interpret the text to say that the capitalist system is right and that God wills that those who have a lot, should have more. If you allow the text to speak to what is best in yourself – your generosity, compassion, humility, your willingness to trust and to risk – then you cannot accept such an interpretation.

Fr. Michel adds the following point: often in the history of Christianity, what seemed an ‘evident’ meaning of Bible texts was totally against the teachings of Jesus and was interpreted in a way that tolerated or even encouraged self-righteousness, violence, the acceptance of slavery etc. We read the Bible in the light of ‘the signs of the times’ too, that is in the light of the noblest aspirations of our culture, which often challenges the culture of the Church, e.g. on the issues of racism, sexism, elitism, authoritarianism etc.

What then does this verse mean? William Barclay says that it lays down a rule of life which is universally true. If we have a talent and exercise it, we will progressively be able to do more with it; if we do not exercise it we will inevitably lose it. He says that this is equally true of playing golf or playing the piano, singing songs or writing sermons. (Commentary on St. Matthew. The St. Andrew Press, Edinburgh, 1967. p.358).

You may recognize from your experience that the same is true of the exercise of virtues like courage, endurance, fidelity and trust. The Russian dissident, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, reflecting on his long years of persecution said, ‘Long periods of well-being and comfort are in general dangerous to all. After such prolonged periods, weak souls become incapable of weathering any kind of trial… But strong souls in such periods are still able to mobilize and to show themselves and to grow through this trial.’

3. WISDOM AND MORALIZING.

3.1 MORALIZING

Michel deVerteuil says that for many people reading the Bible is like visiting a fussy aunt or uncle when you are a child: they will always point out something that is wrong with you; your hair is not properly combed or your words not properly pronounced. Many read a passage of Scripture and their meditation is:
‘I should do this,’
or
‘If I were a better person I would be doing this.’
Preachers are similarly tempted:
‘This is what Jesus did;
my dear people, is this what you and I do? (The answer is presumed to be No).
Therefore, let us begin to do this.’
People may have come to church with several burdens; after the homily they go home with an additional one.
A young mother took her four year old child into her local church to say a prayer one afternoon in the early 1960’s. A few people were praying in different parts of the church; there was not a sound to be heard. Before she noticed, her child trotted up the aisle and into the pulpit. She leaned over the pulpit and said loudly, ‘You mustn’t touch the new Singer sewing machine.’ Then she trotted back down the aisle.

3.2. WISDOM.

The way of lectio divina is the way of wisdom, not the way of moralizing. It took me a long time to see clearly the distinction between the two. If you meditate on the beatitude, ‘Blessed are the gentle; they shall have the earth for their heritage’ and your conclusion is ‘I should be more gentle,’ you are not following the method of lectio divina. In lectio divina you ponder over ‘the gentle’, the non-violent.

You go from the Gospel verse to memories of your experience.

Suppose you are reminded of a teacher who was gentle even with the most disruptive pupils and never said anything that would humiliate a child; she did became school principal, nor was she known outside her own area, yet she was loved and respected by generations of past-pupils; she was gentle but she inherited the earth.
You think of great people like Aung Suu Kyi of Burma, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, who have lived by this beatitude; the inspiration they have given to millions of people and the influence they have exerted show that they have truly inherited the earth.
You think of Alcoholics Anonymous, with no money or political influence, made up exclusively of recovering alcoholics who acknowledge their powerlessness over alcohol, and yet transform the lives of millions of people.

You recognize the pattern in all these memories: it is courageous gentle non-violent people, not the rich and the powerful, who transform the world. And you sense how extraordinary this is, and what a wise and wonderful way to live this is. This wisdom makes you aware of its moral implications and invites committment; it invites you to renounce what is violent in your attitudes or behaviour and moves you to embrace and to promote this gentle non-violent way of living.