Introduction to Lectio Divina

Some Observations:

Over the years as a seminar leader I have found the Episcopal audience to be among the best read and best educated. Although this is as it should be for those of us in the American tradition, it is not as it has always been. Indeed Lection Divina originates in a medieval world where literacy was the exception rather than the rule. The nearly universal literacy of the Roman Imperium had faded beneath the onslaught of foreign invaders, many of whom had no written language. As the literate died from plague and famine, and the privations of battle and flight, the system of education which had replenished the literate ranks generation to generation was lost. What remained were the monasteries where islands of education and learning were preserved. It was during this monastic age that Lectio Divina emerged not so much as reading but as listening. The illiterate monks were read to during their moments of silent dining.


It is important to say here that Lectio Divina is a practice, it is not worship in the same way we laity mean worship. I want to make a distinction between worship—what we lay people mostly do and are encouraged to do—and Christian practice—what the monastic religious are trained to do.

The Prayer Tradition of Episcopal Laity
We Laity are most often taught five kinds of prayer. The first of these is the prayer of adoration or worship. In the prayer of adoration we praise God for his greatness and his goodness. We acknowledge our utter dependence upon hin for all things. The Mass and other liturgies of the church are full of this kind of prayer.
The second of these is the prayer of expiation or contrition in which we acknowledge our sinful nature and ask God for his forgiveness and mercy. This in Episcopal tradition occurs in our prayer of confession during the mass.

The third of these is the prayer of love or charity. This is an expression of our love for god who is the source and object of all love. One traditional prayer begins: "O my God, I love Thee above all things, with my whole heart and soul, because Thou art all good and worthy of all love. I love my neighbor as myself for the love of Thee. I forgive all who have injured me, and ask pardon of all whom I have injured. Amen."
The fourth kind of prayer is the prayer of petition. These are most familiar with us as we come before God with our requests for ourselves and those we love. The Lord’s prayer is probably the best known of these, although we may find ourselves using this kind of prayer most often, perhaps when we are alone.
The fifth kind of prayer we are taught is the prayer of thanksgiving such as the grace we offer before meals and before gatherings.

When Prayer Becomes Practice Rather Than Worship
I want to draw a distinction here because of the word practice. Few of us actually practice prayer, I’d wager, for while these five kinds of prayer are wonderful they are not embedded in a tradition of practice.

Recently, I have been studying the new research of Positive Psychology into the nature of success. There is fascinating new research that suggests that if we want to reach expert levels of skill at anything, we much devote 10,000 hours of devoted, concerted directed practice of that art. Much of this research has been reviewed recently by Malcolm Gladwell in his new book Outliers, which I highly recommend. A great deal of his review of this research is also available on his website: Gladwell.com where he has an archive of his New Yorker articles.

We Laity seldom have time to put in 10,000 hours of devoted, concerted, directed practice of anything and given our once a week participation in church activities it unlikely that we will find ourselves with 10,000 hours of devoted, concerted, directed practice of prayer. This kind of experience is relegated to monastic environments where men and women sequester themselves from the work-a-day secular world to devote themselves to hard spiritual work. It is very interesting that many of the great monastic practices so treasured and hidden from Laity have come out from the monastery and been offered to Laity since the 1960’s. Why should this be?

How Did Lectio Divina Emerge from Its Monastic Traditions and Confines?

Thomas Keating, one of Pennington’s great friends and colleagues, writes in his Intimacy with God [Crossroads Publishing, 1996] “I also became aware of the deep contemporary hunger for spirituality. In the wave of spiritual reawakening that the Second Vatican Council seems to have touched off, young people were going to India in search of spiritual teachers. Some spent several years there under horrendous physical conditions. They adapted to poverty, exposure, sickness and bad food in order to satisfy their hunger for an authentic spiritual path.

“My thought was, well, this is fine. I was not knocking he seriousness of Zen practice or denying that many people were benefiting from it as well as from other Eastern practices. By why were thousands of young people going to India every summer to find some form of spirituality when contemplative monasteries of men and women were plentiful right here in this country? This raised the further question. Why don’t they come to visit us? Some did, but very few. What often impressed me in my conversation with those who did come was they had never heard that there was such a thing as Christian spirituality. They had not heard about in their parishes or Catholic schools if they had attended one. Consequently, it did not occur to them to look for a Christian form of contemplative prayer or to visit Catholic monasteries. When they heard that these existed, they were surprised, impressed and somewhat curious” (13-14).

The simple fact was that most Christian tradition pre 1960 did not let the Laity in on the monastic treasures of spiritual life. In fact, my guess is that the Second Vatican Council’s liberalization of the rules against sharing these traditions with Laity was based simply on the realization that they were losing market share of the next generation’s believing community. To know the truth of this all we have to do is look at the increasingly secular nature of Europe. Catholic Churches are closing all over the continent and many in America as well. Even in Memphis that was so fond of saying we have more churches than gas stations, the recent trend has been to tear down churches and replace them with more commercial establishments like Walgreens.


So Keating asked his monastic community “Could we put the Christian tradition into a form that would be accessible to people in the active ministry today and to young people who have been instructed in an Eastern technique and who might be inspired to return to their Christian roots if they knew there was something similar in the Christian tradition” [15]? So it was that in the last thirty years there has been an outpouring of these hidden monastic treasured traditions.

Among these is Lectio Divina, Centering Prayer, Christian Meditation, The Divine Hours, The Rosary, the liturgical arts of psalmody and hymnodity to name only a few of the best known and shared. In point of fact, we discover that hidden from the laity for all these centuries has been an extraordinary treasure of spiritual practices. Part of this treasure is an over arching community of spiritual directors, something we in Protestant tradition know very little about. In fact, it is my belief that it is this community of spiritual directors that enlivens these secret practices and guards them from abuse and wards the practitioner from damage. We in the Protestant community who voyage into these sacred traditions without benefit of spiritual directors will in some cases find ourselves in considerable difficulty. This is especially true I think of Centering Prayer. For the most part, however, many of these treasures are very accessible and open to those off us who are bereft of the guidance of a community of spiritual directors.

How Then Do We Practice?

Let us return for a moment to the idea of practice. We often call ourselves practicing Christians if we attend church regularly, partake of the sacraments, and attempt to lead a life led by the precepts of Christ our Lord. I want, however, to propose to you that to practice means working at a particular discipline regularly with a determined regime of encounter and coached by someone who knows what the discipline should produce. Take for example the recent hero of the Chinese Olympics: Michael Phelps. Phelps started swimming competitively at age seven. He trains six hours a day, six days a week, swimming approximately 8 miles a day or nearly 50 miles a week. He has access to a dietician who works to detect any slight food allergies that might reduce his strength. He works with a strength coach and a master swimming coach.

I wonder what would happen if we took an attitude towards our faith tradition like an Olympic athlete takes to his sport. What could a spiritual Olympics look like? What would the competitions be? How would we train? What would our rewards be? This may sound facetious, yet this is they way many traditions focus their religious. There is a kind of competition and the gold medal is Sainthood. Among priests the gold goes to Bishops, Archbishops and other worthies.


Now few of us are trying out for sainthood. We are here for community, the nurture of the Mass and the sacraments and to celebrate the mystery of life and the divine. Even so, we can enrich our lives by considering these monastic disciplines which have gone public in the last 40 years as a proper venue for devoted, concerted directed practice. These monastic treasures are time tested and proven disciplines for opening ourselves to the Divine and seeking union with the One who guides and directs our lives.

A Few Words About the Text

Having said this, I want now to turn to our text by Basil Pennington. This text: Lectio Divina: Renewing the Ancient Practice of Praying the Scriptures is a distinctly conservative text. Pennington is an old school, authentic Roman Catholic monastic teacher. You are not going to find him worrying about the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Nag Hammadi Gospels and what they might mean. You will not see him fidgeting over the Gnostic tradition or whether the Q Gospel existed. You may hear him sneer at the Jesus Seminar and the work of Crossan and Borg. You will not find in him any doubt that the Bible is anything but the living word of God from which the breath of the divine ushers when handled reverently.

What I have found in Pennington’s book is in fact a set of instructions for a mystical experience emerging from the devoted, concerted directed practice of Lectio Divina. If you read carefully, Pennington is careful to give you instruction in the basic belief system that Lectio Divina uses to transport its practitioners into spectacular religious experience. In the weeks to come I want to unearth these instructions and see if we can internalize them to make Lectio Divina the Magic Carpet it is intended to be.