How Lectio Divina Might Very Well Be Thought of As Being the "School of Prayer"

As is true of most people, I found it relatively easy to learn prayers by rote, such as the Our Father, at a very early age. Once I was a little older and got the hang of it, the Holy Rosary came fairly easily too, by keeping in mind that I should have a kind of "soft focus" on the theme for each decade while I allowed the repetition of the Salutation to Mary to detach me from my immediate surroundings so that I may enter more deeply into the mysteries of sacred scripture.

The Liturgy of the Hours was a bit more difficult, and required greater maturity. The hardest part was becoming accustomed to the mechanics of this prayer, knowing how to flip back and forth between the pages and find the appropriate text for each section of the prayer. Once I got the hang of the mechanics of the thing the prayer itself was rather straight-forward; all I really had to do was read and listen for the voice of God. Of course, even this was more difficult that it might seem at first. Frequently the Psalms for a particular hour of liturgy did not fit my immediate mood or state-of-mind; the challenge was to subordinate my thoughts to those of the Church and of Christ speaking to me through the ages. Praying the Liturgy of the Hours is an act of shifting one's attention from oneself to the Mind of the Church.

Contemplative prayer and Eucharistic Adoration took yet another level of maturity. These were more easily done with the assistance of a spiritual text, to pull my focus back to Christ when my mind started to wander, but to simply dwell in the presence of Christ required a solid background in contemplating and becoming familiar with the voice of Christ that comes through frequently reading sacred scripture. In fact, I found that praying the Holy Rosary and the Liturgy of the Hours helped prepare me for more fruitful contemplative prayer.

In all honesty, the prayer that came to me most grudgingly was Lectio Divina. I understood the Lectio as being a slow and contemplative reading of a small section of scripture, followed by silence and focusing on a passage, image or word that resonated with me. The technical aspect of the prayer was to become accustomed to the rhythm and pacing of reading and silence, reading and silence -- but unlike the Liturgy of the Hours, I was never really sure which part of scripture I should read at any given time and there was always the temptation to turn contemplation of sacred scripture into a Bible study characterized by analytical reading.

For these reasons, I thought of Lectio Divina as being the prayer that one should try to become proficient at last, after establishing reasonable proficiency in the other forms of prayer, but I think a reasonable case can be made for seeing the Lectio as the school of prayer, that helps to deepen the other forms of prayer in one's spiritual formation.

The point at which I became more comfortable with the lectio was when I moved away from an analytical "Bible study" approach to reading scripture during the prayer to listening for that single word, phrase, thought, emotion or image that I mentioned above, and turning it over and over in my mind until I heard what God was telling me.

It seems to me that the lectio might be thought of as being the school for other prayers because this skill of extracting a detail and turning it over and over in one's mind is also a fruitful practice when praying memorized prayers, the Rosary and the Liturgy of the Hours. Frequently one is tempted to treat all four of these forms of prayer as something that requires a hard focus -- identifying each segment of the text and placing it, cognitively, in relation to the whole. The method of the lectio, however, suggests another approach. All that is required of one is to grasp the strongest impression or detail and to explore it deeply. This, again, is transferable to contemplative prayer because it provides the person in prayer with something to focus on and to open paths to contemplation.

In this sense, Lectio Divina helps us to slow down and savor sacred scripture. It is the difference between our attempt to have mastery over the text as opposed to allow the text to reveal to us what is in our soul and to speak to us of what God wants us to hear.