Faith and Lectio Divina

What is it to speak about a faith context for lectio divina?  In the first place, what is lectio divina?  This reverenced way of prayer in the Church centres us on the encounter with Jesus Christ in the word of Sacred Scripture. 

Lectio divina – literally, sacred or divine reading – is the prayerful, slow and attentive reading of Scripture, waiting, as we do so, for Christ to address himself to me personally in the living word. 

I don’t think it should surprise us if we say that lectio cannot happen without an at least presumed personal faith life.  In other words, lectio divina and a living and active faith in Jesus Christ go hand in hand – without the latter lectio is just what it says it is: “reading”.  The scope of this piece is precisely to say something about this relationship, and how faith, in so far as we can say something about it, is both a context in which lectio divina happens fruitfully and an end to which it is directed.

In the first place, we aim to move aside, for the moment, what we might call the content of faith, in other words, the things that we believe, the hierarchy of truths, the articles of the Creed, all the questions and answers that gave birth to countless catechisms over the centuries, right up to our own day.  Now we are trying to say something about the very principle upon which our belief and being Christian hinges – in this case, faith is now something which necessarily transcends all those intellectual structures and proofs and becomes centred, we hope, in the transformational truth of the Incarnation, the Word made flesh.  Faith derives from this single, and singular, truth about what God has done definitively, and which we have come to know, albeit in some limited way, as the only truth which is worthy of our attention.  Be that as it may, we need some articulated description which allows us to begin somewhere.  So, this is what that excellent little handbook YouCat (the Youth Catechism of the Catholic Church) says about “faith”:  

Faith is knowledge and trust.  It has seven characteristics:

• Faith is a sheer gift of God, which we receive when we fervently ask for it
• Faith is the supernatural power that is absolutely necessary if we are to attain salvation
• Faith requires the free will and clear understanding of a person when he accepts the divine invitation
• Faith is absolutely certain, because Jesus guarantees it
• Faith is incomplete unless it leads to active love
• Faith grows when we listen more and more carefully to God’s Word and enter a lively exchange with him in prayer
• Faith gives us even now a foretaste of the joy of heaven

Not many of us, I would imagine, would think to start at this point and with such a description – it is, at face value and on a first reading, fairly daunting, after all – but essentially this provides a fitting departure point.  Above all, the immense generosity of God who gives us this gift abundantly in response to the free choice of the person to seek this context for relationship should stop us in our tracks.  The business of faith, and a faith life, presupposes a relationship in which both parties act with utter freedom, as themselves, seeking the other as they are.  The text roots us firmly in the notion that faith is a matter which is inseparable from love, and this love is what we would expect evangelical love to be – active, in the sense that it expresses itself by being creative.  In other words, it finds its fulfilment in being directed toward the other rather than toward myself.  Faith should allow us to do just this: to turn ourselves toward the other with an ever greater degree of completeness and selflessness in which our personal fulfilment – our becoming fully ourselves, the person whom God has called into being and whom God continues to call to the perfection for which he has always intended us – is inevitable, because God wills it.

But really, lying at the heart of our consideration, we must listen to what St Paul writes to the Romans, since it is utterly formative for the marriage between faith and lectio divina:

“So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes by the preaching of Christ.”

(Romans 10:17)

This is arresting from the point of view of lectio divina – faith doesn’t, for St Paul, come from what is read, but from what is heard!  But none of us who treat and approach lectio divina as the central act of prayer in our spiritual lives can really dispute this – we do so in order to hear another speak to us, so that we can be open to the Word who speaks his word to us, ever new and as if it were being addressed only to me.  To hear in this instance is to receive something in an entirely new way.  We’ll say a little more about this next time.