Whatever other methods of prayer we may at times find helpful, we must never forget and always turn back to the Scriptures as the Christian prayer book par excellence.

Lectio Divina – Divine Reading

In vocal prayer, despite the time given to brief moments of silence, we have been doing most of the talking. However, for prayer to lead on to generate the quality of love that will alone permanently change us for the better, we must learn to listen. If our spiritual life is to deepen we need to learn to stop talking and listen, to be silent and to allow ourselves to be loved. This is why all authentic Christian prayer begins not by flinging ourselves into obscure states of transcendental awareness, but by trying to listen to God’s words as embodied in the words of Jesus Christ. This is how the early Christians used to pray in a method of prayer that later came to be called Lectio Divina or the divine or sacred readings. It was so called, not just because they believed the words they read were inspired, but because they also believed that they too would be inspired by the Holy Spirit as they read them. They believed that through these sacred readings they would be led on and into a profound dialogue with Jesus that would lead them on and into “the love of Christ, which is beyond all knowledge, where we are filled with the utter fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:18–19).

Whatever other methods of prayer we may at times find helpful, we must never forget and always turn back to the Scriptures as the Christian prayer book par excellence. In the Middle Ages, a Carthusian monk called Guido coined four Latin words that have been used ever since to describe the four steps of Lectio Divina or Christian Meditation. They show how they can lead serious-minded Christians onward to experience the love that surpasses all understanding. These Latin words are only used to sum up the way ordinary Christians prayed from the earliest of times, enabling people who had not known Jesus personally to love him. The words are Lectio – Reading, Meditatio – Reflecting on what is read, Oratio – Reacting in prayer to the sacred texts and Contemplatio – Relishing, while reacting in fewer and fewer words, and then in silence, to the love that is experienced. Many of the early Christians knew whole passages, if not all the Gospels by heart. They had no other prayer books to hand, nor did they have need of them. When the first Christians used the scriptures, most particularly the New Testament, they were not interested in how much they read, but in how deeply they penetrated the sacred texts in their search for wisdom.

The wisdom for which they searched was not a body of facts, but a body – a mystical body full of loving, who continues to love now as he did when he was on earth. They would read a few verses at a time going over them for a second and a third time, poring over them, entering more profoundly into their dynamic inner meaning. Then they would pause in moments of deep interior stillness to allow the same Spirit who inspired the scriptures in the first place, to inspire them too, with knowledge and love for the man who had come to redeem them. When they had savoured one text, they would reverently move on to another, and then repeat the process, leaving pauses for silence for the impact of the words to seep into the very marrow of their being. As this prayer grew more and more intense, the moments of silence would become more and more prolonged, and as love blossomed, words would naturally give way to periods of profound inner contemplative loving.

Now before going any further, I want to make an important point that we should never forget. When we say that God created us in his image and likeness, we mean that it is God’s love that is deepest in us, despite what nature and nurture has done to distort it. When least distorted, it not only mirrors God’s love, but in some mysterious way it embodies it deep down within us. And it is from this love that a primeval prayer rises and takes the form of a desire to touch and experience the ultimate source of all love which is God. It is this God-given desire to return to the One who made us that I want to highlight because it is the continual and ongoing impulse that must be supported and sustained by the various methods of prayer that I will propose. The methods will change, but the God-given desire that they support will never essentially change except in its strength. All that will happen is that the desire that is so subtle to begin with becomes stronger and stronger, as it is fuelled and finally purified, to attain the union for which it craves. It is because this inner spiritual growth cannot be seen that it has been called from the beginning a hidden, secret, or mystical growth or journey. The word mystical is derived from the Greek word that simply means secret. A person who gives over their life to taking part in this secret hidden journey came to be called a mystic. The study that specializes in studying this journey and in guiding people through it is called Mystical Theology.