A practice of holy reading

10 May 2017 • Articles

Author: Terence Handley MacMath

Benedict called his ‘little rule’ a ‘school of prayer’ — a way of teaching us how to have a lifelong conversation with God. This is what we all we long for, all we need. In his school, Benedict has many lessons: silence, meditation on scripture, obedience, simplicity and hospitality; but prayer is what we learn at the beginning of Reception, and what we do at the end of the Sixth Form.

How do we begin, though? Where do we begin to find the materials with which to fashion prayer, or even a desire to pray? Who should we pray to? How do we know what to say? Benedict simply pointed to the Bible, and in his rule made the weekly recitation of all the Psalms, and six hours a day of Bible reading the opus dei — the work of God — for his monks.

The Bible tells us all we need to know. In the Gospels, we read that God sent himself in the person of Christ to share our life with us, to die for us, and to rise again to the life he shares with the Father and Spirit, opening the way for all humanity (and perhaps all created things) to become part of that life, too. In the rest of the New Testament, we read the accounts of eyewitnesses of Jesus’s death and resurrection, and the astonishing transformation their own lives showed, through the Holy Spirit. In the Old Testament, we read about God’s love affair with the Jewish people. Through Moses and the prophets, we hear God’s voice, loving, cajoling, pleading, threatening, directing. In the Psalms, we hear very human voices replying, in love, rapture, desperation, fear, hope.

In one church I attended, a favourite chorus was ‘Read your Bible every day, every day, every day, read your Bible every day if you want to grow.’ Benedict took it for granted, even in a world with few books and little literacy, and little light for reading by in the winter months, that this was exactly how you enter into a relationship with God, and therefore how you grow and pray and grow in prayer. It’s a strange and very basic thing, and perhaps we don’t often question it enough. Why should one book rule our lives? And how does it do that? The troubling thing about the Bible, when it’s used as a compendium for morals and ethics — do this, do that, ‘because the Bible says so’ — is that it can lead people into very unethical or immoral attitudes or behaviour when measured against the gospel of love we hear Jesus preach. Even some of Jesus’s words, taken out of context, can be used as weapons rather than promises. What we need to do is to read the Bible so thoroughly and so meditatively that we allow it to be for us what it claims to be — the inspired Word of God. Then know it (in any translation or tongue) in a way that allows the Holy Spirit to leap from out of page and change our thinking.

If we read the Bible in this way, not as history or instruction manual (though there’s plenty of history and practical wisdom in it) it begins to remake us. The Word lives because we come to know it by heart, and it’s free to resonate in our souls whenever we need it — to show us, warn us, illuminate something, comfort us — ‘a lamp for our path’ as one psalm says.

Benedict called this way of reading the Bible lectio divina — ‘holy reading’. Practised in groups, it has revolutionised Latin American Christianity in recent years, and is becoming increasingly known and loved in the United States and this country. It is very simple, and needs no theological training or commentaries, no priests or interpreters. It is simply taking Benedict seriously in giving time to read the Bible meditatively — to allow the words to be learned and pondered, to stick with beautiful or challenging or difficult phrases and give them time to sink in. All over the country, parish groups, even groups of friends, have started doing lectio divina together, encouraging each other to share the thoughts and reactions they have to particular passages.

In the Anglican tradition, the Book of Common Prayer gives a lectionary of two Old Testament and two New Testament readings every day, ensuring that everyone could read the Bible more or less completely each year, and pray the psalter through each month, morning and evening. New lectionaries and Common Worship will take you through the Bible at a slower pace and more selectively. Then, we begin to know why we want to pray, how to do it, and who we are praying to.