Hi S.,
Please find below my answer to your question regarding Lectio Divina. My answer here is very important since it underlines various important aspects of the practice of Lectio Divina. Some people, unknowingly, don’t implement them and they therefore don’t reach the completion of Lectio Divina. This resembles an “abortion”. Here is your question:
“I just finished an hour of Lectio Divina, and this is what I got from it. The reading about the Blind man of Bethsaida… I never saw it that way…. It revealed my own journey… Jesus took him by the hand out of the village… maybe things that I was comfortable and used to… He used spittle on the eyes of the blind… From Jesus’ mouth to the blind man’s eyes… Only God’s word can make me see…It was a gradual healing…. For me it meant that God will always finish what He started because He is faithful…. And He said do not even go into the village… in my life now it may mean to avoid occasions to sin and to trust in the new way of praying He is introducing to me, not to go back to the old ways of my life. Jesus healed the blind man outside of the village… meaning, true healing can only come through Jesus but not on our own terms, and not the way we want it to. I’ve never seen that particular Gospel passage in this way….
And the first reading about Noah meant process of growth… there are stages… but God will see us through, again He is faithful.
It took me the whole hour to get something from the reading…. Is this Lectio Divina? Am I doing it right?”
Lectio Divina has like three stages in the process of listening:
a- Reading the text and understanding what it says, using our normal intellectual capacity.
b- The supernatural action of the Holy Spirit starts to work in us: the two texts say one thing. (This is led by God Himself)
c- The supernatural light becomes a clear indication for today to do something. (This is indicated by God Himself)
It goes without saying that going from "a" to "b" is a real crossing, because in "a" we are left with the normal strength of our faculties, even if we have faith, but what they reach and achieve is limited. We actually use what in theology is called: the general help of the Grace of God. While in "b", God’s power is communicated to us, the mind (intellect) is lifted by the Holy Spirit from its own ways of functioning to a higher supernatural level. So our mind starts to see God’s loving light with God’s eyes. This is in itself an achievement, because in this case we witness a “miracle” happening to us: the real immediate and personal action of the Holy Spirit who starts to bring the text of the Scriptures to life, it is as if the “Word of God” is being addressed to us personally through the Scriptures. The specific process of (supernatural or infused) contemplation of Lectio is now starting. (This is not to be confused with the specific contemplation of the Prayer of the Heart which is different.)
But the temptation here is to rejoice in this contemplation, delight in savouring it but to bring to an abrupt halt the descent of the Word of God in us thereby aborting lectio, aborting the supernatural Work of God. God’s Word must descend fully, from the highest point of our mind, to the lowest part of our will.
I have noticed that many people just remain at this stage and don’t move forward. Remember the very common way today of presenting Lectio Divina - which is truncated – which seems to allude to the fact that Lectio ends at this stage (a gaze of contemplation): "read => meditate => pray => contemplate". (See stage 8 in the fifteen steps, "Read (3) until I see only one light" which describes this stage and shows that there are other stages after it. Please see here: https://schoolofmary.org/lectio-divina-1-definition-steps/)
From what I have read above, you seem to have reached this stage in the Lectio Divina you did that day. As you can see, you rejoiced in the fact that it is new: "I have never seen it this way". So you are witnessing the action of the Holy Spirit in you. Your mind tastes this newness that God only can give.
There is one further important step at this first stage of listening - the following and last stage being the “Putting into Practice” – that is, having a clear indication of God’s message on how to act. So, the light itself you received and started to rejoice in should continue its journey until it reaches the juncture with your will, that is, it should reach a level of clarity that will allow you right after to put into practice the clear indication given to you by God.
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| The Turquoise Arrow Stops in General Contemplation The Blue Arrow Reaches Clarity |
How do we reach this stage of understanding clearly what God wants to say to us? How do we reach such clarity while Contemplating? It is by begging the Lord something along these lines: “ok Lord, you started to show me something about my life, "I never saw it this way", "I never saw this text this way", "this is new": but what do you mean by that in practical terms? How do you God (not me) translate it in a practical way?
Beg, insist, until the light that has started to work in you becomes clear, as if God were saying: “S., as a consequence of what I have just made you see or understand in a general light, look for how this general light is becoming clearer as we talk clear and is ready to become incarnate in you today. As a consequence, I would like you to start doing this today…
In this case, the process of contemplation will be orientated properly. In fact, contemplation is not about climbing to the clouds, but it is about going from God (the clouds if you will) to the lowest part in us, in fact it is going in the opposite direction, the direction of incarnation: i.e. a Word given to us from God, starting its journey from high above, going down, crossing our entire being, in a beautiful sacred descent (like what happens to Our Lady during the Annunciation) where the Word crosses our mind, from its upper part to its most practical part, and is about the cross from our mind to our will, generating an act. A sacred act that finds its origins in God and is working in a participation of our mind and will with the thought and will of God.
Once the Word, the Light of this contemplation, reaches this junction between "what I know" (our mind) and "what I do" (our will), it becomes clear and visible, the Word of God is pointing its finger or tip (tip of a sword or arrow), toward a precise point in our Will, asking us for a specific act.
Here come the following 5 steps of implementation (see the last 5 steps in the link mentioned above on the 15 steps), marked essentially by this second and last prayer: “God you showed me what you want me to do, please Jesus help me, give me your Holy Spirit so I can put THIS received Word into practice.” Then you put the word into practice! Lectio then is a Word that became clear and then became flesh in your will, through an act.
I hope this helps.
For further reading please read these three articles, they address this issue on how to go from the beginning of the supernatural action of the Holy Spirit (one light) to the end of the process of listening, that is, understanding clearly what God is asking of us, how the one light becomes clear (from 2 to 3 of the above steps):
Note that your way of doing Lectio Divina here in this case is very common to the way the Fathers of the Church read the Bible. We see it in their Homilies. The temptation then is to transform Lectio Divina into a sort of a “spiritual reading of the Bible”, in the sense of having a “spiritual exegesis” or understanding of the text. There is nothing wrong in reading the bible spiritually, or seeing symbolically how it can allude to different aspects of our life. But this in itself is not Lectio Divina yet as you can see from the above explanations.
Many people today (unfortunately it became a trend 15 years ago) offer their own spiritual meditation on texts from the bible and they call it: “Lectio Divina on the Gospel of Matthew”, or Luke or Job, or Jeremiah…. This is really a deviation, giving us the fruits of a personal spiritual meditation and not inviting each one of us to meditate. But strangely nobody seems to bother. It leaves me speechless! How did we reach this deviation?
We see it even in presentations of Lectio Divina, like the French Wikipedia entry on Lectio Divina. It initially seemed to say that Lectio Divina was about the spiritual meanings of the Scriptures! From a method of listening to God’s Word and putting it into practice, we have transformed it into spiritual exegesis or spiritual personal meditation! How sad!
Lectio is indeed the most powerful way of prayer, the most secure (“it is not the ones who say: ‘Lord Lord’ who enter in the kingdom but the ones who put into practice the word of God”), but also the most difficult and challenging: why? Because it involves real transformation and it tackles our conscious faculties that we use on a daily basis: the mind and the will, our thoughts and our actions!
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