Lectio divina is an ancient practice that dates all the way back to the earliest stages of the monastic movement. The spirit of it can be found in St. Antony the Great (251-356), though many credit St. John Cassian (360-435) with bringing the practice to the West from the East.

Regardless of its earliest origins, St. Benedict of Nursia (480-547) established it as a pillar of western monasticism in his Rule that became the standard for monastic life in the West.

I’ve already noted that lectio divina is a Latin expression meaning “divine reading” or “sacred reading.” It’s a reading of holy things, holy content. Reading that’s set apart. A different kind of reading.

The word lectio does not translate cleanly in contemporary English. Most simply, it means “reading.” But, nowadays, reading seems too superficial or uninvolved. Reading for information is too commonplace and nonchalant in our day and age that’s drowning in words. Skimming is standard, so “study” might be more accurate, as it gets at a kind of reading with deeper intention. However, study implies more rigorous intellectual activity than the spiritual work of lectio divina demands. It is not a scholarly exercise as we conceive of scholarship today. “Meditation” gets closer, but the contemporary usage of the word in psychology and New Age spiritualities muddies the water. The Latin word lectio gets at depth. It’s deep reading that is deep work. Lectio means deeply consuming a reading or teaching (more than simply perusing a piece of text).^[1] It is reflective and ruminative reading. Wil Derkse puts it this way:

Lectio divina is about a very slow reading of a text, preferably aloud, that the words may really be mouthed and tasted. This is reading till a word or phrase touches you, till you listen to something that as it were sticks to you. This word or phrase is then repeated aloud, regurgitated, as it were. The Latin term for this process is ruminatio—simply what you see cows doing in a quiet place, preparing the product of the first digestive process for the following phase…transformation.[2]

Derkse’s emphasis on mouthing the words takes us further. Lectio means “hearing” and hearing implies “listening.” To this point, let’s listen to Jean Leclercq, OSB (1911–1993), the great French Benedictine scholar on lectio divina:

With regard to literature, a fundamental observation must be made here: in the Middle Ages, as in antiquity, they read usually, not as today, principally with the eyes, but with the lips, pronouncing what they saw, and with the ears, listening to the words pronounced, hearing what is called the “voices of the pages.” It is a real acoustical reading; legere means at the same time audire. One understands only what one hears…No doubt, silent reading, or reading in a low voice, was not unknown…But most frequently, when legere and lectio are used without further explanation, they mean an activity which, like chant and writing, requires the participation of the whole body and the whole mind.[3]

Lectio is whole-person, whole-body reading or listening. It’s not an exercise for the mind alone but brings in broader aspects of life. The fact that lectio involves listening means it involves obedience. Again, all of this means lectio is work. More on this later, but for now let’s turn our attention to the meaning of divina.

The adjective divina means “divine.” It’s of God or belonging to God. That lectio is divine means, on the one hand, we are talking about reading whose principal object is God’s word (i.e., Scripture) or highly regarded spiritual classics. The grounds lectio divina in an objective content. Fr. Michael Casey, OSCO points out that “binding prayer to the Scriptures is an effective means of overcoming the obstacle of subjectivism and finding a way out of what had become a blind alley of blank spiritual experience.”^[4] I take Casey to mean the experience had by anyone who prays: What am I hearing? Anything? Is what I’m hearing from me? God? Someone else? Tethering prayer to Scripture gives prayer a concrete foundation and a solid sounding board.  

On the other hand, lectio being divine implies a subjective element. God and his word are alive. This means I’m not the only one reading when I’m engaged in lectio divina. No. This is reading done by two people — God and me. It’s co-reading. I might be reading God’s word, but God’s word reads me, so to speak. It pierces my core, given that it’s sharper than a two-edged sword, piercing between bone and marrow, and discerning (i.e., reading) the reflections of the heart (see Heb 4:12). Lectio divina, then, is a way of being with God in Scripture — encountering Christ in and through the sacred page. Fr. Charles Cummings, OSCO explains:

In this practice we meet God through the instrumentality of the divine word…The process is a gentle one. The Lord does not come in an earthquake but in a soft, whispering sound…The encounter takes place without drama…The encounter is real without being extraordinary or spectacular.^[5]

Lectio is hearing God and responding — it is dialogical, conversational — and this is what prayer is — relating to God. St. Augustine speaks of this when he says, “when you read the Bible, God speaks to you; when you pray, you speak to God.”^[6] The Church Fathers repeat this idea: “If we speak to God in prayer, it is because God already speaks to us first in the reading.”^[7] This is why Leclercqdefines lectio divina as “prayed reading.”^[8] And why Louis Bouyer (1913–2004), the French Lutheran minister who converted to Catholicism and became a priest, describes it in terms of assimilation. He says lectio divina is a “personal reading of the Word of God during which we try to assimilate its substance…in a spirit of obedience and total surrender.”^[9] In his apostolic exhortation on the Word of God, Pope Benedict XVI calls lectio “a prayerful approach to the sacred text.”^[10] The Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) describes lectio similarly, saying it’s “where the Word of God is so read and meditated that it becomes prayer” (§ 1177).

To bring this initial chapter to some conclusion, I believe I can say that lectio is linchpin of prayer and work. In lectio, we see “ora et labora” converge. Pray and work — the Benedictine motto does not present two discreet things but holds prayer and work together. It stresses the unity of life. Lectio divina cultivates this unity. It is spiritual work. It is reading for the heart and reading by heart.

After all this, lectio divina emerges as a mysterious, multivalent, multifaceted reality. It doesn’t evade definition altogether, but it’s certainly something that one learns through experienced. It’s more caught, than taught (which makes writing about it tricky). 

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^[1] Karen Dwyer, Lawrence Dwyer, Wrap Yourself in Scripture, 2nd Ed (Omaha: The Institute for Priestly Formation, 2013), 9.

[2] Wil Derkse, The Rule of Benedict for Beginners: Spirituality for Daily Life, trans. Martin Kessler (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2003), 37.

[3] Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982), 15.

^[4] Michael Casey, Sacred Reading (Liguori, MO: Liguori, 1995), vii.

^[5] Charles Cummings, Monastic Practices (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1986), 8–9.

^[6] Quoted in Benedict XVI, Verbum Domini, §86.

^[7] Mariano Magrassi, Praying the Bible: An Introduction to Lectio Divina, trans. Edward Hagman (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1998), 16.

^[8] Magrassi, Praying the Bible, 18.

^[9] Magrassi, Praying the Bible, 18.

^[10] Benedict XVI, Verbum Domini, §86.