The words on the page looked like any other words on a page. They were small, black disruptions of the white space. One line cascaded into the next, like a series of small waterfalls rushing until settling in a clear pool that read: what would it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul? 

I read these words and in them I saw my own reflection like a man looking at his own reflection in calm water. Then, something inside of me shifted. It shifted in almost imperceptible silence, like the eyes shift silently when someone else appears in the room silently, previously unnoticed. Something shifted because as I read, I did became aware of a presence there, with me as I looked into this pool of words and read them and reread them. What would it profit a man…what profit…to gain the whole world…gain the world…and lose his soul…lose his soul…lose everything.

As I mouthed the words again and again, it was as if the pool of words itself started changing. Or, the presence there with me began moving them around. I wasn’t looking at the pool of words with my reflection looking back at me. Rather, the words were looking at me and they wanted to show me something about myself, something I hadn’t seen before. There, right before my eyes, it was as if the letters were scrambled like a Scrabble board at the outset of a game and then they were put back into place and I read: what would it profit a man to gain all the souls of whole world and lose his family? 

Now, I sat before that pool of words in a puddle of my own tears. The words cut the hard crust of my heart and left me pierced and wounded, like the blade of a scalpel at the outset of a surgery. I reread the new black words on the white page: what would it profit a man…what profit…to gain all the souls of the whole world…all the souls…and lose his family. The words read my life. They read me. And they revealed something about me I hadn’t known before.

I am a lay minister in the Catholic Church. And, at the time, I had been going after my ministry like a madman. “My ministry.” That was the problem, thinking it was mine. Launching initiative after initiative, I was profiting my ego under the guise of profiting souls — so many souls, all the souls of the whole world. I was trying to gain the “whole world,” which, in my case, that meant the whole Archdiocese. All my best time and energy went to this pursuit and I could feel the life of my family slipping through my fingers like cupped water in the hands. Cupping water in the hands is an exercise in futility.

I sat there looking at the words on the page, reading them. But really, they had read me and now told me something about myself that left me wounded by the new pool of words and sitting in my puddle of tears. I felt at once desolate and consoled by this experience, simply because it was an experience of the truth and the truth wounds us with its beauty, its radiant presentation of the way things are amid the gray, murky water of the most of our lives. It presents things the way they are, but it never leaves us there. It invites change. It asks for a response.

God’s word read me that morning even as I prayerfully read them. This is lectio divina. It’s the only kind of reading that reads you, because God’s word is living and effective and sharper than a two-edged sword. He is present, somehow, in and through the text, and he speaks, personally, through what appear to be the same small, black letters on any other ordinary white page. But these words, the words of Scripture are different, and the prayerful reading of Scripture that is lectio divina is different, because it is reading for a change and it’s reading that does, in fact, change you. It’s reading that reads you.