Like water on rock

Let the divine word reshape your heart

Gina Dittmer, “Red Rock Erosion Steps”

This is the first of an occasional series on the practice of lectio divina (divine reading).

Rabbi Akiva, scholar and sage, reached the age of forty without learning anything, not even how to read. Standing at a well one day, he noticed a hollow in a stone, and asked the people, “Who made this hollow?”

They answered that the water, falling on it continuously, day by day, had worn the hollow in the stone, and then asked him if he did not know the passage from Job that said “the water wears away the stones.”

Pondering this, he said, “If the soft has so much power over the hard as to bore a hole in it, how much more power will the Torah, the words of which are as hard as iron, have over my heart, which is flesh and blood?” And he at once turned his mind to learning how to read so he could study the word of God.

Our resolutions are rarely as so firm and fruitful as Rabbi Akiva’s, but his lesson is an important one: small and steady application can yield outsized results, and when we apply that effort to our communion with God, our stony hearts can, bit by bit, be transformed. Few of us are poor shepherds who first need to learn to read before we can encounter God in the written word. Indeed, many of us squander countless hours reading trivialities which either fail to nourish our hearts and may even lead us further into sin, rather than those words that ignite our hearts with the very spark of divine life and love.

At the heart of Benedictine spirituality is the written word in two major forms: the Liturgy of the Hours and Lectio Divina. Both are, in a sense, “lectio divina,” since each is a kind of sacred reading, or reading as praying. Together they sanctify time and the intellect, while keeping aflame the love of God in our hearts. Indeed, if we submit to them they will, drop by drop, transform us.

In his rule, St. Benedict directs his monks to pray the Divine Office at specific intervals and spend several hours a day absorbed in books, either through reading or listening. For Benedict, this holy reading was a source of nourishment, spiritual energy, and communion with God, the church, the order, and the world.

Personal, silent reading was still an oddity in the sixth century. Books were expensive and time-consuming to produce, and light or casual reading would have been unknown to monks. Whatever was read had to be worthwhile. The book was a doorway to someone wiser than the reader or, in the case of scripture, an actual window into the mind of God Himself.

Reading was both an individual and a communal act, likely done in community using collectively owned books. In the case of either Scripture or the Church Fathers, the individual soul was being moved to insight, wisdom, knowledge, and communion with God. There was certainly a shared sense of understanding, but the unique movement of his soul towards truth, and therefore towards God, were his own, and thus were unique to each individual. Some of these individuals had such a new way of seeing that their own words would be read and studied by later generations. Thus, the continual renewal of the Christian spiritual and intellectual tradition was powered by the water wheel of contemplative reading in a scholarly or monastic setting.

This practice of reading the past in the present opens a dialog across space and time. The past lives on the page and in the word. The communion of saints is with us in prayer and at worship, invisible battalions of faithful always by our side and ready to pray for us. Some of them were also in our ears and eyes and thoughts, their words transmitted down to us through the year providing an ever-burning, constantly renewed light of wisdom. The saints spoke, and we responded in our minds and in our hearts. Thus, an ongoing conversation ripples through all Christian history, grounded in revelation and continued by the faithful, wearing a more perfectly God-shaped hole in our stony hearts.