Convertisti planctum meum in gaudium mihi
I was privileged last evening to give a conference on lectio divina to a group of priests of the Archdiocese of Armagh. Here is the bare outline of my conference. My content was more developed, but I cannot reproduce in writing all that I said.
Lectio Divina: Mourning into Joy
To begin on a thoroughly cheerful note, let’s talk for a moment about clerical depression. What you may ask, has this to do with the joy of the Gospel, and what has this to do with lectio divina. The one recurring problem that brother priests share with me again and again is a kind of lingering low–grade depression or, to use an older term, melancholy. I would be inclined to use a still older term, acedia, derived from both the Latin and the Greek for a general spiritual lethargy, a weariness that affects body, soul, and spirit.
Acedia
Symptoms of acedia are restlessness, distaste for prayer and for the things of God in general, a gnawing inner feeling of hopelessness, apathy, negativity, and self–loathing. The man suffering from acedia will leave his breviary unopened for days on end. He will betake himself to the altar out of duty and celebrate Holy Mass with scant inner attention, hastily, and without savouring the liturgical texts. If he tells his beads at all, it will be with little engagement of the heart. Other acts of piety leave him indifferent, skeptical, and feeling jaded. At times he will ask himself if he is losing his faith altogether.
Lectio Divina Through the Seasons of Growth
If you have already experienced a season of acedia in your life, you already know how trying it can be. If you have not experienced acedia yet, you probably will at some time. It seems to belong to the laws governing the seasons of spiritual growth. The springtime of our hopes is followed by the summer of growth; growth is followed by a season of harvest; and the harvest, especially when abundant, is followed by some kind of death–like winter. During these winters of the soul, these seasons of acedia, nothing is more salutary, nothing more life–giving, nothing more consoling than a commitment to lectio divina. Allow me to share with you a splendid text from the 12th century. Saint Aelred of Rievaulx, the « Bernard of the North » describes his own experience — one to which we can all, I think, relate:
Brothers, however cast down we may be by harassment or heartache, the consolations of Scripture will lift us up again. . . . I tell you, brothers, no misfortune can touch us, no situation so galling or distressing can arise that does not, as soon as Holy Writ seizes hold of us, either fade into nothingness or become bearable. This is the field where Isaac walked in the evening meditating, and where Rebecca came hurrying towards him and soothed with her gentle charm the grief that had befallen him. How often, good Jesus, does day incline to evening, how often does the daylight of some slight consolation fade before the black night of an intolerable grief? Everything turns to ashes in my mouth; wherever I look, I see a load of cares. If someone speaks to me, I barely hear; if someone knocks, I scarcely notice; my heart is turned to stone, my tongue sticks fast, my tear-ducts are dry. What then? Into the field I go to meditate. I reread the holy book; I note down my thoughts; and suddenly Rebecca comes running towards me and with her light, which is your grace, good Jesus, dispels the gloom, puts melancholy to flight, disintegrates my hardness. Soon sighs give way to tears, accompanied in their turn by heavenly joy. Unhappy are those who, when oppressed in spirit, do not walk into this field and find that joy. (De oneribus 27)
Healing in the Word of God
Saint Aelred’s experience of the Word of God as consoling, medicinal, and therapeutic corresponds with what the prophet Jeremias said before him: “Thy words were found, and I did eat them, and thy word was to me a joy and gladness of my heart: for thy name is called upon me, O Lord God of hosts”. (Jeremias 15:16) This is also the experience of the psalmist in Psalm 18: “The law of the Lord is unspotted, converting souls: the testimony of the Lord is faithful, giving wisdom to little ones. The justices of the Lord are right, rejoicing hearts: the commandment of the Lord is lightsome, enlightening the eyes. The fear of the Lord is holy, enduring for ever and ever: the judgments of the Lord are true, justified in themselves”. (Psalm 18:8–10)
Antidote to Bitterness
If one is poisoned inwardly by bitterness, the Word of God is the wood tossed into bitter waters to make them wholesome and sweet. « And the people murmured against Moses, saying: What shall we drink? But he cried to the Lord, and he shewed him a tree, which when he had cast into the waters, they were turned into sweetness » (Exodus 15:24–15). Whenever I find myself tempted to bitterness, or when events, or words, or circumstances are embittering my soul, I know that there is for me, as for Moses, a remedy close at hand: the Word of God.It may be no more than a phrase, a word from the breviary, or the missal, or the lectionary. A single word is enough for what Saint Thomas says concerning the Sacred Host is equally true of the Word of God: one who partakes of the fragment receives the benefit of the whole. How often have I experienced this in my own life?
It is enough to toss a fragment of the Word into the dark and insalubrious waters that seem to be rising in my soul like a tide out of hell, for that tide of bitterness and poison to recede and be replaced by the inflowing of a living water, pure, sweet, and healthsome. If ones stands in need of conversion, it is found and given in the Word of God. If one stands in need of wisdom, joy, or light, or of the fear of God that finds expression in reverence and in adoration, or of right judgment, or of a compass that unfailingly orients the heart towards the truth, all of these are found in the Word of God. These are very things that gladden the heart, that that, as Saint Aelred says, « dispel the gloom, put melancholy to flight, and disintegrate one’s hardness ».
What God Prefers
For Israel and, consequently, for us the law of the Lord is God’s revelation of His own Heart. The Word of God makes known to us not only what God commands and requires, but even what God prefers, and the things in which His Heart delights. The Word of God is the sacrament of divine intimacy. The Word of God is a tabernacle of His presence. It is the place of encounter with Him, face to face, and heart to heart. It is a sanctuary in which God pours Himself into the souls who would pour themselves out before Him.
Priests and Their Books
There was a time, not very long ago, when a priest’s closest friends — those with whom he lived by day and by night — were his books. Before the invasion of our homes by radio, television, and internet, it was not uncommon to meet ordinary parish priests and curates with extraordinary personal libraries. There was — in the very best and healthiest sense of the expression — an ecclesiastical culture that privileged what Dom Jean Leclercq called « the love of learning and the desire for God ». Even today, it is not uncommon, after the death of a parish priest, to discover that he had long collected excellent books and been sustained by them. Being a great lover of second–hand books, I find it fascinating to discover the notes and comments penciled into the margin, the words underlined, the pages that, having been read and re–read, are worn and almost transparent. All of this is, I think, evidence of a man having passed from words to the Word, of a man having lived in the intimacy of Christ, of a man who sought His Face and listened for the unmistakable sound of His voice and, in so doing, lived out his priesthood in what Robert Hugh Benson calls, « The Friendship of Christ ».
Toxic Things
There is something unhealthy about going to one’s room after a busy day and lounging mindlessly before the television or sitting stupidly in front of the computer. One takes in all sort of unwanted and toxic things. The following morning one feels vaguely dirty, unprepared for Holy Mass, unsuited for the Divine Office. The easy addiction to television and the internet is symptomatic of a deeper problem: loneliness. Loneliness is not a new challenge for priests, but the means used to cope with it are not always, today, as effective nor as healthy as the means more readily adopted in the past. I am speaking, of course, of salutary means and not of the unhealthy and often destructive means that, even the past, rotted more than one priestly heart from the inside out.
Projectiles From Your Bookcase
I should like to share with you one my favourite passages from the writings of a twelfth–century Benedictine, Peter of Celle. It is lengthy, but worth hearing. Listen to what Peter of Celle says. Bear in mind that he revels in a kind of riotous overstatement.
What should I say about reading? I consider a room without reading to be a hell without consolation, a gibbet without relief, a prison without light, a tomb without a vent, a ditch swarming with worms, a suffocating trap. A room without reading is the empty house of which the gospel speaks, where the nocturnal and noonday devils assault the idle hermit with as many thrusts of useless and harmful thoughts as there are hours and moments in the day and night.
One who does not devote his time to holy reading disarms his ramparts of a thousand shields which might hang down from them. How quickly and easily is the city of one’s room captured if it does not defend itself with God’s help and the shield of the sacred page. Jesus, the great hermit, taught you, O good hermit, what weapons are best for opposing your assailant, the devil. Each time Satan tempted him in the desert, he replied with the words of Scripture. As a result, the devil limped away and never recovered, as though a flaming arrow from the hand of a powerful man had been stuck in the thigh of a barking dog. Search in reading’s garden for strong herbs to use as medicine against the incursions of bad angels, lest you perish from his poisonous exhalations and inspirations. Take projectiles from your bookcase so that when you are struck you may strike back at the one who struck you and force him to speak.
Reading teaches these things because it constantly tells of the clash of virtues and vices, so that this clash is never passed over in silence. Reading is the soul’s food, light, lamp, refuge, consolation, and the spice of every spiritual savor. It feeds the hungry, it illuminates the person sitting in darkness; to refugees from shipwreck or war it comes with bread. It comforts the contrite heart, it contains the passions of the body with the hope of reward. When temptations attack, it counters them with the teaching and example of the saints. By it those who have recovered from infirmity are made strong in battle. Prosperity is kept within bounds by its power, lest we glory in our good fortune. Adversity too is limited, lest we waver in it, for God indeed raises up a strong wind.
Reading holds the key of lady wisdom and opens her mistress’s writing case to a sober and humble mind. Reading makes accessible the heavenly storerooms of philosophy. From them David returned with his pockets full. So that he would not be accused of the theft, he said: “In the pocket of my heart I have hidden your words” [Ps 118:11], dividing up the storerooms of the Old and New Testaments, which yield up one thing after another. In front of persistent readers, reading places an inebriating glass, a drink seasoned with costly spices. Reading displays a steaming oven full of different kinds of bread, so that from them each person who hungers and thirsts for justice may be refreshed with the kind he chooses. In the breadbox of sacred reading are breads baked in an oven, breads roasted on a grill, or cooked in a frying pan, breads made with the first fruits and sprinkled with oil, and barley cakes. So, when this table is approached by people from any walk of life, age, sex, status or ability, they will all be filled with the refreshment that suits them. (Peter of Celle, Selected Works, On Affliction and Reading, Cistercian Publications, Kalamazoo, 1987, pp. 133–136)
