LECTIO DIVINA

“Divine / Holy Reading”

“Soaking prayer” in the Heart of Jesus, the Word
and Source of all holy reading in Sacred
Scripture.
[invitation to drink/soak in today’s session, taking only notes that are
personal as you can receive the slides]

-- Opening Prayer

 Lectio divina is more than Bible study, although it certainly

involves study. Involves all four modes of prayer:

o Lectio – reading the Holy Word of God with devoted love

and great care

o Oratio – speaking prayer, from our heart to God’s Heart

o Meditatio – reflecting on the Living Water, a gentle back-

and-forth with the Holy Spirit

o Contemplatio – listening once immersed within the Living

Water flowing in God’s Heart
 Cor ad cor loquitur – “Heart speaks to heart”
(St Francis de Sales, St John Henry Newman)

o Listening to the Lord who is speaking from His

Heart to ours. We receive from Him all that He
desires to pour into us, and we speak to Him from
our heart.

o A communion of hearts ... Koinonia with God,

divine fellowship of God with man ...
 involves our entire integrated persons, body
and soul
 Thoughts, emotions, even physical expression
of tears in healing or lamentation, laughter in
joy, peace in calm, and so on ...
 Going at God-speed ... Important to allow the Holy Spirit to set
the pace in His anointed timing (kairos) within our human time
available (chronos) ... God’s kairos is invited into our chronos.

o Always quality over quantity

o A chapter ... a verse ... a sentence ... a phrase ... a word ...
The Word made Flesh in us.

o Refreshing and soaking in God’s merciful, grace-filled Living

Water, being cleansed, drinking of the Holy Spirit, being
comforted so that Living Water may be incorporated (in-
corpore ... “into the body”) into us body and soul as
nourishment.

o Food (becomes a part of us when consumed) vs. fuel (gets

burned up when consumed)
 The Burning Bush is stoked alive within us (cf. Exodus 3)
 John 7: 37-39 (ESV)

On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and cried out,
37 

“If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. 38 Whoever believes in

me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living
water.’” 39 Now this he said about the Spirit, whom those who believed in
him were to receive, for as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus
was not yet glorified.

Rivers of Living Water

 Rivers of Blood and Water – Holy Communion and Baptism
 Flow from the Temple of God's Presence, the Heart of Jesus
 The Heart of Jesus, our Way, Truth, and Life is filled with
Living Water, superabounding in the Holy Spirit. Christ’s
Heart is our Source for the outpouring the Holy Spirit.
 Baptismal waters of death to self, rejection of sin in the
pursuit of holiness to “You shall be holy for I am holy” (1
Peter 1.16, cf. Leviticus 20.26)
 These waters cleanse us, refresh us, renew us … life-giving
flows of divine life between God’s Heart and ours.
 What is the heart?

 The temple (an inner sanctuary) of our faith, hope and

love of God
 The temple of our moral actions – choosing good or evil
 The temple where our innermost conscience resides. It
can be pure in grace or darkened / warped by sin
 The temple of our emotions
 The temple of our thoughts
 The temple where we encounter God intimately
– con | templatio literally means finding one’s home
in the temple of another’s heart … There the person we
contemplate will experience eternal life in us, and
we will live within the person who contemplates us.
In our hearts contemplating God, His presence never
dies within us, and our presence never dies in him.
Eternal life already begins to be tasted, experienced, savored.
 What is belief?

 Involves faith, allowing our lives to be ruled and directed by

Jesus Christ as our Lord, our Teacher, our Master.
 True belief is not merely intellectual acceptance or “head
knowledge” of Jesus as being Lord and Savior of the world, as
the devil has more intellectual knowledge of the truth of this fact
than we do. True belief means receiving Jesus as the Way, the
Truth, and the Life in a manner that transfigures us, transforms
us by the Holy Spirit whose power makes us holy as the Father
and Son with the Holy Spirit are holy.
 The Living Water is the Holy Spirit poured out at the moment
when Jesus is glorified on the Cross. His blood sanctifies us.
 As believers receive the Holy Spirit from Jesus, we receive divine
power to become sources in the Source. Hearts are filled with
the Living Water of the Holy Spirit pouring from Christ to quench
others’ thirst. We are beggars who show other beggars the Way.
 Here we find personal nourishment, also for evangelization.
 Here we find the divine Source for healing the wounds of
division among the Body of Christ.
 Church of All Nations, at the Garden of Gethsemane
Mount of Olives, Jerusalem (site of Jesus’ Prayer in John 17)
 Psalm 42.1-2a (ESV): “As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God.
My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.” 

The deer drink from the streams of Living Water gushing forth from Christ on the Cross, and their
thirst is quenched by His Living Water. The deer discover true communion together as one as they
drink from the same Source of Living Water, united at the Cross of Christ in fulfillment of the prayer of
Jesus in John 17, in the place where Jesus prayed this very prayer for His disciples to be one as the
Father and Son are One. Their gaze is focused intently on the King of Love who has been crucified to
reconcile them to God and to each other through drinking of God’s perfect Love.
 John 19: 34-37 (ESV)
 
34 But one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once there came out blood

and water. 35 He who saw it has borne witness—his testimony is true, and he knows that

he is telling the truth—that you also may believe. 36 For these things took place that the

Scripture might be fulfilled: “Not one of his bones will be broken.” 37 And again another

Scripture says, “They will look on him whom they have pierced.”

v34 “there came out blood and water” –

ἐξῆλθεν εὐθὺς (exēlthen euthus “came out / flowed forth immediately /
“at once”

In the Heart of Jesus, man encounters both a dead heart that has been
pierced through, but at the precise moment when this heart suffers
death, it becomes a heart that gives freedom as a source of new life
through signs of Water and Blood, together signifying the Resurrection.

v35 This moment of truth is so important moment for John that it receives
his reinforced, emphatic apostolic testimony.
John 19.37 – cf. Zechariah 12.10

“And I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of
10 

Jerusalem a spirit of grace and pleas for mercy, so that, when they

look on me, on him whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for
him, as one mourns for an only child, and weep bitterly over him, as
one weeps over a firstborn. 

Pouring out God’s Spirit of grace

Pleas for mercy
Mourning as for an only child, weeping bitterly
 Saint Gertrude the Great
German Benedictine nun, theologian, and mystic of the late 13 th century

Speaks of drinking from the Heart of Jesus in her first Spiritual Exercise ...
and her prayer is an invitation to become our own prayer to the Lord:
 
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Ah Jesus,
fountain of life, make me drink a cup of the living water from you so
that, having tasted you, I thirst for eternity for nothing other than you.
Immerse me totally in the depth of your mercy. Baptize me in the
spotlessness of your precious death. Make me new in the blood by
which you have redeemed me. In the water from your holiest side,
wash away every spot with which I have ever spotted my baptismal
innocence. Fill me with your Spirit and possess me totally in purity of
body and soul. (SE I, 142-150)

Saint Gertrude’s mystical meditation here demonstrates how our

consecrated life in Holy Baptism, nourished by Holy Communion, immerses
us as believers into the Trinitarian life, through drinking from the side of
Jesus whose fountain of life quenches our thirst for holiness.
 Saint Bonaventure
Italian Franciscan friar, Scholastic theologian and philosopher, 13th century

Provides us with important guidance on immersion in the Living Water of

Christ, drinking of our Lord in Sacred Scripture … Bonaventure emphasizes
that sighs of prayer are necessary for the reader of Scripture who is
meditating upon Christ crucified, so that (s)he does not:
 
reflect without anointing (lectio sine unctione)
speculate without devotion (speculatio sine devotione)
research without admiration (investigatio sine admiratione)
consider without joy (circumspectio sine exsultatione)
labor without piety (industria sine pietate)
engage in science without charity (scientia sine caritate)
pursue intelligence without humility (intelligentia sine humilitate)
study without divine grace (studium absque divina gratia)
mirror without wisdom (speculum absque sapientia divinitus ispirata)

(Itinerarium mentis in Deum, Prol 4 in Omnia Opera V, 296).

Christ is the staircase and the vehicle, like the throne of mercy over the
Ark of the Covenant, and the mystery hidden from the ages. A man
should turn his full attention to this throne of mercy, and should gaze at
him hanging on the cross, full of faith, hope and charity, devoted, full of
wonder and joy, marked by gratitude, and open to praise and jubilation.
Then such a man will make with Christ a pasch, a passing-over … He
will experience, as much as is possible for one who is still living, what
was promised to the thief who hung beside Christ: Today you will be
with me in paradise … For this passover to be perfect, we must suspect
all the operations of the mind and we must transform the peak of our
affections, directing them to God alone. This is a sacred mystical
experience. It cannot be comprehended by anyone unless he
surrenders himself to it, nor can he surrender himself to it unless he
longs for it; nor can he long for it unless the Holy Spirit, whom Christ
sent into the world, should come and inflame his innermost soul … Let
us pass over with the crucified Christ from this world to the Father …
My flesh and my heart fail me, but God is the strength of my heart and
my heritage forever.
(Itinerarium mentis in Deum, VII, 1, 2, 4, 6 in Opera Omnia V, 312-313)
Christ is the Tree of Life (Lignum Vitae) whose fruit is the water that
sanctifies those who come to drink of His living water, a river of
grace having the power to heal (SAINT BONAVENTURE, Collationes
de Septem Donis Spiritus Sancti, I, 6 in Opera Omnia V, 458).
Building upon this imagery of Christ as the living fountain,
Bonaventure shows us how to allow our hearts to share a more
intimate encounter with the Heart of Jesus:

Arise, then, beloved of Christ! Imitate the dove that nests in a

hole in the cliff, keeping watch at the entrance like the sparrow
that finds a home. There like the turtledove hide your little
ones, the fruit of your chaste love. Press your lips to the
fountain, draw water from the wells of your Savior; for this is
the spring flowing out of the middle of paradise, dividing into
four rivers, inundating devout hearts, watering the whole earth
and making it fertile ... Run with eager desire to this source of
life and light, all you who are vowed to God’s service

(Lignum Vitae, 30 and 47 in Omnia Opera VIII, 79-80, 85).

 Reflection questions on these passages together

1. How does the Living Water flowing from the Heart of

Jesus give me life? Do I soak or drink in the streams of
God’s Merciful Love to be healed, refreshed, renewed,
fed, restored?
2. In what ways do I need to immerse more in the Living
Water of Jesus to heal, refresh, renew, feed, restore me?
3. Do I allow the Heart of Jesus to speak into the depths of
my heart? Do I welcome the presence of Jesus in the
Holy Spirit to find His home in my heart? Is there an
intimate loving exchange / dialogue of love between my
heart and God’s Heart? How can I listen better to God?
4. Is my heart prayerful enough? Do I read too quickly or
too little, or in a way that is less effective way for spiritual
growth to blossom? Do I speak too much or too little?
Do I reflect? Does my heart listen contemplatively for
God’s voice?

- Concluding Prayer