I'm enjoying reading The Contemplative Experience (erotic love and spiritual union) by Fr. Joseph Chu-Cong, a Vietnamese Trappist in exile.

In it he connects the stages of Lectio Divina to the four senses of Scripture in a way that I've never seen done before and I'd like to share.

The four steps of Lectio Divina, as we know, are:
Reading
Meditating
Praying
Contemplating

The four senses of Scripture are often designated as:
Literal
Allegorical
Moral
Anagogical (Mystical)

And so he writes:
1 the practice of sacred reading implies a careful attention to the literal sense of the text.
2 the effort of meditation that springs from this reading brings the use of reason and affectivity into play. We search and inquire into the text to see what it has to say about our own life and values; we look for the moral sense.
3 In prayer, we intuit that the text refers symbolically to the experience of God, and we pray for a deep, experiential realization of that experiences - the allegorical sense, which is about deepening faith and deepening responsiveness.
4 Lastly, in contemplation, we experience a delightful foretaste of heavenly realities as perceived in the anagogical, or mystical, sense of the text.

This is good practice! Delicious work! I apologize for having fallen behind on my weekly scripture postings.

Apology accepted. Love, Carlo.

P.S. I wonder if our Trappist brother tries to make a further linkage with the so called stages of relationship. I did not sit with this, so I don't know how well it may relate. How about?

1 Lectio or Reading as becominge acquainted with someone.

2 Meditatio or Meditation as courtship.

3 Oration or Prayer as engagement.

4 Comtemplatio as consumation or marriage, if your prefer.

Alison,
How utterly beautiful...thank you for sharing this. I will sit with this a bit and see what becomes of me in the process...

Wow...Carlo! Your "version" I would, I believe, find the most challenging! Therefore I MUST "give it a go" as they say across the Pond...

Dear Sister Paula Clare and Sister Allison:

I have always liked (intellectually) the 'demarcations' or categories that you find when folks talk about Sacred Reading and I do not object to them. These can useful for a person and worthwhile discipline to develop.

For me, partly out of temperament, I experience the linearity as a distraction. That is not to say that I have not have profound times with Franciscans doing so called 'African bible study', which was simply going a small circle for four rounds of lectio divina. The reading-meditation-prayer comes to me all at the same time in a jumble of 'worship' and this quick mind and sensitive heart that our Lord has blessed me with gets bored with the 'techniques' that often abide next door to spiritual life.

I like the neatness (useful when seeking to teach it) of the four-fold sacred reading (popularized by Guigo II) discipline, but I am incurably messy when it comes to following programs. My loss, no doubt.

I have been doing sacred reading for many years and have always found it to come very easy to me. It is the only way I care to read, in fact. But I would be hard-pressed to try and describe how it takes place. This will not be very helpful, but this is how I would describe it in a word (or a sentence): I read contemplatively.

Thank you for your thoughts 'on reading prayerfully'.

Thank you Carlo for delving into your experience a bit more. I love the attempt to find words for the things that happen to us - all through life perhaps - but always inadequately in this world of prayerful contemplation. And yet the attempts of others to do so, knowing that we all fall short of true experience, is so enriching to me. It can be a great gift to have celebrated something that otherwise would happen largely unseen, unshared.

I've thought some about your suggestion to view these various places of contact with Scripture as akin to those of romantic love. For certainly I do think he is proposing, with the whole of the book, that something of this sort is happening in our resting with God. I do think he is offering a way of imagining a relationship with God as Beloved, and his definition of erotic is that of heightened awareness that is never fulfilled - the yearning continues, infusing all of life (in contrast to his proposed model of sexuality which builds in tension and then finds release).

But I think, like you, Joseph Chu-Cong is not really a linear thinker/experiencer of God. So I can't tell yet in the book what he might make of the notion that we could experience the 4th step you describe, in this life. Or perhaps he might say we taste of it and choose to return, back into the life of longing.

For me, what I find a great gift with these week-long lectio readings, is that I am invited to read them and return, over and over through the days. And the "official" steps then are not intentional, "OK, now I will have an allegorical experience with these words...now!" so much as a gauge for me, to sort of notice where I am with the words. Am I still reading literally? Am I stuck in a sort of moral self-examination? The steps remind me to return, that the words are not done with me yet, and of course even after the week I am free to come to them again and again throughout life - but for now - it may be very necessary for me to be reminded that there is much more richness within them that I have not yet tasted, rather than delude myself that I have come to understanding.