A Letter from Br. Enzo, Prior of Bose, to Brother John
Dearest John,
In the course of the liturgy you celebrate daily with your brothers and sisters in community or at least every Sunday in church, you hear Scripture readings and listen to a homily, a gift which explains and concretizes the texts which were read. In this way you stand before the Word of God, living and active and echoing within you. You stand before the very presence of the Lord, before Christ the Sower who is sowing the seed of his Word in you.
In the liturgy, the table is set with two kinds of food: Word and Eucharist are given to you for your journey, for your exodus from this world to the Father. They will nourish you and prevent you from getting weak as a member of God's people. Here you are given a taste of the pilgrim's bread and a taste for the One who feeds you, consoles you, keeps you strong and protects you from illness.
But since the liturgy is the central experience of the christian life, you will also want to renew it privately during the course of each day, in the solitude of your room. Or perhaps you will want to share this renewal with your brothers and sisters in community, those companions and guides God has given you.
You can be sure that you will not be able to understand and assimilate the Scriptures by relying on yourself alone and on your own scanty resources. There are certain conditions for a fruitful reading of the Scripture, in which the Word of God brings about in you what you cannot bring about in yourself. These are just the preliminaries which allow your reading to be permeated with the spirit of faith in Christ, to be filled with the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and to lead you to a contemplative vision of God the Father.
By reading in the Spirit, I mean praying the Bible, lectio divina...
From: ENZO BIANCHI, Praying the Word, An Introduction to «Lectio Divina»,
Cistercian Publication, Kalamazoo 1998, pp. 84-85.