Start: fraternal synchronisation  

I shall speak as an exegete, that is, as a friend moved by the worry of the text and of its impact on the listeners. Quoting St. Jerome, Dei Verbum says, “Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ”. The inspired texts, the Holy Scriptures, are an excellent spiritual instrument offered to us so that we may approach Christ and know Him as He is.

If we want our meditations to be truly spiritual, they must be Biblical in the real sense. Sometimes we must make a sacrifice. When we are tired and weary, perhaps it is preferable to allow our mind and heart to wander in silence before the Lord without special Biblical reference. When, instead, we feel strong enough, even if we are somehow fatigued, it is good to persevere in the lectio divina, namely in a prayer guided by a concrete Biblical text. In prayers not guided by Biblical words, we may run the danger of narrating –in our depth- something too much subjective. Thus we remain in the “when” of what we know very well, which may be the cause of our own uneasiness and which, anyhow, does not set us free. The Biblical text, instead, which is outside us, compels us to look at things from more objective and external viewpoints and reminds us of what is perfect and more pleasing to the Lord  (See:  Rom 12,1-2).

We must never forget that among the few instructions of prayer given by Jesus there is this norm:  «In your prayers do not babble as the Gentiles do, for they think that by using many words they will make themselves heard» (Matthew: 6,7). Often we allow our mind to run on itself too much, galloping on our own exclusive ground. The theme you have chosen says, «I shall listen to what God , the Lord, says». I shall not recount to myself once again what I think,  going back to my more or less glad states of souls; rather I shall make a “spiritual exercise: I shall open my heart to a gift that comes from the Lord”.

Now we try to realise a moment of prayer, listening to the Lord through one of the most famous Psalms,  95 (94), often used as an Invitatory Psalm that opens the Liturgy of the hours. «Come, let us cry out with joy to Yahweh».

FIRST PART: «RUMINATIO»

Let us enter the text of Psalm 95/94 and stay in company with the text. The most beautiful definition to indicate a Psalm is probably that of itinerary. The Psalm proposes some passages. “I shall listen to what the Lord says”. Let us enter the Psalm; let us start walking in the space created by its Words and let us follow the phases that it proposes in this itinerary.

Let us enter the Psalm. To do this operation it is necessary to forget at least all our states of soul. You have come here in different states of soul: some joyful, others less joyful, some sad, others less sad. All this is to be left outside the door, otherwise we cannot listen to. Let us make a comparison: Do we always listen to People? If we are nervous, sad or feel offended, we listen only with fatigue. If we allow the heavy state we are in to overcome us, our listening to will be very superficial. Sometimes, when I feel very much worried, I experience that we need plenty of discipline to avoid answering in a formal way..  “Listening” means that I suspend the river of my sensations in order to turn towards the person who comes to me. If I do not suspend the flowing of my worries and sensations, I could read even fifty Biblical texts without doing a true Lectio Divina. The rumination must take us away from our usual world, so that we may enter another world: the world of God who speaks. We must feel free from our states of soul, to truly charge ourselves with the worries of God, which the text, inspired Word, wants to communicate to us.

Thus, we must go through the words of the text, Psalm 95/94, with patience, so that just this Psalm, which we have chosen for the lectio, may offer us its world as world of our prayer.

The structure of Psalm 95/94  

How many phases do we find in the itinerary proposed by Psalm 95/94? Some readers think that they are two, others propose three of them.

In the  Nuovissima versione della Bibbia delle Edizioni Paoline, Fr Angelo Lancellotti, in fact, places us within the group of those exegetes  who see two parts in the Psalm. He catalogues this Psalm as “liturgy of the Lord’s faithfulness” and distinguishes two parts.  In the first one he sees an  “invitation  to the solemn celebration in hymns (verses 1-7); in the second he sees a “warning in the form of oracle” (vv. 8-11).

The first part of the Psalm is a solemn invitation to celebrate the Lord and it is in the form of a hymn. This form is very evident, above all because of many imperatives inviting to praise the Lord (verses: 1-2 e v. 6) and of the motivations suggesting the reason for which we must come and cry out with joy (verses:. 3-5; poi v. 7).

The second part, instead, is a warning, expressed in the form of oracle; God himself warns us directly, through a prophet (See:  v. 8a), who starts speaking in the name of God himself, «Do not harden your hearts …» (verses: 8b-11).

For the exegetes who follow the division into two parts, the fundamental phases of the Psalm are a «hymn and oracle». This division says only which ones are the fundamental literary genres of the Psalm: hymned and oracular.

The proposal of individuating in Psalm 95 (94) three parts by Fr, Tiziano Lorenzin in the volume I salmi delle Edizioni Paoline, appears richer also for prayer. He sees in the Psalm a liturgical action structured by three imperatives introducing three parts

 – verses: 1-5 «Come»

   Invitation to the temple  

 -  verses 6-7: «Come»; or better, «Enter”

    Entrance  to the temple

 – verses 8-11: «Listen»

         Listening to the Word

The three imperatives imprint in the psalm a movement proposing three passages: invitation to praise, invitation to adoration, invitation to reflection. In concrete we have:

1) an invitation to go towards the sanctuary, including the beginning of the procession, the joyful greeting and praise;

2) an invitation not only to come, but also to enter, to adore and to confess the Lord;

3) an invitation to listen, including a request for silence, conversation with God and warning.

The Psalm, which we recite almost every morning, proposes a triple itinerary:  we need to go, we need to enter (36)and finally we need to listen to. To knell down is not enough, there is a crescendo of commitment:

1) «Come» soon (as soon as you wake up):

2) «Enter» the most intense place of his presence (probably the chapel);

3) «Listen to, today, his voice» and we must remember that many other times our listening did not succeed in reality.

A not banal invitatory: come, acclaim to the rock (Psalm 95/94,1-2)

The Psalm 95/94 starts with invitatory, “come acclaim to the Lord», that moves towards a central attribute of God, “the rock of our salvation». The one who prays does not say “shield”, “source”, “sun”, “dawn”, etc. Let us allow ourselves to be illumined by the specificity of the image.

Why does the psalm speak of «rock?» Later we read about Massah and Meribah, namely the places of the temptation and contestation in which the people ask for water and God will draw water out of the rock  (See Verse 8). Therefore, the idea subtended by the choice of this attribute could very well be: God is the rock of our salvation, because He the source of water that quenches the thirst of his people even in circumstances where it seems impossible to quench one’s thirst (See: Exodus, Es 17,1-7; Nm 20,2-13). The Psalmist, moreover, may have in mind a second possible allusion, that could add vigour to the first one. The people who pray are invited to enter the temple of Jerusalem, which is built up on the rock from which Ezekiel promises that water will spring out in the desert with a rock that follows the people along the journey: “All drank the same spiritual drink, since they drank from the spiritual rock which followed them, and that rock was Christ» (1 Cor. 10,4).

It is good for us to enter afresh the depth and the beauty of these vast horizons when we pray. In the morning invitatory, these perspectives are a daily gift that the Lord grants us to educate us. If we are truly able to activate these mechanisms, we can say to be alive and thus we renew ourselves, otherwise we risk withering up.

What are we supposed to do in order to go to the Lord? We must “cry out with joy”, “acclaim”. It is the matter to approach with enthusiasm the one who offers us this day. With acclamation we pass from the gift on to the donor. Before the received gift I feel the desire of praising the donor, the beauty of the gift urges us to have an idea of the donor, thus the acclamation explodes. The beginning of the day is an invitation to understand the gifts of the Lord, but in the form of praise, going towards the figure of Him who offers us these gifts. Children are used to thank and to concentrate themselves on the gift. Praise that opens our days, instead, must be the result of our having understood the greatness of Him who offers us the gift. When the gift is understood, then we go towards the donor, in concrete, towards the rock from where the water of our salvation flows forth. “To offer thanksgiving sacrifices: not only rendering thanks to Him, but taking something and offering it to the Lord, rendering it sacred to the Lord. It is the matter of that sacrifice that not even Psalm 51/50 –so very suspicious of rituality- refuses. “Then you will delight in upright sacrifices, burnt offerings and whole oblations, and young bulls will be offered on your altar”(verse: 21).

The Invitatory of Psalm 95/94 contains a great spiritual teaching. We need attention and rumination to understand it well. It is necessary to read and to re-read the Psalms, perhaps also to study them, in order to perceive, when we pray, an ever major richness.  Allow me an open-minded comparison: psalms are like balloons to be inflated, that our heart to widen. The work of rumination is like that of inflating the balloon, so that when it is put within us it may grow and may widen our person. Once it has grown in our heart, a psalm pushes us towards the walls of the heart, dilates the arteries and blood goes back to circulate.  

Creation and the hands of God: transcendence and loveliness (Psalm: 95/94,3-5)

The motives for the praise of God are substantially two. First, “God the Lord is great”, a great king above all the gods. His uniqueness shines in the divine court, where everything flows. According to the initial chapters of the Book of Job, even the tempter Satan penetrates this heavenly court (See: Job, 1,6). The first motive to praise God is the absolute greatness of his transcendence.

The second motive completes the first one: «the abysses of the earth are in his hand». The transcendence of God does not forbid Him to be the loving creator of the universe. The Psalmist represents the world with a wonderful imagination through four elements corresponding to the cardinal points. .He starts from the vertical dimension and contrasts the “abysses of the earth” with “the peaks of Mountains”. Then he passes to the horizontal line and contrasts “the sea” made by Him, with “the moulded earth”. This is above the first description of Genesis, in which the sea and the earth are separated, to indicate how the earth, separated in its turn, has been also particularly taken care of (at least according to the opinion of the psalmist). Everything is God, who looks at the vertical and the horizontal dimensions, embracing the reality of the cosmos.  

It is worthwhile to pay attention to the insistence on the hands, mentioned twice, “In his power (hands) are the depths of the earth” (v. 4) and “and the dry land moulded by his hands” (v. 5) The psalmist wants us to think of the hand of God, symbolising His strong and loving “acting”. The image is impressive and moving at the same time. The things present in the property of God make God’s hand look enormous: it is sufficiently wide to contain the abyss of the earth and the peaks of the mountains. It is, therefore, the hand of one who creates, who moulds like a sculptor the branching veins of the universe, who keeps the whole of his creation subsisting.

To adore God who guides “the people of his hand” (Psalm:  95/94,6-7)

A new invitation to praise and to assume an attitude of adoration summarises the motive of creation and repeats applying it to those who pray. The new motive of praise that the Psalm suggests is the awareness that the Lord is also the One who created and formed his people: “Come let us bow low and do reverence; kneel before Yahweh who made us” (v.6).

The declaration,: «He is our God, and we the people of his sheepfold» (v. 7), recuperates the form of the covenant  due to which Israel belongs to the Lord and the Lord to Israel. All together, therefore, the Psalm praises two parallel creations: that of the universe and that of His chosen people.

The translation “the flock of his hand” makes somehow abstract the locution used in the psalm, which speaks rather –in a very plastic way- about “the flock of his hand”. Surely the meaning of this expression  is the guidance that God gives to his people, but it is also declared that the people is the work of his hands, in the same sense in which the psalms speak previously of the universe and creation operated by the hands of God.

«To enter», «to adore», but above all «to listen to» (Psalm 95/94, 8-11)

The last phase of the itinerary, proposed by Psalm 95/94, leads from the praying entrance of the temple to the necessity «to listen to the voice of the Lord (v. 8).

It is illusory to think that it is enough to enter the “temple”, the place where God has accomplished his prodigies, to truly go close to the Lord and participate in the space of His goods. The temple is truly the place built up by the presence of God’s love. This is why we must go to the temple and there we must worship. However, all this is not enough. To truly enter the temple it is necessary to open our heart and to pass on to listening. There is a decisive dialectic between “to seek”, that leads a person to the temple, and “to listen”, which is the function of opening the subject to something new. By trying, man seeks the best of what his heart proposes; he, so to say, dilates himself, but according to a principle that starts from him, namely his own desire. By listening, we put into ourselves elements that urge us to grow, starting from something coming from outside.

The insistence on listening is formulated by the Psalmist/prophet who speaks in the name of God. The oracle that closes the psalm, insists on the need of listening to, learning from the past history of the people, at the moment of the desert, in other words at the time of the people’s utmost nearness to God the liberator. The appeal is very clear. You who have entered today this temple, the space created by God, do not do like your fathers who “put me to the test and saw what I could do!” (v. 9).

Therefore, in the decisive phase, the need of reaching more maturity appears clear. It is not said that entering the space wanted and created by God is enough to reach communion with Him. The people who apparently lived the gift of the exodus in Massah and Meribah, reached in reality the point of challenging  and tempting the Lord.

Thus the dimension of the “heart” emerges repeatedly, as the place distinct from the simple walking in the space of God: “Do not harden your heart” (v. 8) and they are “fickle hearts (v. 10).  In the psalms there is a  very interesting and decisive contrast of symbols: in the case of God they speak of “hands”; about man, instead, they speak of “heart”. The hand of God (his acting) is always loving. The heart of man, (namely his deep feeling, thinking, deciding) is always erring or even deviated. The case of the “ancestors”, who do not cross the desert proves it clearly. They surely walked after Moses, but their heart did not walk in true syntony with their steps.  

The problem of man is his heart. It is necessary to listen to, namely to go out of oneself because within oneself there could be something not right, even if the steps externally  appear to be correct, One could travel  in the desert, “externally” obeying the Lord, but if one does not open one’s heart to the listening, one cannot enter the resting place.

The last words of the oracle sealing the Psalm appear to be terrible. God assures his people with a declared oath, “They will never enter my place of rest” (11). Man is created to rest with God and he can reach the rest of God only by listening to him. If I do not listen to, I am irreparable “in and of the world”.

The “today” that God offers me this morning, is connected with the “place of rest”, but there is the heart that must be transformed. I shall listen to God and, if I pray in listening, I shall succeed in seeing the reality in a way that is not only material. Then I may not fall back to my usual worries, which bind me to a repeated and obsessive reality. Prayer is a very serious case in our life only if it is done well, that is, if it is lived by us like the exodus capable of making us get out of our prisons. If, instead, it is only a listening to ourselves (and not to God), it risks to remain an obsessive repetition of our problems and, then, thinking that we pray, we would finish by harming us in reality. Thus, it is very important to keep our prayer under discipline, so that it may be a listening to God and not just our chattering.  «In your prayer do not babble as the gentiles do, for they think that by using many words they will make themselves heard…your Father knows what you need before you ask » (Matthew: 6.7-8). «Go out and listen”. On the day we have before us, we must enter the place created by God, in the time that is history created by Him. What can I do to enter, this morning, my days, living them as gift created by God? I can do it if I listen to his voice; otherwise I live in the world that surrounds me, simply belonging to this world. We must succeed in making ourselves be educated by the voice of the Lord  to understand that reality is not simply that which is perceivable and visible. Reality is the object of God’s love, and it is towards this love of God, surrounding and crossing the whole reality, that I want to move in my city. The problems will have yesterday’s hardness. If by chance I solve one of them today, yesterday’s solution may serve to make space for another problem that is already advancing. It is important that each day may have its divine key to read the problems afresh. Today you may have more depth than yesterday; in your reading you have happy days and complicated days, but this does not depend on you. What depends on you is the way you react and your decision to open up your heart.   

SECOND PART: «MEDITATIO»

The ruminatio has made us to enter with certainty the world created by the divine word contained in the Psalm. Let us choose some points particularly fit to narrate the ruminated word and our life. This part of the lectio  leads us to enlighten with the meditated word some situations of our life. At the same time, whatever we meet in our existence helps us to understand in an even more concrete way all that the divine word states.

1) We enter the world created by God only if we listen to his voice, only if the world does not appear in its profane reality. How can I see the sacred reality of the world? Only if I am able to listen to, otherwise I see only what everybody can see, with the fear and anguish which trouble everybody.

2) Before the hand of God there is the heart of man. The hand of God creates, owns, leads to pasture. The heart of man is uncertain and erring. Jesus would never say, “Go there where the heart leads you”, Jesus would rather say, “Seek within your heart, discern whatever is in your heart; pay attention to the place where your heart leads you, because the heart needs to be purified”. In a decisive page Jesus accuses those who wash the crockery and the hands to be pure and forget to wash the heart.  “When He entered a house far from the crowd, the disciples asked Him about the meaning of that parable. He said to them: ‘Are you, too, deprived of intellect? Do you not understand that whatever enters man from outside cannot contaminate him, because  it does not enter the heart but the bowels and finishes into  the sewer?” 

Thus He declared that all aliments are pure. Then he added, “It is what comes out of someone that makes that person unclean. For it is from within, from the heart that evil intentions emerge: fornication theft, murder, adultery, avarice, malice, deceit, indecency, envy slander, pride and folly. All these evil things come from within and make a person unclean” (Mark: 7,17-23). In the Gospel according to Luke, Jesus explains that the seed of the divine word bears fruit not simply “in the heart” of the listener, but also in the good heart.. “As for the part in rich soil, this is people with a noble and generous heart who have heard the word and take it to themselves and yield a harvest through their perseverance (Luke: 8, 15). Sometimes we think and say, Put the Word in your heart and everything will work out well. This however is not what Jesus thinks. The idea of Jesus is that the word bears fruit in a good and perfect heart, If it is not good, the heart  wraps in thorns the Word and suffocates it.

3) The word on the rest of God is the most difficult part of the Psalm We are not created for this world, but for the divine rest, namely so that we may finally rest in God.  God created the world in six days to rest on the seventh day and this has been created also for man.  Man was created on the sixth day so that he might enter the rest with God on the seventh day.  Consequently there is the risk of not entering the rest. “Because of their disobedience, in my anger I have sworn: they will not enter the place of my rest.” In the Psalm which we are meditating, the forty days in the desert are presented like a kind of week that must lead to the promise land, symbol of rest in the whole life of man on his journey towards God. We have been created for our rest. Shat we reach this rest of God? What does our commitment to reach the rest consist of ?  It consists in listening, “Listen today to my voice and, then, you will reach the rest. If, instead, today you do not listen to, you will not enter the rest of the Lord.

4) In the first letter to the Corinthians, even St. Paul tells it well just by calling to mind the journey of the exodus and the contestations of Massah and Meribah, “I want you to be quite certain , brothers, that our ancestors all had the cloud over them and all passed through all ate the same spiritual food and all drank the same spiritual drink;  since they drank for the spiritual rock which followed the, and that rock was Christ. In spite of this, God was not pleased with most of them and their corpses were scattered over the desert. (….) These happenings were examples for our benefit, so that we should not set our hearts, as they did, on evil things, and they were described in writing to be a lesson for us to whom it has fallen to live in the last days of the ages. Everyone, no matter how firmly he thinks he is standing, must be careful he does not fall (….)  You can trust that God will not let you be p ut to the test  beyond your strength, but with any trial will also provide a way out, by enabling you to put up with it” (See 1Cor 10,1-12).

5) On this same line we could reflect on the shipwreck of the disciples of Jesus during his earthly existence. They followed him, but evidently they did not follow him as the passion has proved in a terrible way. They all ran away from the Gethsemane. Only the loved disciples and the  mother of Jesus remained. It is, above all, the Gospel of Mark that underlines the following of Jesus, a completely shipwrecked discipleship (See above all Mark: 14,26-31. 50-52). It will work only because after Easter they set on their journey once again starting from Galilee  (See: Mark, 16,7). What about our discipleship? Towards what does our consecration wander? Where does our pilgrimage go to?  It is the matter of understanding that rest is prepared by our listening to. The New Testament does not say that He saves us at cheap cost. Grace is truly a dear price”. It needs a response. There are no automatisms. “Today” is the day of salvation, but “today” is the day of salvation in the listening. No “today” is tranquil, dense with holiness and grace. We are in a time of grace created by the Lord; the Lord is our shepherd, but He says to us, “Listen today to my voice”. Perhaps He says, “Make your heart adequate for my hands”. 

Third part:«COLLATIO»

The collatio enclose a confrontation in small groups and an exchange in a plenary Assembly

Suggested hints for confrontation  in small groups:  

* Suggestions for the invitatory: At the start of our day, do we have the sense of  our “today”?

- Do we succeed in activating it and how?

- Are there experiences?

* Opening my life to listening –How does this effectively happen?  Is it truly there?

- What touches me most?

* Is it what I perceive of myself?

* What I meditate and comes from “without”?

* There is the risk of recoiling: too many words of ours – Is there any difference between being in search of and being in listening to…?

* A necessary passage: There are ways to help the passage from “the liturgical today”, re-proposing the  historia salutis, to the “experiential today”, that centres itself on the concrete person and wants to make it valuable?  

From the exchange in the Assembly

After listening to the syntheses of the confrontation in small groups, some questions emerged:

A) Which crucial passages allow the “lectio” to exist as truly Biblical?

During these past years, there have been many proposals about the Lectio. Perhaps the scheme to be preferred is made up of five passages:

1) READING IN THE STRICT SENSE  OR  «RUMINATIO»: it is an encounter of the person with the text; in this encounter the text becomes alive again as a space in which the person who prays can enter and move. This space is created by the gift of the inspired book and by the commitment of him who prays, who uses all his possibilities to understand well –rather in the best way- the Biblical text that he has chosen to listen to.

2) REFLECTION   OR «MEDITATIO»:  after analysing the text well, we ask ourselves: “What in my experience is illumined by this text? It is a circular movement. In more concrete terms: “What does this text say about my life? What in my life can help others understand to be important in this text?

3) PRAYER /«ORATIO»: the prayer made within what the text has created, within what has emerged. This point is absolutely decisive, if we want the Lectio to be a listening prayer, without a re-falling of the one who prays into his own previous personal world, not yet fully illumined by this concrete word of the Lord that has been put as a dynamic force of the on going meditation.

4) CONTEMPLATION/«CONTEMPLATIO»: I do not think that it is opportune to venture in a description of God’s specific gift to him who prays; I think it is better to receive it with gratitude.

   5) PUTTING THINGS IN COMMON,  OR  “COLLATIO”: it  is about putting in common (“to put together”,  in Latin confero). It is a fraternal exchange in which we can put together some things. This is not compulsory because often I can do –and actually it is done- the lectio even when I am alone. In case the lectio is lived by more than one person, it is useful to put some fruit in common. Life follows.  

B) Which relation can I see between my today” and the “today” of God?

How to understand my today in relation with the today of God? No doubt, reality is only one, but my heart is divided. The difference does not exist in reality, where only the today of God exists. However, to understand the today of God in our today is not simple at all. If I do not put myself in the attitude of listening, today remains the today of my worries, the today of the watch. Then, how to reduce today to “unity”, the today that I risk to perceive fragmented into two polarities, because of my weak heart? How to  avoid belonging  irreversibly  to my very modest “today of the watch”, of my worries, seen that, in reality, I live in the today of God, often without my being aware of it? Sure, I live in the light of the sun, but to have a theological vision of the sun –for instance to perceive the sun as a creature of God, as fruit of the rock that saves us- I need to think of it, otherwise in the light of the sun I can be tanned, but this happens within the “today of the watch”. It is here that the importance of prayer becomes clear for the opening up of a person. It is not God that needs to be prayed: it is we that need to pray: God himself does not desire our prayer: he desires our communion with Him. He desires to love us and to be loved by us. He is loved only in the measure in which we become aware that He loves us. This is the work of the heart.   

Therefore, there exists a unique today and it is the today of God; but our hearts causes a kind of division, because it has its today which is not perfectly identical to that of God. Meditation (or, if you like it, discernment) tends to bring my today close to the today of God. Sure, God has put in the today also the worries that cross me, but it is not only that. The risk is that my worries may become the whole of God. There is the danger that I –though with noble feelings- concentrate myself too much on my problems and see a deformed eye of God. Of course, the growth, the crisis, sufferings, joys, the regression of those whom I love and my own are all things that send God within his today. However, if I am not attentive we risk reducing ourselves to these emotional elements instead of giving a contemplative sight. Rahner, already half century ago, stated that Christianity will either be contemplative or will not be… He was aware of today’s complicated reality, for which if a Christian does not become contemplative, things slip away from him within those terrible gears..  

C) What do we mean by saying that the true heart is a purified heart?

We must repeatedly start our sailing at superior levels. We start from the postulate, arriving to ten, twenty years of consecration, etc ; there is a formative period and a “re-formative one” Under the blows of reality, at times heavy and very heavy, we understand where our heart is. Sometimes we hear somebody say, “I have become less good!” Often I happen to give some consolation by saying, “Let us be thankful for your becoming less good! Think of it well: before you were not as good as you appeared. You were afraid of not pleasing, you wanted to play a beautiful figure, you did not want antipathy conflicts, you were too tender…then you gave in willingly. Now, being adult and less worried about pleasing others, you face some more challenges: you must be good after understanding that, at the end, you are independent from the judgement of others more than you would believe. Then the true heart is in the sense of purified heart. It is not the matter of taking away the false heart and taking out the true heart. The truth is that our heart shelters bounties as well as selfishness and then, through the spiritual use of the Bible, the soil is to be reclaimed. Our heart is a stony soil. If you want to have a good soil, you must patiently remove the stones and build up small walls. This is how a purified heart comes out.

D) Where do I experience the newness, where do I allow myself to be blown without remaining in the very annoying repeated reality?

Just as there are new events and new actions every day, there must be also a new way of reading the word, of celebrating the listening. Each of us has the fundamental problem: how to renew myself? Is there any trick to become self-innovative? It is a very urgent problem and we are responsible of it. We must activate ourselves. In this sense the Scripture can give us a formidable help: even the underlining of half written word that remains with us during the day can give a good savour to the mind and energy to start again, above all in moments of weariness and low pressure It is a personal responsibility of managing our psychological experience, which then reverberates on everything else

E) Does the emphasis on the spiritual reading of the Bible not expose us to intellectualism?

Reading the Bible is the research of a world with very much concrete values that have deeply marked very solid lives. In the Bible we face human words that are also divine words which can move our heart; words that can be messengers of newness, of newly understood ideas and new points of view. Without the Scripture we would be entrusted to the circularity of ourselves and our own problems. The written word, instead, far from leading us to an abstract world of theory, breaks up our shut up horizon. The very much accessible human word, enriched with the force of God’s Word, kindles lights here and there.  It is then that you feel moved at the discovery that there really is the today of God, which is greater than your problems.  “I listen to you and follow you”. You have chosen a good theme: I can follow you only if I listen to you, because if I do not listen to you, I may have the illusion of following you, I make the itinerary chosen by me and say that I am following you. It is easy to fall into this trap. When can we truly say that we follow the Lord?  We must follow him among our brothers. The Lord speaks to us through our brothers: through the written Word of God and the even ampler word, namely our life.  The Word of God blocks some of our points and invites us to move wider, otherwise we could have a long life, but with the danger of falling into subjectivism: I build up my life the way I want, yet I have learned to say that I follow the Lord. In reality my life (also as religious) finishes by being my own and only my own itinerary.   

Ermenegildo Manicardi
Rettore dell’Almo Collegio Capranica
Piazza Capranica, 98 – 00186 Roma