Transcript of CS#93: Dr. Tim Gray Praying Scripture for a Change

Transcript of Interview with Dr. Tim Gray about Praying Scripture for a Change.  This interview and others like it can be found at http://www.catholicspotlight.com

Listen Now to the audio version of the show.

Praying Scripture for a Change is available at The Catholic Company.

http://www.catholiccompany.com/catholic-books/1033331/Praying-Scripture-Change-Introduction-to-Lectio-Divna/

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Chris Cash:  This is the Catholic Spotlight, the show where we talk about what’s new, cool, and exciting in the Catholic marketplace.  I’m your host, Chris Cash, director of e﷓Commerce from catholiccompany.com, your source for all your Catholic needs.

Chris Cash:  And today in the spotlight, we have Dr. Tim Gray to talk about Praying Scriptures for a Change, An Introduction to Lectio Divina.  Welcome, Dr. Gray!

Dr. Tim Gray:  Thank you, Chris.  It’s a pleasure to be with you.

Chris Cash:  Now, we’ve had a former guest, Carl Schultz come on and talk about his book on lectio divina so I’m interested to know, do you have any knowledge of that book and maybe some of the differences between the two?

Dr. Tim Gray:  I’ve heard of Carl Schultz’s book, I haven’t actually read it.

Chris Cash:  Okay, well that solves that issue.  So let’s just dig right into…that interview was done, oh probably a year and a half ago, so I’m sure that we have a lot of different listeners now than we used to.  What can you tell me about lectio divina and what inspired you to create this book in the first place?

Dr. Tim Gray:  Sure, about three-and-a-half years ago, I teach at the seminary as well as the Augustine Institute in Denver and the seminary asked me to teach the spirituality year guides, that’s the first year of the seminary where we walk through the bible…they read through the whole bible in a year as well as the catechism and I was to take them through the bible and the goal of the spirituality year is not to study the bible academically but to learn how to pray with scripture and especially in the method of lectio divina which at the St. John Vianney Seminary in Denver, that’s what they focus on.  And so, that forced me to really read through…work through the whole scripture with them which I’ve done in different bible programs in different classes but with an emphasis on prayer and meditation.  That was a great opportunity for me to go back and look into the Catholic tradition of what resources and what were the classic writings on lectio divina and kind of match that with my background in scripture and it was a real spark.  And then that led to one of my favorite classes I’ve ever taught that year in spirituality year and every year since then, and then I started teaching at parishes giving talks on lectio divina and people would ask me for resources and so I decided to write the book.

Chris Cash:  All right, so what is it that’s different when you’re talking about doing something and praying the scriptures as opposed to just reading the scriptures academically?

Dr. Tim Gray:  That’s a great question.  There is a real difference, both in tone, style, flavor, spirit.  I think, for me, I spend a lot of time studying the bible so I’ve studied in Hebrew, Greek, and I’ll read all the texts and tried to uncover the history behind it, what’s the nature of the language that’s being used, what’s going on literarily.  But then, if I want to bring that word and listen to it as God’s Word, not a word just simply to be dissected and studied but a word to be listened to and obeyed and reflected deeply in the heart, that’s where you want to have that kind of approach that’s more spiritual and that’s where lectio divina really is a great tool to open up God’s Word and then come up with an approach to pray with it effectively.

Chris Cash:  Now, lectio divina has been used classically by contemplative monks and nuns.  How much of an acceptance do you see going into the secular world now?

Dr. Tim Gray:  I think we just had a Synod on Scripture that Pope Benedict called for last October and in that Synod was a Synod on Scripture in the life and mission of the church and the overall urgent theme of the whole Synod, the most repeated refrain from bishops all over the world was the need for the lay faithful to learn how to pray with scripture in the method of lectio divina.  And so lectio divina was probably the hottest topic of the Synod and I think that goes back to the church even going back to days of Vatican II calling on Catholics to read and pray with scripture daily and that the scriptures should be opened up to all the lay faithful and I think that in the past, people had an idea that the scripture was something just for clergy, just for the sisters maybe and that you shouldn’t be reading this on your own and the church has made it clear at Vatican II and even at the Synod, that’s not the case at all, like the catechism even says that all the lay faithful are exhorted by the church to read the bible and the Word of God daily in their daily lives.  So I think that there’s an impetus now that the church is saying “Hey, lectio divina isn’t just simply the method of prayer for monks and the religious.”  Now of course, there’s a great tradition in the monastic tradition of using lectio divina but what’s interesting, Chris, is that if you go back to the early church fathers and their preaching and exhortation to lay people, they talk a lot about lectio divina and so this was the common practice of prayer that the monks formalized or I’ll even say they took it a few steps deeper.  They deepened it in their monastic life but it was the common life of Christians and in terms of how prayer was to be approached.

Chris Cash:  Now, if I were to want to become more versed in lectio divina, obviously one thing I’d want to do is pick up a book like yours but what are the other things that I would need to do to get going, learning how to do lectio divina?

Dr. Tim Gray:  Sure, what I try to do in my book Praying Scripture for a Change is to lead people through the traditional steps of lectio divina as the monks kind of perfected it, so to speak, and refined it but then at the end, I tried to give practical tips.  So people would say, “What part of the bible should I start with?”  And for some of those practical steps, I’d say the Gospels are the first and best place to begin lectio divina so either Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John; any of the four are good for lectio and lend themselves to that.  The other part of the bible that is a great place to start and continue lectio for the rest of your life is the Psalms which I think is why the church gives us every day in the Mass and the liturgy hours, the church gives us a Psalm of the day and so, in other words, the church is saying the Psalms are so important for prayer, we’re going to give you a Psalm every day and the liturgy hours are saturated with Psalms and every day we get a Gospel reading in the Mass because the Gospel has primacy and importance.  So no other two books, no other genre in the bible is read everyday in the liturgy, in both the liturgy hours and in the Mass like the Psalms and the Gospels and that’s why I think they’re the best resources and the easiest place to start lectio divina.

Chris Cash:  So what are the mechanics of lectio divina prayer?

Dr. Tim Gray:  Actually, there’s two approaches to lectio divina as the tradition develops.  The first, which I like to keep very simple, is that when you look at the problem of prayer, we Christians know that we pray without ceasing as Paul said.  We should pray all the time.  A Christian who doesn’t pray is a strange thing.  It just seems like something inherently wrong with us if we don’t pray and we’re Christian and yet, prayer often tends to be dry and the experience of being boring or dull or fruitless and I think the number one reason for that that I kind of dive into is that if you’ve ever been in a conversation with somebody where they don’t talk, they don’t say anything or on the other hand, they do all the talking, what you end up with in either case is a monologue and monologues tend to be monotonous and boring.  And so we try to avoid those people because they’re boring, they’re burdensome.  They dominate conversations.

Well, when we enter prayer, if all we do is we talk to God but we don’t hear God speak to us, prayer then becomes a monologue and then it becomes monotonous and dry and what the secret of the saints is, I believe, and I try to go into this in the book, the saints understood that we could hear God not through being mystical or having divine voices speak to us but by taking up His Word, that as St. Augustine said, “When we pray, we speak to God.  When we read scripture, God speaks to us.”  And the key for that dialogue, to make prayer a dialogue is to have the Word of God, that the scripture is the normative way God speaks to his people.  And so, if you look at St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, St. Cyprian, they all said and the Vatican II quotes this phrase and puts it front and center at the end of the constitution on the Word of God that when we pray, we are talking to God; when we read the scripture and listen to the Word of God in the scripture, God speaks to us.  And so the first step I would say of the lectio divina is that it’s as simple as the Texas two step.  You share your heart with God and then you listen to the Word and you read it reflectively and God will start to speak to you and then you can have a dynamic dialogue and prayer can transcend the monotony of a monologue.

Then after that, Chris, I like to explain how the monks and I like to quote the classic work of the Middle Ages on lectio by Guigo the Carthusian.  He wrote a little book called The Ladder for Monks and Guigo outlined four steps to making lectio work simply.  And in those four steps, number one was reading or lectio, to read the text slowly and carefully.  And then stop at whatever key phrase or word that seems to really resonate with our hearts and speak to us.  And then that leads to the second step which is meditacio or meditation.  Meditation is where we stop in our lectio on a key image or phrase or word and now we begin to really think through it and reflect on it.  So for example, if you’re praying in the Gospels, maybe in the Gospel of Luke and you’re praying to the story of Mary and Martha, and you hear Jesus say, “Martha, Martha, you’re anxious about many things.”  If you’re a careful reader of Luke, you’ll realize that Jesus has spoken about anxiety in several places and as you do a meditation on anxiety in your own life and in the text of Luke, you’ll see a pattern of this coming up in the Gospel where Jesus is constantly speaking into our anxieties and then we can have a prayer where “Lord, I’m anxious about many things right now.  I’m anxious about the economy.  I’m anxious about my job security.  I’m anxious about my family and whatever concerns are going on.”

And then that leads to the third step of lectio as Guigo outlines it and that is what he called oratio or quite literally prayer and this is what we usually call prayer but prayer in this third step is where we’ve taken the meditation of what we reflected on, maybe an anxiety and what is making me anxious and what did Jesus say about anxiety and how I should be free from it and now it leads to a dialogue where I say, “Lord, I’m anxious about these things.  Help me.  Help me find peace of heart, help me find trust.  Help me to trust in You.”  And now that leads to a conversation where we’re expressing the thoughts of our meditation into a request, into a conversation with God.  Then that leads to the fourth step which is contemplatio or contemplation.  And contemplation is what Guigo says, it’s where we to quote Psalm 34, “taste and see the goodness of the Lord”.  It’s where we experience God in our prayer and God responds to us and that response can be wordless and that’s important for people to understand and I go into that a fair bit on my chapter on contemplation because that I find that this step is the hardest for people to get their minds around and most importantly in their hearts.  And this is where to use an example, I remember one time a couple of years ago, visiting my sister in San Diego and my wife and I were walking on the beach at sunset, and watching the sun set over the ocean and we didn’t have to express in words the beauty of the moment but just holding hands, walking in that beach, sharing that moment was powerful.  And that’s what can happen in prayer.  Once we’ve really entered into a deep dialogue with God and we’re just sitting in His presence, all of a sudden, it doesn’t have to be a word but we can experience God’s presence whereas Guigo says, “to taste and see the goodness of the Lord”.

Those are the four classic steps and then I like to add a fifth, and I do this by the inspiration of St. Francis de Sales.  St. Francis de Sales warned and cautioned that once you start praying and living a life of meditation, there’s a serious danger that we will encounter and that danger is that as we pray and meditate about holy things and about virtues and about God and a spiritual life and things that are spiritual, we can become easily deceived that we’re actually virtuous, that we’re holy, and that we’re really spiritual because we meditate about spiritual, virtuous, and holy things.  And we actually think that we have the virtues that we meditate on.  We think we have the holiness that we reflect on.  We think we have the spirituality of the deep spiritual authors that we’re reading and St. Francis tells what we need to kind of buffer us or protect against that is a practical resolution to put into practice the meditation we have.  In other words, St. Francis de Sales cautions us that if we just meditate about virtue but don’t practice it, we’re actually in a worse place because we think we’re virtuous and we’re actually not.

And so, what we have to do is end our meditation in our prayer time with a practical resolution of what we’re going to do that day in a small way to put into practice the inspiration and the meditation that we’ve had in prayer.  And so then, I talk about the practical steps that St. Francis de Sales and others have given of how we’re to do that in our prayer to make our prayer fruitful.  And there’s a great spiritual writer, Fr. Jordan Aumann who talks about the importance of that practical resolution and it’s really powerful when people incorporate that into their prayer life.  It’s amazing.  It’s also very humbling because you realize, I remember the first time I tried to do that, the first week or two, I was successful with my practical resolution maybe once and I usually forgot about it during the day and I realized how hard it was to do this and to put it into practice.  But that’s part of the struggle and that’s the great thing, once you make this intentional, then you enter into the struggle to spiritualize and then you see your setbacks, you also get to see advances and that’s really exciting and it makes prayer exciting once you have this simple message to crack open the Word of God and make it effective for prayer.

Chris Cash:  Okay, well we’re going to take a short break here to hear from our sponsor but when we come back, we’ll be speaking more with Dr. Tim Gray about Praying the Scripture for a Change, An Introduction to Lectio Divina.  This is the Catholic Spotlight.

Chris Cash:  And we’re back on the Catholic Spotlight, talking with Dr. Tim Gray about Praying the Scripture for a Change:  An Introduction to Lectio Divina.  Now, Dr. Gray, I think one of the most powerful things with regard to lectio divina is that it is deep and it’s powerful but at the same time, it’s something that you can do without having a deep and powerful knowledge of scripture already.

Dr. Tim Gray:  Absolutely, I mean, this is the beauty of the Word of God itself is that the Word of God is as Gregory the Great once said, “It’s a simple stream that a lamb can cross but yet it’s deep enough that an elephant can drown in it.”  And it’s really true.  I mean, the scriptures and that’s why I oftentimes recommend start with something as simple as the Gospels but you could pray the Gospels your whole life and you’ll constantly learn deeper insights.  A way from which the Old Testament alluded to it, parrots within the Gospel of repetition and deeper insights into what Christ is saying and yet, you can start with very little background.  All you need to do is read the story of Jesus and that story starts to have meaning.  You just read the simple encounter of Jesus with the leper and you can do a lectio on that.  It could be very powerful and fruitful and the other key to all of this, I believe is, this is where the Holy Spirit becomes a guide because the Holy Spirit inspired the Word of God and as Paul says, we don’t know how to pray as we ought.  In Romans 8, Paul says we don’t know how to pray but it’s the spirit of God that helps us to pray and what God wants to do to empower our prayer is to take this divine text, this divine word in His scriptures and then pray for the presence of the Spirit to enable and empower our prayer and that Spirit can make our prayer as easily understandable for a child and yet as deep for the deepest intellect.

Chris Cash:  Now, have you started getting any feedback from people who are using lectio divina and especially using your book to get involved with and learn more about lectio divina?

Dr. Tim Gray:  I have, I’ve been teaching this for a few years at the seminary and as well as at the Augustine Institute and giving talks all around the country in different parishes and I just got a comment, actually yesterday from a woman who read the book and actually, it was a review on Amazon and she talked about how it transformed her prayer life and it helped her overcome a lot of pitfalls and that’s really one of the things I love about lectio divina is that I think some of the most common pitfall and problems people have in their prayer life can be overcome by this very simple and effective method.  For example, a lot of people want to experience contemplation and they’ll go to the chapel.  They’ll have a 10- or 15-minute prayer.  They have a 20-minute break and will go to the chapel and they’ll start praying and they want to hear God speak to them and they try to get really, really quiet so that they can hear God speak to them like He did to Elijah in a still small voice and then someone praying the rosary almost out loud and that’s annoying and in the Adoration Chapel and they used to be quiet and they think if they can get it quiet enough, they can hear God.

And what we go on, what this method shows you is that contemplation is the fourth rung on the ladder and people try to start at the fourth rung and they can’t reach it and then they find prayer too hard and they stop.  And what I love to show is that lectio just simply if you can read, you’re ready for the first step in prayer and all you have to do is read God’s Word slowly and carefully and re-read it and you’re ready for the first step and you put your foot on that first rung and now the second rung, meditation is within reach, whereas to step up on and to start with meditation can be really difficult.  It’s like trying to reach the second rung in the ladder and then once you start in the meditation then the next rung is within reach and that’s oratio and then that leads to contemplatio and so I think that one of the pitfalls I hear from people is they’re like, “Wow!  I always want to start with contemplation.  I wondered why it was always so hard for me to get there.  And I didn’t think I could do it and once I understood that there was a couple of simple steps to get me there that helped me so much.”  Those are the kinds of things that I get excited about and that’s why I wanted to write this book because the feedback I got from talking and teaching people about lectio is people like, “Wow!  This opens it up.  Now I understand how to get where I want to go in prayer.  And now I have a roadmap in front of me and it’s a simple road map and that helps people and empowers them and that’s what I get excited about is empowering people for their prayer life.  And the other thing I like to do is, as a modern scholar of the *** [00:22:23], there is a lot of simple methods that scholars have recognized for reading scripture, literary methods and other things.  And I try to take that and match that with the wisdom of the Catholic tradition on lectio and get people some practical tips on how to read for their lectio to enrich their lectio which will in turn enrich their meditation and prayer.

Chris Cash:  Well, I’ve pretty much exhausted my thoughts on this particular book.  Was there anything else about this you wanted to share with our listeners?

Dr. Tim Gray:  I would just say that there’s nothing more exciting than an encounter with God that’s lively and dynamic and if you stumbled with prayer and you thought that I may actually have a mystic gene in me that I can just have that deep prayer life like someone like Teresa of Avila and the other saints.  I just want to say that God wants everybody to pray and He wants to be reached in prayer.  He wants to help you pray and I just think of someone like St. Teresa of Avila who said that she wouldn’t go to the chapel without a holy book and Teresa in other words…Teresa of Avila always brought the Word of God into her time in the chapel, into her prayer to enable her to have that dialogue with God and if you can just learn that method of how to enter into that dialogue with God with scripture, it will enrich and empower your prayer and your relationship with God and nothing in life is more exciting than that.

Chris Cash:  Do you have any future projects you want to comment on to let our listeners know about what other great things come in on the line?  I’m sure that there’s something in works with the Great Adventure series right now.

Dr. Tim Gray:  Yeah, Jeff Cavins and I are working on…we’ve been doing the bible timeline, the Great Adventure Bible Timeline bible study program and people keep asking us for a book on the bible and so Jeff and I are close to hopefully, it will come out in September.  We’re in the last edits of a book we’ve done together called the Great Adventure which is it takes the 12 periods of the bible timeline and there’s a chapter on each period where we go into detail to kind of open up the whole bible in one book to kind of give people the plot of scripture story and the overview in one penny book.  And for me, I’m excited about that because it does help with lectio divina because if people can get their minds around the big picture of the story scripture saying it will enliven and help their prayer lives, and it also gives people a biblical world view which is incredibly empowerful and important today because as St. Paul says, “We should not let our minds be conformed to the world but be transformed by the renewal of our minds in Christ.”  And to have that renewal of mind, we’ve got to know God’s story.

Chris Cash:  Well, that sounds like a pretty exciting product.  I’m definitely going to be looking forward to seeing that.  I’ve always been a huge fan of the Great Adventure series as a whole so well, if you don’t have anything else to share then I’m going to say thank you very much, Dr. Gray.  I’m glad to have you on the show again and hopefully, we’ll be hearing from you soon.

Dr. Tim Gray:  Great, thanks a lot, Chris.  God bless.

Chris Cash:  God bless.

Chris Cash:  Thank you for listening to the Catholic Spotlight, a production of the Catholic Company, your store for over 10,000 Catholic books and gifts that make a difference.  Find us online at catholiccompany.com.  You can find more podcasts from the Catholic Spotlight at catholicspotlight.com and if you have a question, comment, or would like to be featured in our intro, call our voice mail at (206) 312-0069.  We would love to hear from you.  You can find more info on being featured on our intro at catholicspotlight.com as well as announcements about future interviews.  Have a great day and God bless.

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Transcript of Interview with Dr. Tim Gray about Praying Scripture for a Change.  This interview and others like it can be found at http://www.catholicspotlight.com

Listen Now to the audio version of the show.

Praying Scripture for a Change is available at The Catholic Company.

http://www.catholiccompany.com/catholic-books/1033331/Praying-Scripture-Change-Introduction-to-Lectio-Divna/