Many people seem to have trouble communicating with God. Not, of course, because of poor communication on God's part, but on ours. God has no trouble understanding us, but we often have great trouble understanding Him. Sometimes it's because we don't realize that good creature--Creator communications is not a matter of talking to God, but of talking with God. The spiritual life in the fullest sense is a dialogue, not a monologue; it's a two-way communication. I think it was St. Anselm who said that by prayer we speak to God, and by His holy Word He speaks to us.
But persons not disposed to speaking to God in prayer will be also not disposed to hear God speaking to them through His Word. St. Teresa of Avila wrote that souls without prayer are spiritually sick'so preoccupied with outside affairs that they are not only incapable of entering into themselves, but they are also incapable of allowing the awesome insights of God's Word to enter into them.
Through the centuries, the saints have agreed that relating to God intimately in prayer enables God to relate intimately to us by sharing the divine wisdom with us "that we may understand what God has freely given us" (1 Cor. 2:12). As we commune with God He communes with us. But the opposite is also true: if we open our hearts to His holy Word, an exhilarating prayerful experience of faith, hope, and love will burst forth in our souls, as happened when Epaphras exposed the Gospel message to the Colossians (See Col. 1:5) And this prayer experience was further enriched by Paul's prayer for them to have "knowledge of God's will through all spiritual wisdom and understanding" (verse 9).
Thus, prayer gives us an appreciation of God's Word, but also God's Word gives us an appreciation of prayer. But this poses a question: Which is better, to speak to God in prayer and wait for Him to commune with us in Scripture, or to see what He has to say to us in Scripture and then let it entice us to commune with Him in prayer? The dialogue can be initiated from either side, but the fact remains that God has already taken the initiative; His Word existed before you and I did. We don't have to wait for Him to speak, but He has to wait for us to listen and respond. And He wants that response on our part to be a meaningful one. As John Alexander wrote, "The central issue about the Bible is whether we live it." The "how" had been epitomized by John Bengel: "apply thy whole self to the text and the whole text to thyself."
Of course, a modicum of familiarity with God's Word is indispensable. One doesn't have to be a Scripture scholar to have some workable knowledge of God's Word. But St. Jerome (himself the patron of Scripture scholars) formulated the need with classical minimalism: "Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ." Keep in mind that academic knowledge of the Bible is not the same as the Spirit-spawned gifts of wisdom and understanding. (Is. 11:2) It isn't so much the "head knowledge" that counts; it's the "heart knowledge" that is important here. The former is theological, while the latter is spiritual. In the thought-provoking words of Samuel Chadwick, "No man is uneducated who knows the Bible, and no one is wise who is ignorant of its teachings."
More important than knowing the Word of God is knowing the God of the Word. Among other things, this means that it is not something to be approached primarily as a literary masterpiece (which of course it is). "To read the Bible merely as literature," said C.S. Lewis, "is to cut the wood against the grain, for the Bible demands incessantly to be taken on its own terms. It will not continue to give literary delight very long except to those who go to it for something quite different." As someone quipped, "Scripture is God's personal love letter to His children; so if you don't understand it, you're reading someone else's mail."
As one becomes more and more aware that "the letter kills but the Spirit gives life" (2 Cor. 3:6), eventually the Holy Spirit leads the devout soul to grasp the inner core of any given passage. Even if one doesn't know the "exactly correct" interpretation of a passage, the devout reader should depend on the Spirit to provide insight as to the right application of it. Saints have experienced this intervention of the Spirit in dramatic ways; St. Anthony Claret, for instance, said that "there were passages that impressed me so deeply that I almost seemed to hear a voice telling me a deeper meaning of the passage I was reading."
Consider a hypothetical situation. Suppose you were asked to sift several tons of sand from one pile to another by spooning it through a hand-held strainer or sieve. Without doubt you would find such a task boring, to say the least. But suppose you were to catch a gold nugget every hour, and later every minute, as you sifted through the sand pile, and were allowed to keep what you found. How boring would that task be then? "Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly," urges Paul (Col. 3:16). With the availability of such riches, it would not be hard to relate to his words to the Ephesians; "I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know...the riches of His glorious inheritance." (Eph. 1:18)
To make Scripture meaningful and exciting, our value system has to be radically changed. In the words of Chuck Swindoll, we Christians are called to read God's Word so deeply that "our blood runs Biblene." Perhaps our problem is that we read God's Word too much and experience it too little. There's a great difference between memorizing passages and thinking biblically with the "thoughts of God" (1 Cor. 2:11). There's a difference between having the Scriptures lodged dry as dust in our head, and having them throbbing with soul-stirring inspiration in our heart. There's a difference between acknowledging the truth of God's Word, and being inspired and animated by that truth.
If only we could enjoy the privilege of Cleopas and the other unnamed disciple on the road to Emmaus, to whom Jesus "explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning Himself" (Luke 24:27)! "They asked each other, 'Were not our hearts burning within us while He talked with us on the road, and opened the Scriptures to us?'" (verse 32). How many people do you know whose hearts are "burning within them" while they are hearing or reading God's Word?
Pope St. Pius X stated that the Psalms, from the time of the early Church, have had the "wonderful power of fostering devotion among Christians." How many Christians do you know who have experienced this "wonderful devotion-fostering power?" Very few modern-day Christians are open enough to God's grace to experience what St. Augustine did when he heard the Psalm sung: "Those voices flowed into my ears, truth filtered into my heart, and from my heart surged waves of devotion."
There are three stages in Bible reading: First, the "cod-liver-oil" stage, when it is taken like medicine; second, the "shredded-wheat" stage, when it is nourishing but dry; and third, the "peaches-and-cream" stage when it is savored with exquisite delight. Great luminaries with the Holy Spirit's gift of understanding, like St. Gertrude, could find profound insights in even the most prosaic passages of Scripture, but for most of us with that gift less developed, obviously not every passage will be found spiritually exciting at any given time for any given person. Vis-a-vis this fact, Alex Wilson offers some sage advice: "Bible study is like eating fish. If you find a bone, you need not throw away the whole fish. Simply lay aside the bone and enjoy the edible parts." The analogy is eminently clear.
Consistency is one of the greatest challenges in any program for developing one's spiritual life, and growth through Scripture is no exception. While trying to come up with a simple help for those who might need a boost in their struggle to persevere in keeping open to God's Word, a whimsical poem-pun popped into my mind; though it is quite schmaltzy, I'll dare to offer it here for anyone for whom it might provide a simple support:
So much for "theology by jingle." More seriously, consistency in feeding on God's Word is absolutely essential if one would become advanced in the enviable skill mastered by the great saints of fathoming the mind of God in His Sacred Word. Diamond mining is arduous work, but very rewarding. To persevere in the challenging task of mining the precious stones, motivation is a critical factor; so also in seeking the gems of divine inspiration in God's Word, as the great St. Jerome points out: "Everything we read in sacred books shines and glitters even in the outer shell; but the marrow is sweeter. He who desires to eat the kernel must first break open the shell."
Why is this kind of excitement generally lacking in even good Christians in our times? I think it is because we have forgotten the basic truth that such experiences can be architected only by God's grace and we seldom plead for such grace. In our Pelagian humanism, we try to lift ourselves up to the heights of holiness by our own bootstraps. Thus, theology displaces spirituality; academicism displaces devotion; and the Lord steps back to watch from the sidelines as with prideful futility we struggle like ants trying to move a boulder.
No one had formulated this more clearly than St. Catherine of Siena who was called upon even by popes for advice. She writes: "Every light that comes from the Holy Scripture comes from the light of grace. This is why the foolish, proud, and even some learned people are blind even in the light; the light is clouded by their pride and selfish love. They read the Scriptures literally but not with true understanding. They have let go of the light by which the Scriptures were formed and proclaimed."
In every age, especially in our modern era of secular humanism, the sense of transcendence of God's Word has been ignored. Blessed Angela of Foligno was intoxicated with the awesomeness of Holy Writ. She wrote, "The Holy Scriptures are so far above us that no man--be he the wisest in all the world and possessing all the knowledge it is possible to have in this life--can fully and perfectly know and understand them. There is none whose intelligence would not be always overcome by them."
Tim Hansel, who wrote the book, "You Gotta Keep Dancing," tried a curious experiment in faith. He made a 50-year commitment to explore just one verse of the Bible--the first sentence of the 23rd Psalm: "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want." Memorizing it, of course, took only a few seconds, but understanding it in depth, and experiencing it, he said, was one of the greatest adventures of his life. So far, he has spent only about 15 years exploring that one sentence, and now he realizes that he has just begun to scratch the surface of the sacred periscope. The first day alone he spent over three hours exploring the work the, and came to realize that it is always used to preface a statement of reality: The table, The book, The person, The Lord. Only recently he has come to see how it ties together each of the subsequent sentences. His Spirit-activated insights already cover enough basic material to nucleate a sizable library of spiritual wisdom. He still has another 35 years left in h
The fathomless depths of God's Word are staggering, because God Himself is the ultimate focus. A four-year-old moppet, in her childish misquote of the 23rd Psalm, said it all. With a curtsy and a perky stage bow, she simply proclaimed, "The Lord is my shepherd--that's all I want." No theologian or no saint could have said it better!
Visit Father Hampsch's home page at:
http://claretiantapeministry.org/
This site Copyright © 1995-2001 Catholic Charismatic Center