Thursday, August 11, 2011

Spiritual Reading: Listening with the Heart


Spiritual reading, like prayer, is more a work of the heart than the head.  We miss the very purpose of spiritual reading if we read many books in order to acquire a fund of information on spiritual topics.  Our reading should be directed to stir the heart rather than fill the head.  To inflame the heart and bring it to relish divine things it is necessary that our reading resemble prayer; our reading will be spiritually fruitful only in proportion to our loving union with God while we read.  The heart must respond to the voice of the Lord inviting it, must stop occasionally and surrender itself, must "taste and see that the Lord is sweet" (Ps. 33:9).

For St. Benedict, prayer was all but impossible without spiritual reading; indeed, the one was hardly distinguishable from the other.  In Chapter 4, after exhorting us "to listen willingly to holy reading," he immediately urges, "to apply onself often to prayer."  Commenting on these texts, one of the old abbots wrote that "prayer does not differ from reading, nor is reading different from prayer."

Just as we often make the mistake of thinking that we have to say a great deal in order to pray well, so we may be inclined to think that in order to atain sanctity we must read many holy books.  Though St. Benedict had his monks spend four hours a day in spiritual reading, yet he would be the first to deny that it was necessary to read volume after volume.  As in prayer, the important thing is that we love much, not that we read much.  The heart refuses to be stuffed and gorged; and it also refuses to be rushed.  The heart will love generously, with all its strength, if we read slowly; otherwise it soon wearies.  It is much better to read only a few pages slowly and to read them with great devotion than to devour volumes in haste.  However, the same is true of spiritual reading as of prayer; the more of it we do well, the more quickly we run the way of perfection.

From Nothing But Christ
by Kilian McDonnell, OSB

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