Let’s think for a few minutes. In the early Church, how would someone have come to know Jesus — after his Resurrection and Ascension? How would they have encountered him, so to speak?
Well, in a secondhand way, we can say Jesus would have been encountered through the lives and stories and proclamation and martyrdoms of people who actually walked and talked with Jesus, who followed him. They certainly would have encountered him in the liturgy and those nascent forms of the Sacraments that were taking shape. They also would have come to encounter him in the earliest inspired writings of Apostles and apostolic men that became known as the New Testament. These would have been read, publicly, often in liturgical settings, and would eventually become more widely accessible in the manuscript tradition that copied and transmitted the text.
These books — divinely inspired and eventually canonized — they were a kind of certified and guaranteed way of encountering the living, breathing Word of God — Jesus Christ — even as the apostles and their disciples died.
In time, say 200-300 years after that first apostolic generation, a new practice, a new way of reading Scripture and encountering Christ emerged alongside the liturgy and in service of it. That way became known as lectio divina. Lectio divina (lit. “sacred” or “divine” or “holy reading”) is a kind of prayed reading of Scripture. It’s knowing Scripture by heart — not as in rote memorization, but as in the Scriptures becoming part of you, getting into you. Like nutrients to body or oxygen to blood, the word of God was to be assimilated and change the way you thought, spoke, and acted.
Lectio divina was a kind of incarnational encounter with the incarnate God — facilitated by the sacred pages of Scripture and one’s own voice.
Here’s what I mean: In the early manuscript cultures (which still largely relied on oral story-telling to carry the culture forward and not the written word), books were super expensive to produce. They were also big and clumsy. To save space and make things more economical and efficient, scribes used a written form of Latin, in this case, known as scriptio continua — there were no margins and no spaces between words, there were neither punctuation marks nor page headings. There weren’t chapters and verses and all the other things that help a reader read today. It would have looked something like this:
COMETOMEALLYOUTHATLABORANDAREBURDENEDANDIWILLREFRESHYOUTAKEUPMYYOKEUPONYOUANDLEARNOFMEBECAUSEIAMMEEKANDHUMBLEOFHEARTANDYOUSHALLFINDRESTTOYOURSOULSFORMYYOKEISSWEETANDMYBURDENLIGHT
So, reading was a chore. It was difficult. It was time consuming. One had to decipher and literally sound out the words. So reading was a kind of whole body experience — involving a heavy book, the use of the eyes, the mouth, and the ears. You literally incarnated the word while reading, and this was necessary to “get it,” and “get it in you.”
Nowadays, when we read the Gospels (or anything else for that matter), we take a lot for granted and we tend to read quickly. We read silently. It’s an individualized, privatized affair. It pretty much involves our eyes and our minds. But, what would happen if we try to incarnate reading once again? What would happen if we would become like the “mumbling monks” whose prayed reading of scripture became known as lectio divina? What would happen if we gave God the first word and if the word of God would become part of us? What would happen if we encountered Jesus in Scripture and lived from that encounter?
I actually have tried the continuous script approach with various groups in my parish ministry, and with surprising results. People got into trying to sound out the text and different words and phrases stood out. I think everyone’s been surprised by how helpful it is to basically be forced to take the text slowly. It seems to open new space to hear the voice of the Lord resounding through the sacred words.
Each week on Thursday, I will publish the upcoming Sunday’s Gospel in continuous script. This will land right in the inboxes of my subscribers. Honestly, it’s a fun challenge to try to decipher the reading. I hope this helps people (myself included) to slow down with the text and to let it speak to us in new and different ways. Then, on Saturdays, I’ll post my own reflections after having prayed with it for a few days, and invite you to share your own if you’d like. (You can read all about the plan for this Substack here.)