The words on the page looked like any other words on a page. They were small, black disruptions of the white space. One line cascaded into the next, like a series of small waterfalls rushing until settling in a clear pool that read: “What profit would there be for one to gain the whole world and forfeit his life?”
I read those words slowly. What profit would there be . . . what profit . . . to gain the whole world . . . gain the world . . . and forfeit his life . . . lose his life . . . lose himself . . . lose everything. As I mouthed the words again and again, suddenly the pool of words itself started changing. There, in my mind’s eye, it was as if the letters were scrambled like a Scrabble board at the outset of a game and then they were put back into place and I read: what would it profit a man to gain all the souls of whole world and lose those of his family?
The words cut the hard crust of my heart and left me pierced and wounded, like the blade of a scalpel at the outset of a surgery. I reread the new black words on the white page: what would it profit a man . . . what profit . . . to gain all the souls of the whole world . . . all the souls . . . and lose his family. It was as if the book read my life. The words of Scripture read me. And they revealed something about me I hadn’t realized before.
At that time, I had been doing ministry in the Catholic Church for years. I attacked my ministry like a madman. My ministry. That was the problem, thinking it was mine. Launching initiative after initiative, I was profiting my ego under the guise of profiting souls—so many souls, all the souls of the whole world. I was trying to gain the “whole world,” which, in my case, that meant the whole Archdiocese of Cincinnati or trying to scale some initiative so it could go national. All my best time and energy went to this pursuit, and I could feel the life of my family slipping through my fingers like cupped water in the hands. Cupping water in the hands is an exercise in futility.
I sat there looking at the words on the page, reading them and rereading them. But really, they had read me and now told me something about myself that left me wounded. The words made me feel simultaneously consoled and uncomfortable. The Gospel does this to us. It’s uncomfortably consoling. It is this way because it expresses the truth. The truth wounds us with its beauty, its radiant presentation of the way things are amid the gray, murky water of the most of our lives. It presents things the way they are, but it never leaves us there. It invites change. It provokes a response.
God’s words read me that morning even as I prayerfully read them. This is lectio divina. It’s the only kind of reading that reads you, that exposes you, because God’s word is living and effective and sharper than a two-edged sword (cf. Heb 4:12–13), and lectio gets that living word inside of you. It’s not magic. There are no mental gymnastics. It’s simply God’s word read in a context open to impact. God is present, somehow, in and through the text, and he speaks, personally, through what appear to be the same small, black letters on any other ordinary white page. But these words, the words of Scripture are different, and the prayerful reading of Scripture that is lectio divina is different, because it is reading for a change and it’s reading that does, in fact, change you. It changes you because it’s reading that reads you.