by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Writer
(March 10, 2008) The vast number of Catholics without a spiritual director because of the priest shortage will find comfort in the advice given by the “Pope’s Preacher” in a Lenten meditation delivered to Pope Benedict XVI and the Roman Curia – try the Bible!
“To every soul that desires it, the word of God assures fundamental, and in itself infallible, spiritual direction,” said Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa in a March 7 Lenten meditation which was reported by Zenit News.
“There is a spiritual direction that is, so to speak, ordinary and everyday, which consists in the discovering what God wants in the situations in which man usually finds himself,” he said.
“Such spiritual direction is assured by meditation on the word of God accompanied by the interior anointing of the Spirit, who translates the word into good ‘inspirations’ and the good inspirations into practical resolutions.”
However, he was not talking about the very common practice of opening the Bible at random, sometimes referred to as “Bible Roulette.” Although many saints used this method and gained great fruit from it, this practice “must be done with discretion, in a climate of faith and not without having prayed for a long time,” Father said.
Instead, he recommended three steps for effectively using the word of God as a tool for personal holiness: “Welcoming the word, meditating on the word, putting the word into practice.”
The first step, welcoming the word, includes all the ways in which a Christian ordinarily comes in contact with the Word, such as listening to it in the liturgy, reading or studying it.
There are two dangers in this first step, he said; “hermeneutic inflations” – which usually occur in an academic environment when one believes interpreting or studying Scripture is more important than practicing it; and “fundamentalism” – when one takes everything in the Bible literally without regard for any interpretive mediation.
These two dangers only appear to be opposed to one another, Father said. However, “what they have in common is the fact that both stop at the letter, neglecting the Spirit.”
The second step, meditating on the word, is to read Scripture as if one is looking in a mirror.
“The soul that looks into the mirror of the word learns to know ‘how he is,’ he learns to know himself, he sees his deformities in the image of God and in the image of Christ,” Father said.
For instance, when reading the beatitude “blessed are the poor in spirit,” one can see “that you are full of attachments and full of superfluous things,” Father said. “When reading that ‘charity is patient,’ you realize how impatient, envious and self-interested you are.”
By reading Scripture in this quiet and more reflective way, we not only see ourselves more clearly, but we see the face and the heart of God as well.
“In this way, the contemplation of the word procures the two pieces of knowledge that are the most important for advancing along the road of true wisdom: self-knowledge and knowledge of God,” he said.
The third step is to use the word of God for holiness by putting it into practice. “The word of God is only truly understood when one begins to practice it,” Father said.
“As soon as one begins to look through the New Testament to see in what the duty of obedience consists, one makes a surprising discovery, and that is, that obedience is almost always seen as obedience to the word of God. The obedience itself of Jesus is exercised above all through obedience to written words,” he said.
For example, in the episode of the temptations in the desert, Jesus’ obedience consists in recalling the words of God and of abiding by them. This must be the case in the life of all believers.
“The words of God, by the present action of the Spirit, become the expression of the living will of God . . . in a given moment,” Father said. “Obedience to the world of God is obedience we can always do.”
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