Undusted Texts

The Holy Prophet Jeremiah  "'Is not My Word like...a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces?' (Jer 23:29).  As the hammer splits the rock into many splinters, so will a scriptural verse yield many meanings."--Sanhedrin 34A These words of the Jewish Midrash reveal an essential truth: the Light within the Scriptures is unfathomable.  Yet how much more incomprehensible is the fullness of the Lord! So many throughout the Church's life have reiterated the fact that Scripture bears a multitude of meanings.  Origen described three ways of interpreting Scripture: the way of the body, the way of the soul, and the way of the spirit.  In the West, the concept of four senses arose, as a medieval couplet summarizes it: "The Letter speaks of deeds; Allegory to faith; / The Moral how to act; Anagogy our destiny."  Some came to speak of the "sensus plenior," the fuller meaning that lay deeper than the literal meaning of the words themselves.  All t...

"Oh, how I love Thy Law! It is my meditation all the day." So sung King David, and so should we sing at all times in our fervor for the Lord's Word. Many ways are there for us to be soaked in Scripture in order to "swim in the Law of the Lord" (in the beauteous phrase of St. Seraphim), and one of these is the way known as lectio divina, the divine reading. A great guide of this practice is Guigo II, a Carthusian prior. Let us learn from him how the Law of the Lord can always be our delight. Guigo shows us for degrees for entering into the inner chamber of the Word: reading, meditation, prayer, and contemplation. We can even see these in the Psalms: "Make me understand the way of Thy precepts, and I will meditate on Thy wondrous works...I long for Thy salvation, O Lord, and Thy Law is my delight." Guigo's words show us how these verses are a lamp for our path into the Scriptures: "Reading is the careful study of the Scriptures, conce...