Using Scripture in Prayer

Praying with Scripture

This contemplative attitude and skill are what we want to bring to praying with scripture. With scripture we can take a long, loving look at God's actions toward us; we can look at Jesus and become absorbed in what he is like, what he says, what he does, what he cares about. Scripture is a privileged place where we can go to put ourselves more explicitly in the Lord's presence. If the goal of our spiritual striving is to know the Lord God, to become more deeply in love with God, and to be alive in the Spirit (in short, to be a disciple of Jesus), then scripture is a special resource for our spiritual striving. It becomes a special place of encounter for our heartfelt knowledge and personal relationship with God to grow.

In scripture we find expressions of God's deepest desires for us, of God's attitude toward us, and of God's willingness to be involved with us. The directness of the biblical word's expression of God's desire to be in a loving relationship with us calls for a response. We react to the biblical word in the way we would to any provocative statement addressed to us. If we like what we hear, we respond with approval and enthusiasm; if we do not like it, we want to stop listening and turn away from it. What we cannot avoid is that the Bible expresses the word of a living God who wants to engage in dialogue with us. So we need to approach the Bible in prayer as a word addressed to us personally calling for a response. "What do I hear the Lord saying to me?" is the fundamental question we bring to scripture when we pray.

Praying with scripture depends on two things: (1) what we find in the text and (2) what we bring to the text out of our lives. In prayer we bring these two realities together and, through imaginative play, let them interact, tease each other, illuminate each other.  This is how a personal dialogue with God goes on through the mediation of the biblical story. The most important capacity we have in order for this dialogue to happen in a personal way is our imagination.

But can we encourage this imaginative play with a story in these days of modern biblical criticism? How can we integrate a critical understanding of scripture with the spiritual use of a text for prayer and spiritual direction?

The 1943 breakthrough of scientific exegesis in the Catholic community has brought the use of historical criticism to bear on biblical texts to discover and define what the text meant in its original setting. But an exclusively historical critical approach to scripture concerned only with discovering what the text meant originally would not be sufficiently nourishing for the spiritual life. At the same time, however, an uncritical concern with what the text means or can mean may easily result in uninformed pietism. We want to avoid both extremes: critical sterility and uncritical piety.

The spiritual use of scripture, which is concerned with the personal meaning of the text rather than with what the author intended for his original audience, is not trying to undo, replace, or ignore all that historical criticism has brought to us about the Bible. The spiritual use of scripture recognizes that what the text meant as it came from its author is not the only meaning of the text, and certainly not its complete meaning. Historical criticism is one procedure of interpretation that we must bring to understanding a text, but it is not the only procedure in the interpretive process.

To say that the author's meaning of a text is not the only meaning nor the fullest meaning is not really new to the Catholic community. Nor is it foreign to critical approaches to scripture. Patristic and medieval uses of scripture were sensitive to the plurality of levels of meaning in a text, even though those eras did not have the critical tools we have to retrieve what the author meant. Critical scholarship during the 1950s was active in pursuing the theory of sensus plenior, which claims there are more meanings to a text than that which the human author intended.

More recently, biblical scholars who apply the hermeneutical theory of Paul Ricoeur are interested in the "surplus of meaning" that a text has. Our spiritual use of scripture falls within this tradition of discovering more meaning in a text than what the human author intended. The way we approach a text today in our spiritual use of it is not to see the text as a "container" of meaning, but as a mediator of meaning. The literary form of the text is a strategy for involving the reader in different ways to discover the personal meaning of the text.

However, saying that there is more meaning to a text than that intended by the author does not make the text open to any meaning whatsoever. The meanings of a text are controlled by the text. This makes historical criticism very important. With the critical exegesis of historical criticism, we do not eliminate the possibility of discovering meanings different from the original, but we are able to establish the text, clarify its literary form, and keep the meanings we do discover in line with what is truly possible.