Communion with God---reading the Bible

Reading the Bible has founded a communion, transcending time and place, of those who wonder at, praise, and are eager to share their vision of God's abiding, ingenious and undefeatable mercy [Daniel Rees in Lectio Divina].

People who write about spiritual experience all recognize that they have journeyed through the same spiritual territory where they recognize and describe the same features.  While critical scholarship is out to demonstrate pluralism, the eye of faith is confident of discovering one more instance of the communion of saints.  

St. Gregory the Great stated that every Christian is called to know the heart of God in the words of God, or to listen to God's word with "the ear of the heart."  Some people seem to believe that reading the bible is only for the experts, for those who have studied it and understand it, but God has intended His book to be for every person.  Rees says, "In the Bible, the simplest should feel, just because it is ... the Magna Carta of their worth, as much at home as the academically proficient."  St. Jerome wrote: "An ant can paddle in it, and an elephant can drown in it."

The Bible is universal because it is a mirror of self-knowledge (James 1:23), and it grows in stature with those who read it, according to Taius of Saragossa.  A man in prison who was given a Bible to read said, "It is not I who read this book; it reads me."

The prophet Habakkuk was an Old Testament prophet who heard God speaking to him, interpreting the days and time in which he lived.  This is what Habakkuk wrote: 

I will stand on my guard post

And station myself on the rampart;

And I will keep watch to see what He will speak to me,

And how I may reply when I am reproved.

Then the Lord answered me and said,

Record the vision

and inscribe it on tablets...(Hab. 2:1-1).

Habakkuk used three elements in hearing the voice of God:  becoming still, using vision, and journaling.  His journal has become for us a record of how God acted in the life of Israel.  Reading the Bible can help us "see" also how God is acting in our lives too, and recording our understanding can help us gather up "the heart of God in the words of God," as Gregory the Great put it.

note:  some of this blog comes directly from Rees' article on Lectio Divina, published in a Benedictine magazine whose name I do not know but will find out and acknowledge later this week.