“The Lectio Divina of Fiction”

By Chiara Cecchi - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=83336943

Just because you are literate doesn’t mean you know how to read. So I like to provoke new students—none of whom attend my institution expressly for academic purposes. Our students matriculate to the seminary college first and foremost because they feel called by God to the Catholic priesthood. They come because a spiritual adviser suggested it; they come because they adore liturgy; they come because they enjoy helping people. They do not come for Beowulf. So I have found that my job as Professor of Literature has been to win converts not to Christianity but to fiction.

What a task this proselytization is. As primed as the seminarians might be to reject utilitarian educational aims given their mysterious spiritual call, every year I encounter a new crop who predictably view fiction as a waste of time. So every year I remind them that they must, at least, read the Bible—a compendium of literary forms that demands more than surface-level interpretation. The parables of Jesus are evidence enough of this demand, and students certainly know he isn’t teaching them how to farm. Yet suddenly and already we are on choppy waters: if a text means more than what it signifies literally, how can there be consistency among interpretations? If there isn’t consistency, do we find ourselves in a sea of relativity? And if relativists, then heretics! Shipwrecked before venturing from the coast. 

To alleviate this fear I have worked on encouraging students to approach reading Homer and Mary Shelley, Sappho and James Baldwin as a form of the centuries-old practice of lectio divina, which is the slow, prayerful reading of scripture. Reading as prayer, as opposed to mere literacy, means cultivating a habit of being that can be likened to contemplation—an openness to and awareness of a reality that is lived rather than measured. The twentieth-century Trappist monk and best-selling author of Seven-Storey Mountain Thomas Merton glosses contemplation as a “celebration of love.” I use his definition as a starting point for this theory of reading because it resists cultural notions of commodity or exchange: celebrations are not useful, and love is a gift.

A Carmelite monastery was where I first encountered the practice of lectio divina, or divine reading. This medieval exercise offers a helpful model for reading fiction precisely because it extends beyond the individual reader. Its steps include: first, reading slowly and more than once; second, meditating or connecting my lived experience to the text; third, praying or discerning what the text is calling me to as a result of that connection and asking to receive what is necessary to carry that out; and finally, contemplating. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops defines contemplation as “a gaze turned toward Christ and the things of God … [in a] state of seeing or experiencing the text as mystery and reality. In contemplation, you come into an experiential contact with the One behind and beyond the text,” which I believe occurs whether we are reading scripture or a well-written novel. The Benedictine theologian Raymond Studzinski traces the beginnings of lectio divina to a looser approach. He writes that lectio “signifies less a carefully and arduously followed routine and more a receptive and pondering attitude toward the Word and life. Reading, meditating, and praying [in this way] gradually inscribed that Word in fleshly existence and transformed the monastic into a self which, like an illuminated manuscript, rendered the sacred text in a colorful, artistic way for others to ‘read.” The good reader effectually becomes her good reading—a breathing text—that others read, so to speak, in their encounter with this transforming person, and that is why reading in this way does not remain solitary, private though it may seem. As such, learning to read well can become a conduit of loving not just books but oneself and others—a creative act that promotes healing individually and communally because the private and public, the reader and her environment, cannot be neatly distinguished. 

The relationship between the reader and her environment was well-understood by the nineteenth-century Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, who devoted a chapter to reading in his manifesto Walden Pond, written as a result of his two-year stay there in Concord, Massachusetts. Throughout his writings, Thoreau never opposes terms that on face value we take to be contradictory, such as solitude and community, nature and culture, the wild and civilization. For Thoreau, by engaging with the natural world—taking an unhurried walk in the woods, for instance—we better access culture, just as reading a good book can help us to better appreciate the natural world of which we are a part, so that in either instance we come away with fresh, more integrated vision. When Thoreau listens to the hum of mosquitoes, he hears, “Homer’s requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath.” Having read the epic poem about Achilles’ rage helps Thoreau to appreciate the drama of the natural world just as listening to the natural world leads him back to the literary: “If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life … would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights.” I repeat and paraphrase him: if we would observe realities only, we would behold the enchanted world of which we are a part. Thus we become enveloped in a mystery that we must learn how to read despite our necessarily limited understanding. 

That limit must be respected by fiction writers as well, as National Book Award-winning author Flannery O’Connor conveys repeatedly in her essays on writing: “The fiction writer presents mystery through manners, grace through nature, but when he finishes there always has to be left over that sense of Mystery which cannot be accounted for by any human formula.” This is because, as Merton states, “even our best answers are themselves not final.” Using almost the same language as O’Connor, he concludes that the best answers themselves “point to something further which cannot be embodied in a verbal formula.” To be sure, we encounter the verbal formula in a good book, but our reading really begins when we let it point us to the “something further,” to Mystery, to grace. That is, good reading abides in contemplation or love.

Affirming as this may sound, and ultimately it is, the road to it—O’Connor and Thoreau assure us—is a Way-of-the-Cross. To read well, Thoreau writes, “To read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object.” Or as O’Connor puts it pithily: “for the reading of literature ever to become a habit and a pleasure, it must first be a discipline.” Both authors speak of good reading as requiring something of the asceticism of monks.

Why the rigor? Because, as O’Connor states, “Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust.” Reading fiction is a necessarily dirty business because good writers address the world as it is, not as they might want it to be. In good reading, therefore, we walk among adulterers, con-artists, murderers—in effect, all the ugliness, not just the beauty, that exists and of which we are capable. Of course, we are not required to read such stories, but we are required to live them, so O’Connor sees good reading as a kind of spiritual training and the avoidance of it as evidence of weak faith. Rather than escaping reality, a charge leveled against fiction readers as often as cloistered monks, O’Connor assures us, reading fiction is a plunge into reality—an expression of hope and faith that in the midst of illness, tragedy, conflict, violence, Mercy and Love are there, especially when we least perceive it. And this is “the poet’s job,” writes Nobel Prize-winning writer Rabindranath Tagore, “to inflame man’s awareness with . . . love, to awaken him from indifference.” 

That awakening from indifference is precisely the effect that reading had on twentieth-century French mystic and philosopher Simone Weil. Not only did she champion for exploited factory workers by laboring herself under the same grueling conditions, but she was also a loving friend. After escaping Nazi-occupied Paris, Weil wrote a moving letter to her friend, poet Joe Bousquet, who was struggling with the paralysis he suffered as a result of a war injury. Weil does not explain away his pain with easy platitudes; she offers instead her murky impression of the redemptive and communal edge of suffering that causes him to experience, directly in his body, the evil of war, by sharing with him her own afflictive experiences and their mystical dimension. She appends to the letter the poem “Love (III)” by the seventeenth-century metaphysical poet George Herbert, and adds in a postscript that the poem, “has played a big role in my life, because I was repeating it to myself at the moment when Christ came to take possession of me for the first time. I thought I was only reciting a beautiful poem but, unknown to me, it was a prayer.” May our reading be likewise.

Jennifer Heil, Ph.D. teaches World Literature at St. Joseph Seminary College and chairs the division of Language, Literature and Fine Arts.