Topic 30 of 33 - Your Place in the Learning Journey
The Bible and Personal Prayer
The relationship between reading scripture and praying is intimate and ancient. Jewish practice of meditating on Torah - turning the words over in the mind repeatedly, letting them sink into the will and imagination - influenced the earliest Christian approaches to scripture. The desert fathers and mothers developed practices of slow, receptive reading that eventually crystallized into the tradition of lectio divina: read, meditate, pray, contemplate. In this approach the text is not primarily a source of information to be extracted but a presence to be inhabited, a conversation with God in which the reader listens before speaking.
The Psalms occupy a unique position in the junction of scripture and prayer. They are themselves prayers - addressed to God rather than about God - and they cover the full range of human experience before God: praise, lament, thanksgiving, petition, confession, and the raw edge of doubt and anger. The church has prayed the Psalms continuously since its beginning. Praying the Psalms is not merely using a prayer book. It is entering a tradition of prayer that connects the reader to an unbroken community of those who have brought their full experience before God.
Other biblical texts have also functioned as prayers in Christian practice. The Lord's Prayer from Matthew 6 has been prayed by Christians in every century and every language since Jesus taught it. The canticles of Luke's Gospel have been sung daily in the liturgical offices of the church for fifteen centuries. Scripture and prayer are so intertwined in the Christian tradition that separating them entirely would impoverish both.
For personal devotional life, the practice of reading a biblical text and allowing it to move into prayer is one of the most sustainable and fruitful spiritual disciplines available. It requires no special equipment and no particular expertise. It does require the willingness to slow down, to read less but more attentively, and to remain open to having the text say something unexpected. Keeping a journal of such encounters builds over time into a record of a life shaped by scripture.