What Is Lectio Divina and How Do You Actually Do It?

⏱ 13 min read

You have heard the phrase. You have probably read three articles about the four movements — lectio, meditatio, oratio, contemplatio — and you can name them, more or less, on a quiet morning. What you have not quite done is practise it. The articles described the steps. They did not tell you what was supposed to be happening inside you while you walked them. So you sat down with a verse, did each step for two minutes apiece, and finished after eight minutes mildly suspicious that you had done it wrong.

This is the contemplative explanation that the introductory articles miss. Lectio divina — Latin for divine reading — is not a four-step technique. It is a way of being with a scripture verse that the monks of the twelfth century walked because they had figured out, slowly, that the verse is a door rather than a piece of information. The four movements are not steps to complete. They are four different qualities of attention you give the same line, in sequence, until the line has stopped being a sentence on a page and become a presence in the room.

This article is for the woman who has heard of lectio divina, tried it once or twice, and felt she missed whatever the point was. The point was not what you thought. It is gentler, slower, and more reachable than the introductory pieces suggested. Bernard of Clairvaux — the twelfth-century Cistercian abbot whose writing on contemplation is still the standard the monastic tradition reads itself by — walked this practice for a lifetime. We will let him tell you what is supposed to happen, and then we will walk one verse together in his speed. (If you want the practical 140-day form of the practice we are about to walk, the Bible Study Workbook for Women is the matching companion this article quietly points toward.)

What the monks meant by divine reading

The word lectio is the ordinary Latin word for reading. The word divina is divine. Lectio divina — divine reading — was not a special technique invented in a monastery. It was the slow speed of reading scripture that was simply assumed for the first thousand years of the Christian church, and which the monks codified, around the twelfth century, into four movements so that novice monks could be taught it.

The four movements are lectio (reading), meditatio (meditation), oratio (prayer), and contemplatio (contemplation). They are not steps the way boil water, add tea, steep, pour are steps. They are four qualities of attention — and the same verse passes through all four. The verse you read in lectio is the same verse you meditate on in meditatio, the same verse you pray in oratio, the same verse you sit with in contemplatio. You do not change the verse. You change the quality of attention you are giving it.

This is what the introductory articles tend to obscure. They describe the four movements as if they were four separate techniques to be applied in turn. They are not. They are four ways the same verse moves through you, deeper each time. Once you understand that, the practice stops being a checklist and starts being what the monks always meant by it — a slow, four-fold deepening of one line into the soul.

The first quote — what the slow reader is actually after

Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermons on the Song of Songs is, more than any other monastic text, the long-form description of what the contemplative reader is reaching for. A. W. Tozer, writing in the twentieth century, quoted Bernard’s most-cited four-line stanza — the one that has been carried in the contemplative tradition for nine hundred years — and described what surrounds it. Read this slowly. The same way Bernard would have read his verse.

“Thine own eternity is round Thee, Majesty divine. To have found God and still to pursue Him is the soul’s paradox of love, scorned indeed by the too-easily-satisfied religionist, but justified in happy experience by the children of the burning heart. St. Bernard stated this holy paradox in a musical quatrain that will be instantly understood by every worshipping soul: We taste Thee, O Thou Living Bread, And long to feast upon Thee still; We drink of Thee, the Fountainhead, And thirst our souls from Thee to fill. Come near to the holy men and women of the past and you will soon feel the heat of their desire after God. They mourned for Him, they prayed and wrestled and sought for Him day and night, in season and out, and when they had found Him the finding was all the sweeter for the long seeking.”
— A. W. Tozer, citing Bernard of Clairvaux, The Pursuit of God

To have found God and still to pursue Him is the soul’s paradox of love. That is the engine under lectio divina. The soul reads the same verse four ways, slowly, because the finding of God in the verse does not end the seeking — it opens it. The fast reader assumes that once she has read a verse and understood it, she is done with it. The contemplative reader knows that the verse, properly entered, makes the soul thirst more. The reading is not finished by the reading. The reading deepens the longing for what the reading was pointing toward.

We taste Thee, O Thou Living Bread, and long to feast upon Thee still. Bernard is naming the experience of a single verse held slowly. The taste is real. The taste does not satisfy in the way a fact does — by ending the question. The taste satisfies in the way only a living thing can, by deepening the appetite for itself. The woman who reads one verse for forty minutes and ends the forty minutes more hungry for God than when she began is not doing it wrong. She is doing exactly what lectio divina was built to produce.

This is what the four movements are for. Each movement is a deeper taste of the same verse. By the fourth, the soul has tasted enough that the longing has been re-lit. You leave the chair not satisfied, in the news-reading sense. You leave the chair re-thirsting. That is the destination. That is what Bernard meant when he wrote, again and again, that the finding is the start of the seeking, not its end.

The four movements, walked once

Let us walk the practice with one short verse, the way Bernard’s novices would have learned it. Use the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want — Psalm 23, verse 1. Five English words. We will spend perhaps fifteen to thirty minutes with them. Adjust the time downward your first morning, upward as the practice settles. (If verse-mapping has been your existing slow-reading practice, the verse mapping for beginners walkthrough is the analytical cousin of this contemplative one — same scripture, different speed, both legitimate.)

Lectio — the reading

The first movement is lectio — simply reading the verse. Read it aloud, slowly, three times. The first time the eye is doing most of the work. The second time the ear catches what the eye missed — the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. The third time, one word starts to lift slightly above the others. Maybe it is shepherd. Maybe it is want. Maybe it is my. The lifted word is the door for this morning.

Do not chase the word with analysis yet. Just notice it. The lectio movement is the bringing of the verse into the ear, slowly, until one word makes itself known.

This is already different from what most modern Christians do with a verse. The modern reader scans the verse once and moves on. The lectio reader reads it three times — by the third reading, a word has surfaced. You cannot get to meditatio without a word having surfaced first. The surfacing is the work of lectio. If nothing surfaces after three readings, read a fourth and a fifth. The verse will yield.

Meditatio — the meditation

The second movement is meditatio. You stay with the word that surfaced. Say the word surfaced was shepherd. You sit with shepherd.

Not analytically. The Puritan slow-reading method — walked in the sister piece on how to meditate on scripture — is the analytical-but-warm cousin of this movement. The monastic meditatio is a little gentler. You let the word shepherd lie in the mind the way a stone lies in still water — without forcing thought, but allowing the word to send out its quiet rings. Shepherd. What rises? A picture, maybe. A passage from another part of scripture — Jesus saying I am the good shepherd. A memory — being lost, being found, being led when you did not know where to go. A felt sense — the safety of being one of a known flock.

Whatever rises, you let it surface and then let it settle. You do not chase. You stay with shepherd for five or six minutes. The mind will wander. You bring it back. Shepherd. The wandering is not failure. The bringing-back is the practice.

By the end of the meditatio movement, the word has loosened from the page. It is in the room with you. It has a presence the ordinary reading speed never lets a word develop.

Oratio — the prayer

The third movement is oratio — prayer. You speak the verse back to God, slowly, in your own words.

Lord, You are my shepherd. I have not been letting You shepherd me lately. I have been trying to shepherd myself, which is why I am tired. I shall not want, You said. I want a great many things. Show me what I am actually wanting underneath the wanting. Be the shepherd of this day.

The oratio is not eloquent. It is the conversation that the slow reading has opened. The verse becomes the seat of a prayer that would not have come if you had read the chapter at the news-reading speed. You stay in the prayer five or ten minutes. You let it wander into the day, into the week, into the names of the people you carry. You bring it gently back to the verse. The verse is the trellis the prayer is allowed to climb.

Contemplatio — the resting

The fourth movement is contemplatio. This is the one the introductory articles describe least well, because there is the least to do in it.

Contemplatio is the stopping of activity. You have read. You have meditated. You have prayed. Now you sit. The verse is still in the room. God is still in the room. You do not say anything. You do not think anything in particular. You sit with the verse and with God, in the same room, for five minutes — by the clock if you need to.

This is the movement Bernard would have insisted on. To have found God and still to pursue Him. The contemplatio is the resting that does not end the seeking. You sit. You let the verse be there. You let God be there. The soul does its quiet work in the silence, without being asked to.

When the five minutes are over, you stand up. The verse goes with you. Not as a sentence you have read but as a presence you have sat with. That is what lectio divina always meant. The four movements are the slow passage of one verse into the soul, until the soul has stopped reading the verse and started carrying it.