SSF217 – A Mysticism of the Word: The Bible and Contemplative Prayer

We Catholics of our age, by and large, have not yet fully tapped into the Word of God in our life of contemplation and in living out what Dei Verbum #21 envisions the Word of God to be in our spiritual lives. Even Catholics engaged in Bible studies can miss the depth available to us in the Sacred Page. The best Catholic Biblical scholars of our day would be the first to admit that their work is not the end but only the beginning of our own going deeper in praying the Bible.

This course will try to recover how the Saints in the past ages, such as the Church Fathers and medieval monks, read and prayed the Bible. Saints Bernard and Bonaventure will be key guides for us here but also Elisabeth of the Trinity and Little Therese.

We will consider the proper place of the historical critical method in our reading of the Bible but go deep into the three spiritual senses of Scripture. Joseph Ratzinger regularly described this as a crisis of our age in the Church and the need for the three spiritual senses in breaking beyond too flat a reading of the Bible. We will address some thorny questions here. I will present some insights drawn from my own wrestling with these questions and my coming to develop, over a span of 20 years, a rich, nuanced, and powerful theology and spirituality of the Word. Catechism #109-119 will be our guide in the course. Even today, the Word of God is not chained (2 Tim 2:9), and this course will help release the power of the Word into your interior life of contemplation and into our world today.