Reading Plan for St Luke's Gospel

This coming quarter I plan to provide lectio divina prompts for St Luke's Gospel.

How much time?

In his Rule, St Benedict points us to several key means of sanctification, including:

• acceptance of the call to conversion, and perseverance in the 'narrow way of salvation' (especially the Prologue to the Rule);
• cultivation of obedience and humility (especially chapters 5-7 of the Rule);
• practice of the tools of good works (especially chapter 4);
• the liturgy of the Divine Office, the Opus Dei (especially chapters 8-20); 
• work (esp chapter 48); and 
• spiritual reading (Chapter 48).

Our reading, then, should be part of a balanced program, reflecting our state in life: Carthusian monks, who have few other demands on their time might be able to do several hours a day of it; but those living in the world with families and a job might only be able to manage a few minutes or so!

Even so, a few minutes can be of great benefit to us, so it is worth trying to carve out the time each day.

The point of lectio divina, it must be remembered, is not just to quickly read through the text as if it was a work of fiction which we want to read quickly in order to find out what happens.   Rather, the idea is ponder it so that it can act as a mirror to our souls, and a guide to our living.  Accordingly, depending on how much time you can allocate to lectio each day, you might want to read through the text here each day, but then focus in on one or two particular verses.

I'd also strongly encourage you to at least read through and/or listen to the Latin - even if you haven't studied Latin, you will gradually be able to start picking out the words, absorb it, and at the very least be able to recognise it when you hear it at Mass.  And reading and hearing the Greek can also be of benefit given that was the language it was written in.

This might also be a good point to take a (another) look at my notes on how to do lectio divina.  The key point is that these posts are intended as a starting point for your own study and meditation, not the end point!

St Luke

St Luke's Gospel provides us with some rich material from Our Lady on the events surrounding the nativity of Christ, so I plan to linger on those early chapters a little.  In particular, given that we say the Benedictus and Magnificat canticles taken from St Luke daily in the Office, I thought I'd send a couple of days on those, to provide you with some possible starting points for probing deeper into the meaning of these texts to which the Church has attached so much importance.

As usual, I'll take a break for Sunday and the major feasts, and provide the Gospel of the day (from the EF/traditional Benedictine calendar) and third nocturn Matins readings on them instead.  I should note though that on July 2, the feast of the Visitation, the Gospel is actually from St Luke 1, so I've arranged it so that the Gospel text appears in sequence.

With that in mind, I anticipate reaching chapter 8 of St Luke's Gospel by the end of July, and chapter 18 by the end of August, finishing St Luke by the end of September.

In terms of commentary, I'll provide extracts mainly from the classic commentary of Cornelius de Lapide this time around, occasionally supplemented by other sources such as the Catena Aurea compiled by St Thomas Aquinas.

Other books of the Bible

For those interested in reading more of the Bible than just the Gospels, I've updated (and will keep updated!) my summary (which you can find in a sidebar) of the Bible in a Year Reading Plan 1 put together by Dom Christopher Lazowski, OSB.

The plan loosely mirrors the order of readings at Matins (noting of course that the Benedictine Office doesn't have variable Scriptural readings during the week over the Northern Hemisphere summer).

Possible lectio programs reading the Gospel of St Matthew

Lindisfarne Gospel

Doing at least some lectio divina each day should surely be a key part of our daily spiritual regime.

But what should we take as our text?  Let me suggest a few options for consideration.

Option 1: Study the psalms

For followers of St Benedict, knowing the psalms is surely the first priority.  St Benedict enjoins the study of the psalms twice in his Rule - once as a use for the gap between Matins and Lauds, and a second time in his discussion of the daily horarium.

Why?

The psalms are of course the backbone of his Office, their repetition each each week so crucial that the lessons are to be dropped if necessary, rather than the psalms be omitted or Lauds started late!  Yet the saint never actually explains why they are so important; rather  he just assumes we know that the psalms are the most quoted book of the Old Testament in the New, and long considered to contain the entire Bible in summary, poetic form.

My blog Psallam Domino is devoted to notes to assist those wishing to use the psalms for lectio divina, or to pray them with greater intensity, particularly in the context of the Benedictine form of the Divine Office.

Option 2: The texts of the Sunday cycle

One obvious option is to use the lectionary and propers used at the Mass.  If you normally attend the 1970 Missal Mass, there is so much material provided in the lectionary that you will have to select what to look at  - one obvious option being the epistles for each day.

In the traditional Mass the obvious option is to look at all the proper texts for the Sunday (and perhaps the texts of the other major feasts and seasons) - that is the Introit, Gradual, Alleluia, Epistle, Gospel, Offertory and Communio - over a week.  The Church has, for centuries, selected out these texts as crucial to our instruction, repeating them year after year so that we can have them practically memorised, so exploring them in more depth for ourselves makes a great deal of sense.

The Sunday Gospels of course can easily take up two or three days in this regime, if one studies them with the aid of patristic sources such as using the excellent Sunday Sermons of the Fathers volumes.  And if the psalm verses or other text in the propers are too sparse or repetitive, it is no great problem to consider the whole psalm or chapter from which the text is taken.

Option 3: Systematic reading of the Gospels

A second option is to spread the reading of the Gospels over a year, taking one for each quarter.  The Gospels are obviously the most important books of the bible for a Catholic to be familiar with, so well worth the effort.  And there are any number of commentaries available to assist this task.  A good starting point is the Catena Aurea of St Thomas, providing an anthology of patristic commentaries for our consideration.

This is the approach I plan to take here, looking at St Matthew's Gospel this quarter on this blog.

Option 4: (Rest of the) Bible in a year

Another option worth considering is systematically reading the rest of the Bible.

If you are feeling ambitious, a while back, a monk posted a suggested two possible reading plans for the Bible in a year over at New Liturgical Movement.  But if you are not a monk with several hours a day to devote to the task, you could devise a plan to spread your reading over two  or three years!

All the same, I will post in a sidebar the books suggested by reading plan 1, which broadly mirrors the Matins readings.