I’ll Meet You in the Psalms:
The American Holiness Movement’s Lectio Divina and The Psalms by Luigi Giussani
By John W. Wright

Long before the modernist conquest of Western culture that contributed to the dissolution of the visible unity of the church, God sanctified common texts and common methods of reading for the upbuilding of the church, one, apostolic, holy, catholic church. One can literally watch this unfold historically in the recovery of decayed manuscripts at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt. In this massive cache of papyri we find scrolls and then codices of the Psalter. Interesting, we discover that this common book of the synagogue and church began to take different forms in the second and third centuries. Christians began copying the scrolls into codices, a form of writing that is easier to move from section to section. We discover here the transformation of the Book of Psalms into a form that empowers the communal worship and prayer of the early church. The formation of the Christian Scripture arises out of this Christian transformation of early Jewish holy scrolls into a book suitable for reading in the gathering of the church.

It does not surprise me, then, to find certain deep affinities between the reading of the Psalms offered by Luigi Giussani and my tradition in reading the Psalms as a person brought to faith in Christ within the Church of the Nazarene, an evangelical order that reaches back to John Wesley’s Methodist Societies in the eighteenth century. I would like to open up briefly Father Giussani’s approach to the Psalms as a contemporary example of a pre-modern Christian practice and then relate it to a similar example within the American holiness tradition within the United States. I hope to offer a means that the Spirit’s sanctification of the Scriptures for the upbuilding of the church through its witness to the Word of God, Jesus Christ, might bring us together into a common witness to the church catholic.

First, to Father Giussani’s work.

Father Giussani reminds us at the beginning of his book that “The Psalms are the form of a dialogue defined by God Himself for His relationship with the people He has chosen” (p. 9). This simple observation is very astute. The Psalms speak the voice of humans in their experience. There is no “objective narrator” who hovers above the text. The voice comes from within each psalm, asking the reader to identify with the human words spoken in the text. The words are human words expressed to God.

Yet such a description does not exhaust the voice in the Psalms as read in the synagogue and the church. Through God’s Spirit, these words are “defined by God Himself for His relationship with the people He has chosen.” The Psalm do not speak out of an unmediated human experience; through the gift of the text, the human experience of dialogue with God in the Psalms is experienced as gift from God. In the psalms, our dialogue with God does not begin with us, but with the very revelation of God. The Psalms as Scripture are God’s pulling us into dialogue with the Mystery of Life as a Gift. In Psalms we enter dialogue with God through God.

Thus, Father Giussani notes that “the Psalm represents the man with whom God has established the ancient covenant, to whom God has anticipated His coming – and so it is preparatory, an unfolding. One who does not read the Psalms does not understand the death and resurrection of Christ. But the sacraments are the cornerstone, particularly the Eucharist” (pp. 10-11). The Psalms for Father Giussani find their end, their goal, in Christ, the Gift of God, made ever new to us by faith in the celebration of Christ’s real presence with us in the Gift that is the Eucharist. We discover the same structure at work in the event of Jesus Christ and in the Eucharist as in the Psalms: humans enter dialogue with God only in and through God’s own Gift of God’s Word, Jesus Christ, by the Spirit’s power. Dialogue with God is not a human effort, but God’s gift of God’s own self that calls us to participation in the Divine Mystery that is Love.

By recognizing this form of the Psalms in its theological richness, Father Giussani takes the contemporary reader into an ancient Christian practice, a practice called, lectio divina. The modern world has eroded the conscious practice of this mode of reading the Scriptures. As in earlier ages, monasteries have largely provided the setting for its preservation and continuation. One way of understanding Father Giussani’s book on the psalms is as his attempt to offer to all Christians the ability to take this ancient practice out of the monasteries and past history of the church to be re-discovered for all the faithful in the contemporary world.
What is “lectio divina”? It is “a slow, contemplative praying of the Scriptures which enables the Bible, the Word of God, to become a means of union with God. This ancient practice has been kept alive in the Christian monastic tradition, and is one of the precious treasures of Benedictine monastics and oblates. Together with the Liturgy and daily manual labor, time set aside in a special way for lectio divina enables us to discover in our daily life an underlying spiritual rhythm. Within this rhythm we discover an increasing ability to offer more of ourselves and our relationships to the Father, and to accept the embrace that God is continuously extending to us in the person of his Son Jesus Christ” (http://www.valyermo.com/ld-art.html). As a dialogue from God to participate in the Love that is God, the Psalms provide a wonderful place to begin a retrieval of the Christian practice of lectio divina, a retrieval that bears great importance in the midst of the struggles of the contemporary world.

All this seems fine and good. But it also seems that I have strayed far, far, far away from my tradition. The Church of the Nazarene cut its teeth in revivalist tent meetings, not exactly a setting for the slow, rich contemplative practice of the Benedictines. Originating at the beginning of the 20th century in the United States, the Church of the Nazarene participated in the virulent anti-catholicism of the day in the United States. From the categories provided by today’s society, to enter a Church of the Nazarene is to enter a conservative evangelical Protestant world that has little, if any connections with the tradition in which and from which Father Giussani writes. Yet I would like to argue that such a perspective obscures deeper common roots that the Wesleyan/American Holiness Movement and the renewal movement within Roman Catholicism that is Communion and Liberation and its founder, Father Giussani, share together.

To follow traditions in the Church of the Nazarene is sometimes difficult. It is not a learned tradition, but a practical tradition, a tradition of activity more than thought. It is a tradition performed more than a tradition reflected upon. This has obvious strengths – we, as a tradition, have never been accused of over-intellectualizing the faith handed down to the saints; but it also has weaknesses – it is easy to loose who we really are. For reflection on the psalms, we do not have a contemplative tradition on the psalms, but rather, a homiletical tradition – a tradition of oral performance of the clergy in calling the faithful to deeper levels of Christian experience.

This is perhaps seen in traditional holiness interpretation of Psalm 51, a psalm, interestingly, not commented upon in Father Giussani’s book. The psalm represents one of the strongest penitential statements in all of the Scriptures:

Have mercy on me, O God, in your goodness;
In the greatness of your compassion wipe out my offense.
Thoroughly wash me from my guilt and of my sin cleanse me.
For I acknowledge my offense, and my sin is before me always:
Against you only have I sinned,
And done what is evil in your sight--
That you may be justified in your sentence, vindicated when you condemn.
Indeed, in guilt was I born
And in sin my mother conceived me;
. . .
Cleanse me with hyssop, that I may be purified;
Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow.
Let me hear the sounds of joy and gladness;
The bones you have crushed shall rejoice.
Turn away your face from my sins,
And blot out all my guilt.
Create in me a clean heart, O God,
And renew a right spirit within me.
Give me back the joy of your salvation,
and a willing spirit sustain in me.

The psalm takes the voice of a person, crying out to God. The psalm speaks to God. It is remarkable for its horrible pessimism concerning the sinfulness of humanity, a pessimism matched by its confidence in God’s Spirit to address completely and solve this sinfulness. It speaks, in one place, of the utter degradation of the human being by sin, and the utter exaltation of a human being open to the complete work of the Holy Spirit in one’s life. The holiness movement’s interpretation explicates and emphasizes precisely this movement.

This movement of Psalm 51 can be seen in disparate comments made throughout the Church of the Nazarene’s premier theology, written by H. Orten Wiley, in the middle of the 20th century. Wiley reads Psalm 51:5, emphasizing its brutal description of human life dominated by sin. He writes, in Ps 51:5 “the word iniquity as used here, cannot under any circumstances refer to actual sin, but carries with it the thought of a perverted or twisted nature from the very inception of life” (Christian Theology, II, p. 99). Wiley recognizes, however, with the catholic tradition, that sin is not primeval, or essential to human nature. Sin is not natural. It is “an alien principle which falsifies the beginning of individual life (Psalms 51:5), and brings men into bondage through the law of sin and death which is in their members (Rom 7:22)” (p. 148). For Wiley, the words of Psalm 51 depict the existential situation of humanity, a situation that we experience in our lives: “man is born in a state of spiritual death; and while full provision is made for remitting the guilt and condemnation for which man is not directly responsible, it still remains that he is liable for the consequences of this sin. We make this statement in order to show the actual condition [not the actual nature] of man apart from the mitigating influence of divine grace” (p. 98). Wiley leads us to identify with the speaker in Psalm 51 in owning, not only our sins, but our sin – the alien principle that falsifies our lives at their deepest level. The holiness movement’s reading of Psalm 51 offers little wiggle room for the lack, the deprivation, the lie, to use Father Giussani’s word, that is sin at the basis of our lives.

Yet Wiley recognizes more is going on in the psalm than the identification with sin. He recognizes that there is a calling upon the Holy Spirit in the passage, a movement within the deepest levels of the speaker. He pays particular attention to vv. 10-11:
Cleanse me with hyssop, that I may be purified;
Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow.
Create in me a clean heart, O God,
And renew a right spirit within me
The holiness tradition calls this “awakening”: “Awakening is a term used in theology to denote that operation of the Holy Spirit by which men’s minds are quickened to a consciousness of their lost estate. In this quickening, the Spirit not only works through the medium of objective truth, but by a direct influence upon the minds and hearts of men” (Wiley, II, p. 341). Praying the Scriptures become a means by which individuals actually participate in God through the Spirit’s calling to us in our sin.

Yet the Spirit’s work does not end with awakening. When the Spirit is not resisted, the believer moves to repentance: “Repentance is the result of the gracious work of the Holy Spirit upon the souls of men . . . In the OT, this condition was known as ‘a broken and contrite heart’ (Ps 51:17), the heart being the inmost personality and not merely the affections, the intellect or the will” (p. 361).
The psalmist voice does not stop with repentance either. Since this is a dialogue with God in language provided by God, what the psalmist asks, God will do –for we talk with God through God’s Gift, the Spirit. The holiness movement has confessed that God will answer the prayer of the psalmist for purity of heart, the cleansing of iniquity, the sin in which one is born. God will “cleanse me with hyssop that I may be purified”, and thus restore the image of God in which we were created, the fullness of salvation from sin, the completeness of the Christian life – i.e., holiness. “We mean by this that we are cleansed from all sin, only as through faith, we are brought into a right relation to the atoning blood of Jesus Christ, and only as there is a continuous relation to atoning blood by faith, will there be a continuous cleansing, in the sense of preservation in purity and holiness” (Wiley, II, p. 484). “From the negative point of view is a cleansing from all sin, from the positive standpoint it is in infilling of divine love” (Wiley, p. 491), that is, participation in the Spirit, the Love of the Father and the Son.

The holiness movement, in its core convictions, therefore shares in a lectio divina of the Psalms: a type of “praying of the Scriptures which enables the Bible, the Word of God, to become a means of union with God. . . . Within this rhythm we discover an increasing ability to offer more of ourselves and our relationships to the Father, and to accept the embrace that God is continuously extending to us in the person of his Son Jesus Christ” by, one might add from the holiness movements perspective, the work of the Holy Spirit.

Such concerns are not foreign to Father Giussani’s book on psalms. The work is not blind on the depth of sin in human life, not merely sinful acts, but the lack that keeps us from who we are in God: “The first evil is inside of me, weakness, contradiction, boredom: that heart that does not respond to the Voice that made it arise out of nothingness and called to Himself” (p. 139). In a similar way, by participating in God the Father through Christ by the Spirit as articulated, for instance in Psalm 132, we discover that we become the actual dwelling place of God: “The dwelling place is where we find God, the path to our destiny. It is where everything in us is reborn. A dwelling place is the place where everthing is for you, where nothing is against you, where everything is for your gladness, where everything is a sure path to the threshold of happiness and completion” (p. 151).

As in the holiness movement, engaging in a lectio divina with the psalms leads us to a grace that does not annul our nature, is not added upon our nature, but perfects our nature. Later on Psalm 147, Giussani writes, “The Mystery is God who has entered the world to sum up all things in Himself (see Eph. 1:10), as Saint Paul said. Thus may He grant that we be summed up in Him, that we penetrate everything that we do with faith.
The pure heart is the heart that is not centered on self, and the free heart is the virginal possession of people and things.
Our relationship with God and with Christ is in the event, that is, in the circumstance of the instant, now, not a minute before or a minute after: loving being in the instant, loving the living God in the instant, loving Christ in the instant. The relationship with Christ is in the instant!” (p. 166)

What then is the difference? The Wesleyan tradition, presupposing the catholic faith, has concentrated largely on human participation in salvation, rather than God as the salvation in which humans participate. Wiley devotes much time and attention to the human movement from awakening to entire sanctification. Father Giussani, on the other hand, emphasizes the God in whom we participate. Giussani speaks often of God as the Mystery or the Presence. To even try to describe such a God is dangerous: “The more often the Presence is laid out for us, the greater the danger that we will not accept it, or qualify it with our ‘ifs,’ ‘ands,’ and ‘buts.’ We want, we set the measure of time; we set the method of responding to it” (p. 86-7), and Giussani makes it known throughout the book that this tendency to set the measure or method is a bad thing.
The Wesleyan lectio divina can slip easily into a form of modernism, a theological humanism in which the divine is collapsed in the human. Yet it does push to decision, to commitment to faith that leads to an active, if sometimes unwise, witness in the world. The slow, contemplative lectio divina of monasticism, even one as faith-full as Father Giussani’s, can lead to an inactivity through transforming God into an object for adoration, but not participation in through love. By an interaction with each other, a joining in a lectio divina of the Scriptures, we can celebrate together God’s dialogue with us, in which God the Father pulls us in to participation in God’s Word by the power of the Spirit.