By Peter Chave
‘Come, my beloved, let us go forth into the fields and lodge in the villages’ The Song of Songs 7:11
I led a day retreat for the leaders of a Local Ecumenical Project which included Baptist, Anglican, Methodist and Roman Catholic clergy. Leaving the city behind, in favour of the gentle embrace of the Cornish countryside, we took with us that much-neglected book The Song of Songs and checked it out with plenty of time spent in the grounds of the retreat house. ‘…The winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth; the time of singing has come…’ (2:1–12). But The Song of Songs is just a human love song, isn’t it? Scholars have proved it, haven’t they? Anyone who has not got a tin ear must always have recognised that. And isn’t it wonderful that embodied, romantic, human love is celebrated in Holy Scripture?
Lectio Divina or ‘holy reading’ is a meditative way of reading a passage of scripture. The idea is to read a text slowly, entering deeply into the response to individual words and phrases. One of the strengths of this approach is that it can be used with any passage of scripture, so that it does not depend on the text telling a story. It’s an approach particularly associated with the psalms, but by no means limited to them.
