There are things which we cannot understand except within the teaching of the Church; scripture must be understood with the mind of the Church, the mind of Christ, because the Church has not changed; in its inner experience it continues to live the same life as it lived in the first century; and words spoken by Paul, Peter, Basil or others within the Church, have kept their meaning. So, after a preliminary understanding in our own contemporary language, we must turn to what the Church means by the words; only then can we ascertain the meaning of the given text and have a right to start thinking and to draw conclusions.
Once we have got the meaning of the text, we must see whether in its utter simplicity it does not already offer us suggestions, or even better, a straight command. As the aim of meditation, of understanding scripture, is to fulfil the will of God, we must draw practical conclusions and act upon them. When we have discovered the meaning, when in this sentence God has spoken to us, we must look into the matter and see what we can do, as in fact we do whenever we stumble on a good idea; when we come to realise that this or that is right, we immediately think how to integrate it into our life, in what way, on what occasion, by what method. It is not enough to understand what can be done and enthusiastically to start telling our friends all about it; we should start doing it.
Paul the Simple, an Egyptian saint, once heard Anthony the Great read the first verse of the first Psalm: ‘Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly,’ and immediately, Paul departed into the wilderness. Only after some thirty years, when Anthony met him again, St Paul said to him with great humility: ‘I have spent all this time trying to become the man that does not walk in the counsel of the ungodly.’ We do not need understanding on many points to reach perfection; what we need is thirty years of work to try to understand and to become that new man.
Often we consider one or two points and jump to the next, which is wrong since we have just seen that it takes a long time to become recollected, what the Fathers call an attentive person, someone capable of paying attention to an idea so long and so well that nothing of it is lost. The spiritual writers of the past and of the present day will all tell us: take a text, ponder on it hour after hour, day after day, until you have exhausted all your possibilities, intellectual and emotional, and thanks to attentive reading and re-reading of this text, you have come to a new attitude. Quite often meditation consists in nothing but examining the text, turning over these words of God addressed to us, so as to become completely familiar with them, so imbued with them that gradually we and these words become completely one. In this process, even if we think that we have not found any particular intellectual richness, we have changed.
~Archbishop Anthony Bloom, Living Prayer
