Once it was all simple. Catholics prayed in Latin for salvation in words and ceremonies dictated by the One True Church in Rome. Protestants prayed in fancy English for the expiation of sin and a place in a decorous heaven. Jews prayed in Hebrew to the One God who had inexplicably chosen us for a private destiny and saddled us with commandments.
And then, in the time it took to go from Frank Sinatra to the Beatles, these ancient taboos and walls began to crash. Prayer changed, too. For Catholics, the key event was the Second Vatican Council. “Vatican II was a course correction when it came to Catholic prayer,” says Bradford Hinze, a Fordham University professor of theology who is old enough to have personally experienced the change. “Emphasis shifted to the centrality of the Bible for Catholic prayer.”
Part of this populist shift involved better exposing laypeople to a centuries-old method of Biblical exegesis and meditation called lectio divina, or divine reading. Practitioners set time aside for a daily Bible reading in four stages: reading the text carefully (lectio), contemplating its meaning (meditatio), entering into a dialogue with God about it (oratio) and reaching a wordless contemplation of God (contemplatio).
Zev Chafets, "The Right Way to Pray?", New York Times Magazine. September 20, 2009.
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