I was reading something the other day and came across an author’s quote of an old spiritual classic in which he said fittingly describes lectio divina. From the fourteenth century Cloud of Unknowing we read:
“God’s word…can be likened to a mirror. Spiritually, the ‘eye’ of your soul is your reason: your conscience is your spiritual ‘face’. Just as you cannot see or know that there is a dirty mark on your actual face without the aid of a mirror, or somebody telling you, so spiritually, it is impossible for a soul blinded by his frequent sins to see the dirty mark in his conscience, without reading or hearing God’s word.” (Penguin edition, p. 102)