by John McLuckie

I have been involved in ecumenical activities – committees, commissions, consultations – over the last 35 years or so, and there is never any shortage of scriptural content to these processes. Biblical themes and references are central to every significant ecumenical text produced in the last century. But it strikes me that something quieter, and probably more significant, has been going on in parallel with the activity that takes place on an organisational level. There are at least three important contexts in which sacred scripture has been at the heart of the lived ecumenical experience of ‘ordinary’ Christians over this last generation or more.

Scripture in the Spiritual Life

One of ecumenism’s most unsung successes has been in the fertile ground of lay spirituality. My first significant encounter with scripture in this context was during a retreat in daily life which took place while I was an undergraduate in the mid-1980s. A Loreto Sister was my spiritual guide for the retreat and I remember the sight of her Jerusalem Bible bristling with index tabs which marked the place of the wide selection of texts from which she would choose one for her retreatants. Mostly, she would encourage us to use the imaginative approach to meditating on a passage which forms the heart of the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius. We had been taught this technique of ‘composition of place’ at the beginning of the retreat.

It should not be surprising that Christians of many traditions, especially those for whom scripture is of central importance, have found nourishment and inspiration in Ignatian techniques and insights. In many ways, Ignatius inhabited the same thought-world as the European Reformers of the 16^th century. And perhaps those traditions that have, at times, been marked by a cool rationality are rediscovering the ‘language of the heart’ in spiritual traditions encountered through ecumenical friendship. It is by no means unusual to find Christians of Anglican, Reformed, Baptist and Methodist traditions trained in the arts of Ignatian prayer and spiritual accompaniment.

Alongside these Ignatian methods, Christians of many traditions in the Western world have found the value of the ancient monastic practice of lectio divina, the prayerful and meditative reading of scripture in groups or alone, and in the use of short scriptural phrases as mantra-like aids to contemplative prayer.

I am sure it is no coincidence that two influential books on the Psalter as a source and pattern for Christian prayer were written within a few years of each other by writers from different traditions. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible (1940), and Thomas Merton’s Bread in the Wilderness (1953) each proposes an almost sacramental approach to the Psalter, a visible means of encountering Christ the Word in the rich and vibrant words of the Psalms. Indeed, the Cistercian Monk explicitly draws on the insights of the Protestant Pastor for his own understanding of the place of scripture in the life of faith. These two books stand at the head of a movement in Western Christian spirituality in the 20^th century and continue to speak powerfully of how scripture animates and undergirds that spirituality.

John McLuckie is a priest of the Scottish Episcopal Church and is currently Rector of Old St Paul’s church in Edinburgh’s Old Town. He writes on matters of Christian and inter-faith spirituality and is a member of the Third Order of the Society of St. Francis.

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