Introduction

It is useless to tell you that consecrated life in the West is going through a delicate time. It is equally obvious to repeat that in these years we have looked for all the ways to find solutions. And that often we look into each others’ faces to ask each other, along with other persons of responsibility in the Church: what can we do? This is equally true.
Today we repeat to ourselves once again, however, recalling immediately the early years of the Christian community’s life, when Paul, about to set sail from Ephesus for his last voyage toward Jerusalem, as preview of the dramatic events awaiting him, calls together the leaders of the young and fragile community of Ephesus, and moved interiorly by the same worrisome question as ours about an uncertain future, gives his response, leaving them and us his last reminders.
It is here that, in face of the insecurities of the future, he indicates a sure and perennial way: “And now I commend you to God, and to the word of his grace that has power to build you up and to give you your inheritance among all the sanctified” (Acts 20,32).
Like Paul, in a particularly sensitive moment, like the great saints in the decisive turning points in their life, we turn to the Lord and his Word, which has the power to build up, that is to build the personal and communitarian, individual and ecclesial edifice, an edifice capable of facing all the uncertainties posed by new times.
Ours is not a gesture of blind fideism, because we do not imagine ourselves to be enlightened by special or extraordinary revelations, more or less pretentious or less illusory, but we seek humbly to receive light and strength from the eternal and very firm Word of God, who created heaven and earth, who builds slowly, patiently, silently the new person and the new fraternal and missionary community of his disciples, a missionary brotherhood which has in itself the promise of being able to face the future courageously with all its challenges, its questions and surprises.
It is a return to the origins, a going back to the early decades of the Church, when the only nourishment of the little flock was the Word of the Lord, Word in whose name the disciples had thrown out their net, and in following its course, entered into new lands to proclaim the gospel of salvation.
It is a return to sources, with the rich spiritual experience of entire generations behind us, generations who nourished themselves with this Word of life, thanks to a praying familiarity with it and frequenting it assiduously, a practice which gradually took the now classic form of lectio divina.
And still, those who live in the tensions of the often frenetic activities of our times, ask a question rather often: the much proclaimed lectio divina, was it not born in monasteries and does it not require a climate of monastic quiet in order to be practiced? Isn’t there a danger of falling into a new rhetoric that proposes things, beautiful in themselves, but hardly practicable by those who are caught up in an overload of work, as often happens these days?
Legitimate questions, to which we will try to give a response, starting off above all from daily experience, in addition to a previous rapid study of some statements from the documents Vita Consacrata and Tertio Millennio Ineunte, documents especially authoritative and already widely known.