I was asked by a dear friend how I go about preparing the study guides that are posted here. The guides have several components: the opening prayer, the introductory material on the readings (notes about context, places, and people; supplementary verses), the study questions (categorized as mind/literal, soul/allegorical, strength/moral, and heart/anagogical), Church commentary, the personal reflection questions, and a closing prayer.

The Opening Prayer

For the first series of “Making Sense of Sunday” guides on this blog, the ones beginning with the 28th Sunday in Ordinary Time of Year C, the opening prayer is static, and is based upon the greatest commandments, which are love of God and love of neighbor, seen through the lens of the Father’s love for the Son, and the Son’s love for us. The two saints whose intercession are invoked are St. Jerome (the patron saint of Bible study) and St. David (the patron of the parish).

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.

Heavenly Father,
your Son commanded us to love one another as he has loved us,
and he taught us that he loves us as you love him.
We ask you to send your Holy Spirit upon us as we read your word,
so that as we come to understand your love for us
we may better love you, and all you have created, in return.
Amen.

St. Jerome:     pray for us.
St. David:        pray for us.

Contextual Notes

Throughout the process of preparing these guides, prayer plays a part, as does – I hope – the work of the Holy Spirit within me. I will also end up reading and re-reading the passages from Scripture several times, to become more familiar with them, but also to try to pick up on nuances that I’ve missed because of my familiarity with them. I read the passages in at least two different translations: always the 2nd Catholic edition of the Revised Standard Version (RSVCE) and the New American Bible (NAB) or its Revised Edition (NABRE).

The first step after reading the passages is deciding upon literary notes. What books are we reading from? Who are their authors? To whom were they addressed? Around when were the books written, and what people, places, and times do they concern? What are their literary styles?

The second step is deciding about context. Are the verses sufficient, or should I expand to include preceding or following verses? If this passage follows a passage we read recently, is there a gap in between them? If so, should I provide a summary of what we have skipped over? Are there cross-references to other passages of Scripture that can help illuminate these (as is often the case with the Gospels)? Are there particular words or phrases that I should highlight, especially if their translation risks losing some detail captured by the original language? What background on the geography (nations, towns, landmarks) and persons (individuals, nations) should I provide?

Gathering Commentaries

Once I’ve gone through that list of questions and come up with some tentative answers, then I begin to read through various commentaries. I have a study edition of the NAB (and use the USCCB web site for the NABRE), the Ignatius Press RSVCE, the single-volume edition of Ignatius Study RSVCE New Testament, a few volumes of the Ignatius Study RSVCE Old Testament, and the single-volume compact edition of the Navarre RSVCE New Testament. I have some other single-volume commentaries on individual books of the Bible, as well as thematic ones (e.g. on Abraham or on St. Paul). I make notes based on their footnotes, commentaries, and scriptural cross-references.

I make selective use of Protestant commentaries, such as textweek.com and biblehub.com (particularly useful for looking at the Hebrew and Greek behind our translations). I will also search Google images for use at the tops of my blog posts, and read the articles or blog posts that use the pictures that most catch my attention. That’s how I found this interesting post from the blog “Covered in His Dust”.

I take all the verses I plan on using for my study guide and run them through my Catechism Search Engine, to see if and how the Catechism makes use of those verses. I also search for them in the commentaries, letters, and sermons of the Church Fathers, via a number of sources: the Catena Aurea (the “golden chain” of patristic Gospel commentaries that St. Thomas Aquinas assembled from patristic sources), books I own (such as The Teachings of the Church Fathers edited by Fr. John Willis, SJ), and the Christian Classics Ethereal Library.

Study Questions

Once I have compiled this collection of Scriptures and commentary, I begin work on the study questions.

The first set I work on are the “mind” questions, which deal with the literal sense of Scripture, and aim to establish (or enhance) comprehension of the Bible passages. In answering these questions, the reader will show that they understand the vocabulary, expressions, situations, and implications of the text. For example, after Naaman tries to insist Elisha receive a gift (which Elisha refuses), why does Naaman then ask Elisha to give him a gift, and why does he ask for a pile of dirt?

Then I move on to the “soul” questions, which deal with the first spiritual sense, the allegorical. In the Old Testament text, I look for types, foreshadowings, and allusions to Christ, to the sacraments, or more broadly to the Church and her mission. So Naaman, a Gentile, being washed in the Jordan and cleansed of his leprosy, and then accepting Israel’s God as the one true God without having to formally enter the Mosaic covenant (i.e. without circumcision, among other things) is a clear foreshadowing of the sacrament of Baptism and the non-application of the Mosaic requirements to Gentile converts.

In the New Testament text, I look for allegories of recapitulation primarily, where history on a grand scale is re-lived on the small scale in the experiences of individual persons. One astonishing example of this in the New Testament is the encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4). After the northern kingdom of Israel went into exile, they were sent back to their land (then known as Samaria) with peoples of five other nations, and so worship of Israel’s God was mingled with worship of five other gods, or ba’als, which word also means “lords” or “husbands”. The woman at the well, in the presence of Jesus, is told by him “you have had five husbands, and he whom you now have is not your husband” (John 4:18). This woman is a recapitulation of Samaria’s history, and the one she was with who was not her husband could mean Jesus himself (thus referring to God) or her actual adulterous relationship (thus referring to the Romans, under whose rule lived the inhabitants of Galilee, Samaria, and Judea, but whose gods they did not accept).

The next set of questions are the “strength” questions, aligned with the moral sense of Scripture. This means finding ways to practically apply what I’ve read to my life as a Catholic Christian (and hoping that it applies to the readership of the guide as well). Two examples from the first study guide on this site are Naaman’s stubbornness at first to try and do things his way instead of God’s way, and the Samaritan leper’s gratitude in response to the answer to his prayer. Those two sentiments are moral situations we can relate to and learn from, as they play out in the Scriptures.

The last set of questions are the “heart” questions, connected to the anagogical sense, and which I also connect to prayer. My rubric ties the four senses of Scripture not only to the four ways of loving God expressed in the greatest commandment, but also to the four pillars of the Catechism (the faith, the Paschal mystery, Christian living, and prayer). It may seem like a kludge to lump heart-anagogy-prayer together, but I consider the intimacy with God that one experiences in the various forms of prayer to be akin to the intimacy with God that we will finally have in heaven. Consider prayer to be “beatific hearing” as a foretaste of the “beatific vision” of heaven… but maybe don’t quote me on that.

I will admit that the anagogical questions are the hardest for me to come up with, either because they can be very personal (when connected to prayer) or because I have the most difficulty in discerning the anagogical sense of passages that are not overtly future-looking. It is easy to interpret Jesus’ end-time parables anagogically, but not always the more “mundane” Gospel passages. This, for me, is an area that I recognize I need to develop spiritually, and so I appreciate the challenge of coming up with questions that get a person thinking anagogically.

Once I have a a list of questions, I arrange them logically (usually grouped by reading, rather than by category of question) and end up revising the list and its order a few times until I am satisfied. There is a lot of interplay between the list of questions and the remaining steps of the creative process.

Personal Reflection

I also come up with questions intended to be answered privately (although brave souls may feel free to share their responses with the group). These questions are usually introspective and ask the reader to compare their own situation in life with the situations portrayed in the Bible. For example, upon reading the parable of the prodigal son, consider each character. When have you been the son who left? When have you been the son who remained? When have you been the father? And perhaps more difficult to consider, when have you been the prostitutes or the distant farmer who enable or encourage the younger son’s continued separation from this father, and are obstacles to his return?

Closing Prayer

Final Edits

In an effort to keep the study guide to four 8.5″ x 11″ sheets of paper, I will then do some trimming (mostly of the commentaries that appear between the study questions and the reflection questions). I try to have the guide in its final form about a week before the study. I print one copy double-sided, bring it to a local print shop, and convert it into a single 17″ x 11″ page, folded-once booklet, and hole-punch it.