I'm sure he loved the texts for their meaning. He dedicated his life to this work, after all.
I find when I practice lectio and meditatio, though, I don't pay as much attention to the words as the images or sentiments or experiences that surround them.
I spent the first half of my life (so far) in Evangelical circles, with that pastor, and became a Catholic in the second half, so have experience with both extensive rote memorization by chapter and verse, and now engaging the texts more comprehensively. Obviously there's also the difference between being a child and an adult, but I find that now I remember the sense of stories when I refer to them, not the actual text, except when I call to mind some fragment of a quotation from my childhood.
I don't think either is necessarily better, and it's entirely likely to me that my overall growth in age and maturity would have led me to this deeper experience even if I hadn't converted. I just don't find it quite as helpful for memorization.
By way of tangential analogy, my current (Catholic) pastor regularly tells the parishioners not to take it when non-Catholics accuse us of not knowing the Scriptures. He pointed out that not once has anyone in the congregation been surprised at how the reading ended. He says Protestants and Evangelicals tend to know Scripture like a mailman knows a neighborhood. They know the street names and numbers and can easily find them on a map. But Catholics know Scripture like families who grew up in the neighborhood. They may not know what number house Mrs. Jones lives in, but they know the Smiths lived there until Junior went off to college, and wasn't that the same year Younger Brother fell out of the tree on the corner and busted up his arm?
Thank you, it is great to have the opinion of someone actually practicing this. I was indeed wondering if regular lectio of a text would lead almost automatically to memorizing it, but it seems not to be the case.
Still, I could imagine that the new testament is more easily memorized by getting "involved" in the story. I have this impression mostly by comparing with the pali canon (the oldest set of sacred buddhist scripture): buddhist pali texts (with a few exceptions, such as the dhammapada) are very technical and contain very little in terms of "story", and their structure contains much more repetition and structured lists than the bible. So much so that all written versions I know of abridge the repetitions, as it would otherwise be extremely boring to read. That biblical texts (or more poetic pali texts) did not have to resort to this makes me think that the meaning and emotional involvement with the text indeed helps in memorizing it.
The gospels and the Acts of the Apostles certainly have a strong narrative element; the letters rather less so. It doesn't surprise me that they could all be memorized in a decade, but not a year. I just think the techniques in this article might not be the way to do it, focused as they are on rapid memorization of dialogue.
I find when I practice lectio and meditatio, though, I don't pay as much attention to the words as the images or sentiments or experiences that surround them.
I spent the first half of my life (so far) in Evangelical circles, with that pastor, and became a Catholic in the second half, so have experience with both extensive rote memorization by chapter and verse, and now engaging the texts more comprehensively. Obviously there's also the difference between being a child and an adult, but I find that now I remember the sense of stories when I refer to them, not the actual text, except when I call to mind some fragment of a quotation from my childhood.
I don't think either is necessarily better, and it's entirely likely to me that my overall growth in age and maturity would have led me to this deeper experience even if I hadn't converted. I just don't find it quite as helpful for memorization.
By way of tangential analogy, my current (Catholic) pastor regularly tells the parishioners not to take it when non-Catholics accuse us of not knowing the Scriptures. He pointed out that not once has anyone in the congregation been surprised at how the reading ended. He says Protestants and Evangelicals tend to know Scripture like a mailman knows a neighborhood. They know the street names and numbers and can easily find them on a map. But Catholics know Scripture like families who grew up in the neighborhood. They may not know what number house Mrs. Jones lives in, but they know the Smiths lived there until Junior went off to college, and wasn't that the same year Younger Brother fell out of the tree on the corner and busted up his arm?