Clarifying what we do - 7 August 2015

Meditation is becoming ever more popular at present. It is being promoted in companies and law offices, schools and universities, and on supermarket notice boards – as a way to relax and relieve stress, to become more "mindful" (that word has now been appropriated, although I suspect there is only the haziest idea what it means), more focussed, to cope with parenthood… I suppose people have endless private hopes for trying out meditation. Methods of meditation offered are drawn from Buddhist and Hindu sources, from TM (Transcendental Meditation), Hildegard of Bingen... In my view we need not be critical of any of that, if people find it helpful. What we practise and teach is Christian Meditation. It is one form of Christian prayer – but the word “prayer”, to many these days, connotes religion and all that stuff they don’t want any more. The meditation we practise is Christian because we understand we are in the presence of the risen Christ, the icon of the invisible God, whom Jesus called Father, and we believe we are being conformed ever more closely to the image and the way of Christ. It is meditation because in this form of prayer we are as still and silent as we can manage, we are not using words or litanies, we are asking for nothing, simply being present and consenting to God. Our mantra helps to keep it simple. If we are curious about results or benefits, we know to look for them in changes within us, often subtle or unexpected. Christian Meditation is a discipline. “Discipline” means that it requires us to be serious and pay attention, but it also means that we are learning things as we go, we have open, receptive hearts and minds. In Christian Meditation we do not “empty our minds”…! We hear from time to time of the fears of some that “emptying our minds” – as though we could ever do that anyway – somehow “lets in the devil”. It is a baseless fear. One of the effects of a discipline of Christian Meditation is that those infantile superstitions and fears slide away. Indeed, fear in our lives, including the over-arching fear of mortality, tends now to get replaced by love and gratitude and a constant awareness of mercy and grace. Love, writes St John, casts out fear [I John4:18]. Christian Meditation is a kind of doorway to true contemplative life and prayer. There is nothing whatever new about it – it has been known and practised in the church since earliest times. But at times it was typically seen as difficult and suitable only for monks and nuns. The great gift of our day has been that teachers have released meditation and contemplative life and prayer from its captivity to the church’s so-called professionals, and brought it to the rest of us. It is grown-up faith. We must no longer be children… writes St Paul… Speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into Christ who is the head… Clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God… [Eph.4:14ff].