About Christian Meditation

Christian Meditation is a way of praying.

There are many ways of praying. If you attend the liturgy at church -- that is a way of praying. Lectio Divina is best seen as a way of praying. Journalling and Examen may be seen as forms of praying. Children’s prayers, intercession groups, prayer chains... all sorts of things are ways of praying, because one way or another people are opening their consciousness to God.

Christian Meditation belongs to the so-called contemplative school of praying. That is because it is silent, still and inward, wordless except for the use of a mantra, and imageless. So it is in those respects very different from other ways of prayer.
Two things at the outset:

• No one learns to pray by talking about it, reading about it, or hearing about it and discussing it. We learn it by doing it. And all my experience is that people learn contemplative prayer and life by embarking on it in a disciplined way, and usually by joining with others in a Christian Meditation group.

• We need to have a little clarity about this word contemplative, since it gets hijacked by all sorts of people. Contemplative does not mean thoughtful. Plenty of people are thoughtful, and it’s no doubt a good thing to be. But that is not what we mean. We do not mean insightful, or quiet and gentle, or that we have an affinity with the trees and the distant vistas and the sunsets. It would be good if we were all these things -- but contemplative means receptive. It means that we know how to be silent and still in the presence of God, and that our lives have come to include this discipline of silence and stillness; that we know how to set aside our own thoughts and wishes, however noble, even the good and holy thoughts -- how to set aside the noise of our lives, including our religious lives, and certainly our frightened, clamorous and voracious egos, and be still, simple and receptive in the presence of God. I think we’ll come back to this word contemplative as we go along -- it is often seen by what it is not.

There are two initial and very basic questions people have when they hear about Christian Meditation and the contemplative life:

1. How do you do it?

2. What is it for? What benefits does it carry?

How do you do it is best answered by quoting from the website of the World Community for Christian Meditation.

Sit down. Sit still with your back straight. Close your eyes lightly. Then interiorly, silently begin to recite a single word – a prayer word or mantra. We recommend the ancient Christian prayer-word "Maranatha". Say it as four equal syllables. Breathe normally and give your full attention to the word as you say it, silently, gently, faithfully and above all - simply. The essence of meditation is simplicity. Stay with the same word during the whole meditation and from day to day. Don't visualise but listen to the word as you say it. Let go of all thoughts (even good thoughts), images and other words. Don’t fight your distractions but let them go by saying your word faithfully, gently and attentively and returning to it immediately that you realise you have stopped saying or it or when your attention is wandering.

Now, the fact is, every meditator develops personal variations on this. Contemplative prayer and life is certainly not about rigidity, rules and procedures. We experience these disciplines as freedom.

Posture matters -- the point is to be able to be still for 20 - 30 minutes, and different people do that in different ways. Real silence and stillness come with practice. We use a posture which enables us to be still, but absolutely awake and alert. Part of the discipline is managing our environment so that we can be uninterrupted.

The mantra is an issue for some. Not all meditators use the word Maranatha, but lots do. Generally, we don’t discuss our individual mantras. And we have a saying, that you change your mantra only once. So the mantra may require a bit of thought at the outset, but after that any worrying about it is simply another distraction. The point of the mantra is that it is always there, it is what we return to as soon as we realise we have become distracted, and in meditation we prefer the mantra even to good and worthy thoughts or pictures. We are not meditating on its meaning. Eventually we begin to listen to it rather than recite it. In one sense the mantra is simply a device to help us. But meditators find that, in another sense, their mantra becomes very important in life, always there, always reminding them, echoing in their consciousness at all sorts of times, functioning as a point of stability, a resonance which they hear even in times of stress.

Let go of all thoughts, says the website. Of course that’s easier said than done. It is counter to just about everything else in our lives. Letting go of thoughts means letting go of control, or more likely of our illusions of control. I have an abiding memory of an old parishioner who knew she was dying. Perhaps the most powerless and contemplative moment of her whole life. All her life she had been active among the church women and had done many things. And with her dying breaths she told us to make sure someone had remembered to get milk for the tea and coffee after the funeral. Christian Meditation is the opposite of control. It is with empty hands. It is the relinquishing of power, and (we hope) of anxiety. It is leaving it to God.

However, as Jesus knew, most of our distracting thoughts are more to do with utter trivialities. “What shall I eat, what shall I drink, what shall I wear…?” says the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6:25). Every meditator knows that as soon as we create a silent and still space, there is something that hates this vacuum and wants to fill it up. We immediately receive a flood of usually trivial distractions to do with food, drink, clothes, agendas, tomorrow, yesterday, whatever… Or our distractions are about important things -- someone’s sick, someone’s sad, all that. We have long ago learned to recognize the distraction, honour it if it is honourable, note it, and set it aside, gently replace it with the mantra. Eventually it dawns on us that it is this returning that matters, because it is the setting aside of the ego, making vacant the place where God belongs, so God can occupy it again.

But remember, our second question was: What is it for? What benefits does it bring? It is easy to see what intercessory prayer is for, or the prayer of the liturgy. For years now, people have been attracted to Buddhist practices, Transcendental Meditation, some forms of Yoga, Tai Chi, Zen meditation -- generally to achieve some goal of peace or serenity. And these are indeed benefits of any process of being still and silent. You may also lower your blood pressure for a while, and avoid rows at home. One woman told me her psoriasis had cleared up.

Christian Meditation is about none of that. It is a way of responding deeply to God in Christ, and I can’t help noticing that it appeals more and more to people who may have been in the church all their lives, or even left it, but have never actually wanted to take farewell of God. There are lots of these people. Christian Meditation is deeply Christian because it relies totally on the heart’s openness and the heart’s hospitality to the risen Christ.

The idea that something is simply good in itself is profoundly counter-cultural these days. This pragmatic, ego-obsessed culture needs to know what I will get out of it, what’s in it for me? Will it calm my fears and solve my problems? We think we need value-added religion. If it is not “delivering”, then is it not a waste of time? Moreover, the discovery that Christian Meditation is very much about relinquishing control, or the illusion of control we like to have, is deeply threatening to some.

There is nothing new about Christian Meditation in Christian history. Contemplative prayer was well known in the monasteries. Its roots go back to the Desert Fathers and Mothers of the 4th and 5th centuries -- it was from them that John Cassian http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.giflearned to pray, and brought what he knew to Europe where he taught Benedict and others. Largely since the Second Vatican Council the monasteries have been commissioned to open their teachings “beyond the walls”, and that is a major route by which Christian Meditation and Centering Prayer have come into the practice of so many around the world. The Benedictines Fr John Main and Fr Laurence Freeman, the Cistercian Fr Thomas Keating and numerous others, have been the principal teachers. The World Community for Christian Meditation (WCCM) is now in many countries of east and west. Its website is: www.wccm.org The NZCCM is at http://www.christianmeditationnz.org.nz

-- Ross Miller rossmill@orcon.net.nz