A daily discipline - 8 July 2011

Part of the general teaching about Christian Meditation encourages us to adopt some daily discipline of meditation. No one should be frightened about this. The discipline will vary a lot from person to person. If you consult someone like Father Laurence Freeman, he will say simply that we should meditate for between 20 to 30 minutes, twice a day. It is what he does, and he believes it is the basic discipline for a contemplative person. And of course it represents a considerable rearrangement of our personal lives and schedules and priorities. Plenty of people do that.

But it depends on a lot of things. For some it depends on their many other at present unavoidable tasks and responsibilities. I do not see how a mother at home with preschoolers can meditate twice a day in stillness and silence. It also depends on our state of health, on the understanding of other people in the house, and so on... numerous things. I come back to the basic principles, that whatever we do, it is always to be a gentle discipline -- we do what we can, not what we can’t. In our maturity we may have discovered that times and seasons change, and that what was impossible at one time of life may be able to blossom some other time.

But there is a deeper point underlying this. The teaching says that if and when the moment arrives for meditation, we do it whether we feel like it or not. We discern the moment, and choose to respond, whether we feel like it or not. Feelings are put to one side. This is a decision about priorities. And it always strikes me as being profoundly counter-cultural. It may be that for those of us who have seen a thing or two, getting on with something we don’t feel like doing is not a strange experience at all. We can manage that perfectly well if we choose to. I was once invited to “explain”, as they put it, Christian Meditation to a church youth group. And that bit of it was incomprehensible to them. Doing something they didn’t feel like doing, or thought they didn’t like... Why would anyone do that if they didn’t have to?

Meditation, contemplative life and prayer, teaches us to set aside emotions, feelings if we have to or if we choose. In the welter and pressure of emotions, which we always have anyway, we choose something else, to become still and wait. That is a very rich decision. It is a decision, in the stillness, to be directed elsewhere than ourselves. In the normal course of our lives it may be something that happens nowhere else. Even if we see our lives as outgoing and caring of others, which may well be true, this is different. It is paying attention to God, with empty hands and with all the love and stillness, silence and simplicity, that are God’s gift.