Dancing With Your Shadow

Christian books on meditation do not lie thick on the ground. There's Anthony De Mello, of course and John Main and Laurence Freeman. There's a wealth of classic material if you can find it and if you can come to terms with the archaic language. Morton Kelsey has a couple of titles which include some reference to meditation, but after that my own knowledge of the literature is starting to wear a bit thin. Which is why I was very pleased to be lent this book a week or two ago. As far as practical advice on beginning and continuing meditation goes it's the best I've come across. There are some useful chapters on the theory of meditation and some advice on what is likely to happen as you settle down to a committed practice.

Kim Nataraja has had a varied spiritual journey which began in Christianity and took the scenic route through various world faiths before arriving back where she started. She is now a leading member of the World Community For Christian Meditation. She is a spiritual director and teacher of meditation of many years standing. Her book has all the marks of rising out of year after year of coaxing people into growth in the art of arts. It is very readable and practical in its advice but doesn't skimp on the deeper stuff either. Mrs Nataraja's advice comes from a well worked philosophy of the whole person in which integration seems to be a recurring motif. Something which particularly pleases me is her use of story: points are illustrated by stories from all manner of traditions, always apt and always enjoyable for their own sake.

A quick glance at the table of contents tells you the scope of the book:

Foreword by Laurence Freeman OSB
Introduction
Prologue
CHAPTER ONE: Meditation – the art of arts
CHAPTER TWO: Stilling the body and the mind
CHAPTER THREE: Conditioned thoughts
CHAPTER FOUR: The interplay of the ego and the deeper self
CHAPTER FIVE: The worldview – old and new
CHAPTER SIX: Purifying the emotions by watching the thoughts
CHAPTER SEVEN: The spectrum of consciousness
CHAPTER EIGHT: Ultimate Reality
Epilogue: The Roots of Christian Meditation
Appendix I(Scriptural references to meditation)
Appendix II( Practical advice on how to meditate )
Bibliography
About The World Community of Christian Meditation

It is available on line at a reasonable price from the World Community of Christian Meditation For members of my parish therre is one in the parish library.

Comments

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire. Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon...

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and...

Kindle

Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on. I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incomp...

The Traitor

A couple of people have questioned me privately about the Leonard Cohen song The Traitor , and about Cohen's comments on the song, "[The Traitor is about] the feeling we have of betraying some mission we were mandated to fulfill and being unable to fulfill it; then coming to understand that the real mandate was not to fulfill it; and the real courage is to stand guiltless in the predicament in which you find yourself". What on earth does he mean, and why am I so excited about it? For the latter, check with my psychiatrist. For the former, my take on the song is this: The Traitor is another of those instances, as in The Partisan , where Leonard Cohen uses a military metaphor to speak of life in general and human love in particular. Many of us hold high ideals: some great quest or other that we pursue. These are often laudable things: finding true love, finding the absolute love of God, becoming enlightened, spreading the Gospel, writing the great novel or some such ...

Why I Hold the Views I Do

St. Hilda's Collegiate School, taken with my phone after a recent meeting. This picture has nothing whatsoever to do with what follows, but I like the interplay of shapes and particularly the shadow on the wall. My mother is a Methodist, liberal in her theological and social opinions. My father was a socialist, just slightly to the left, in his politics, of Karl Marx. My siblings -there are 5 of us- are all bright, eloquent and omnivorous in their consumption of books and other intellectual fodder. One of my most cherished childhood memories is of mealtimes in our little state house. The food was ingested with copious amounts of spirited, opinionated, clever and sometimes informed debate on whatever subject happened to catch the attention of one of the family that day. Or whatever one of us thought might get a rise out of someone else. So, sex, politics and religion it was then - oh and motorbikes, economics, international relations, demographics, cricket, company ownersh...

Available Light

Search This Blog