Some Christians are a bit nervous about meditation because it doesn't
quite fit their idea of what prayer is . Most Christians trying to
maintain a regular prayer life, sooner or later come up with some
pattern of prayer or other which involves talking(even if that talking
is carried on within the confines of their own skull); for example the
well used ACT pattern. In this, we go through a cycle of Adoration,
Confession and Thanksgiving - telling God how great he is, telling him
what we've done wrong lately and thanking him for whatever it is that
has come our way lately: all stuff you might have thought he knew
already. Usually we also ask for things to be done for us or for others,
and again, presume upon the foreknowledge of the one who created our
desires.
Down through the years many Christians have thought,
'surely there's got to be more to prayer than that', and in various ways
and at various times, have begun and continued a great exploration of
the human psyche which constitutes the huge mass of knowledge loosely
called Christian mysticism. Within this tradition, meditation has been
practiced for many many centuries. The desert fathers used to teach by
giving their disciples a Word: a personal phrase for them to ponder
repeatedly for years; in other words, a mantra. Meister Eckhart
discovered and taught a discipline very like Mindfulness meditation. The
anonymous medieval book of instruction The Cloud Of Unknowing
assumed a mantra based meditation. From these medieval classics to the
modern proponents of Christian Meditation such as Anthony De Mello and
John Main the tradition has been strong, but also it has been regarded
with suspicion by many Christians precisely because it is devoid of
words and we Christians are usually very very fond of words - especially
our own. How can it be prayer if you don't say anything? Or think
anything? Or feel anything?
For those who are a bit nervous about
it, there's a number of ways in which meditation is prayer in the
usually accepted sense of the word as verbal communication with God. The
use of a mantra can be a prayer: a repeated petition or act of worship.
For many, a time of meditation is often ended by a brief period of
intercession, in which the heightened consciousness and concentration of
the meditation is brought to bear on some person or issue or other. For
myself, I have certainly noticed that reading the Bible or the New
Zealand Liturgy immediately after meditating invests familiar words with
whole new depths of subtlety and meaning. But the way in which
meditation is prayer is a bit more complicated.
Alan Firth has written a lovely narrative poem called The Gardener
in which he tells the story of a grower of prize vegetables who wishes
to communicate with the slugs who live in a wasteland beside his garden.
Faced with the impossibility of communication across such a divide of
perception and intelligence, he magically becomes a slug himself in
order to talk to them. It is, of course a metaphor of the incarnation.
It's a clever piece, both artistically and theologically, and one of its
basic presuppositions is the enormous distance between God and
humankind in terms of intelligence and consciousness. How could we
possibly conceive of the mind which conceived our minds? When we talk to
God, as we do in prayer - our feeble intellects making contact with The
Old Wise One - it is slugs talking to the gardener. Our incoherent spur
of the moment Eek! Save Me God! prayers or our most elaborate liturgies
are all slugtalk. We are creatures trying to converse with the
uncreated and we are working with all the limited resources of our
creatureliness. The automatic patterns which govern almost all of our
lives and our thinking don't leave off when we start thinking of or
conversing with the Almighty. The language we use, the sense of our own
self we bring to the conversation and the image we have formed of God
are all part of the great complex of unconscious patterns which I spoke
of a few days ago. All our language about and to God is limited. But
when we manage to be still enough to leave the patterns behind us, we
find ourselves able to break free of those limits.
Meditation is
not in itself a religious activity; as a comment on an earlier post
pointed out, an atheist could meditate without doing violence to his
world view, but it does bring us closer to a perception of what IS - the
universe freed of the preconceptions through which we normally view it.
It brings us closer therefore to the God who defined himself as I AM.
It might not look it on first glance but the prayer of utter silence is
the purest prayer there is.
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