Christian meditation is accepting the invitation to our life. It is Christianity’s prayer of silence. We rest from striving and allow ourselves to become self-forgetful, open, and attentive to the presence of God within and around us.
Meditation was described by the great Desert Father Evagrius as the letting go of thoughts, the laying aside of concepts. You might describe meditation as a spiritual art or skill which allows something to take place, which helps us cultivate a disposition of attentive receptivity – wakeful awareness – which opens us to the gift of contemplation.
Of all the many things that might be said about contemplation, we like to speak of contemplation very simply as the gift of seeing clearly, a gift which cannot be separated from how we live, from a life of compassion and peace.
Some characteristics of meditation in the Christian wisdom tradition are detailed below.
Immediately before teaching us the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus introduces us to a way of prayer which resonates deeply with his practice of communing with God in solitude. This is the most emphasised aspect of Jesus’ prayer in the New Testament.
“But when you pray, enter into your inner room and, having closed the door, pray to your Father in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you” (Matthew 6.6). In meditation, we leave the outer rooms of self-conscious preoccupation, and enter the ‘inner room’ of self-forgetful awareness, to pray in silent (“secret”) communion with God. As prayer deepens, it becomes less and less a matter of what we think about and do, and increasingly a matter of simply being, of resting within what God is doing.
Meditation cannot be separated from an ethical life. The intention we bring to meditation influences the attention of the heart, the deepest truth of our being, which is God, infinite love. It is important to be aware of our values, our core beliefs, the purpose for which we are meditating. Ultimately, meditation, like all prayer, is ultimately about relationship, about living well, together.
When we build a regular practice of Christian meditation, we discover that we don’t need to escape from our humanness in order to find healing and enlightenment. Quite the opposite. We discover that our wounds and failures can become doorways of light. The path of meditation does not lead us away from our vulnerabilities, but helps illuminate and guide us through them.
“In Christian theology,” writes the Anglican solitary Maggie Ross, “nothing is wasted, nothing is left behind; through wounds comes healing.” This is one of the great insights that comes through the practice of meditation.
As we learn to meet our wounds with compassion and without judgement, as we learn to accept and indwell our vulnerability, we discover a place of deep communion, a place of solidarity and compassion for all in the silent ground of our shared humanity.
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Meditation is a school of community. The simple practice helps turn us to what is before all our words and ideas, before all religious metaphors and doctrines, and opens us to the peace which transfigures all that we think divides us and lays bare who we are – members of one family, living in one shared home. We are drawn into ever deepening communion—with ourselves, with others, with God.
Contemplation (the gift of seeing clearly) is very far from being a mere option for Christians, says Rowan Williams: “it is the key to the essence of a renewed humanity that is capable of seeing the world and other subjects in the world with freedom – freedom from self-oriented, acquisitive habits and the distorted understanding that comes from them. To put it boldly, contemplation is the only ultimate answer to the unreal and insane world that our financial systems and our advertising culture and our chaotic and unexamined emotions encourage us to inhabit. To learn contemplative practice is to learn what we need so as to live truthfully and honestly and lovingly. It is a deeply revolutionary matter.”
The contemplative dimension is the heart Christianity (and every great religion). We have been given all we need to come home to the mystery of God’s presence within ourselves and all creation, and to manifest this presence in the practice of unselfish love. We have been given all we need for a new way of seeing and a new way of being.