Can I chat to God during Meditation?

‘Is it alright to chat to God during contemplation?’ someone asked in one of our online practice sessions recently.

It’s a common question. A question which gives us the opportunity to remind ourselves how Christian contemplatives have traditionally understood God and prayer. I suspect the person who asked the question meant meditation when they said contemplation: ‘Is it alright to chat to God during meditation?’

Meditation is a way of silent prayer. Just describing meditation as silent prayer answers the question.

For many people, prayer primarily means speaking to God with words. Asking, thanking, interceding. And this is all good. Prayer with words has a very valuable place in a balanced diet of prayer. But meditation is a different mode of prayer, often called prayer of the heart, or prayer of the mind in the heart.

Prayer as open receptivity

This way of prayer is often likened to listening. During our time of meditation, of silent prayer, we are not speaking, we are listening. All good relationships involve speaking and listening. Now, when the tradition speaks of listening, it does not mean listening for anything in particular. It means an attitude, an orientation, of open receptivity, a surrendering of the mind that conceptualises, which operates by means of words and images. We just practise sitting with open, receptive attention. We attend to the One beyond all words and images.

In the words of Thomas Merton, ‘the true contemplative is not one who prepares [their] mind for a particular message…a word that will transform [their] darkness into light,’ but one who ‘waits on the Word of God in silence, and when [they are] “answered,” it is not so much by a word that bursts into [their] silence. It is by [their] silence itself suddenly, inexplicably revealing itself to [them] as a word of great power, full of the voice of God.’ (1)

‘Is it alright to chat to God during meditation?’

It is, of course, completely up to you how you spend your time. But talking to God during meditation is a little like coming to a beautiful river and asking whether it’s alright to sit on the bank and chat to the river. To meditate is to get in, to immerse ourself in the river.

‘Our greatest need,’ says St John of the Cross, ‘is to be silent before this great God…for the only language he hears is the silent language of love.’ (2) Another of St John’s teachings – that God is always speaking his one Word ‘in eternal silence, and in silence it must be heard’ (3) – prompted the much-loved monk Thomas Keating to quip, ‘This suggests that God’s first language is silence, and that all other languages are poor translations.’ (4)

God transcends mind

Let’s think about God for a minute. Or, rather, let’s think about the problem with thinking we can think about God.

‘God transcends mind,’ says the great fourth-century theologian Gregory of Nyssa. (5). ‘Do not imagine divinity in yourself when praying,’ says the Desert Father and contemporary of Gregory, Evagrius of Ponticus. ‘Do not have any images but go immaterially to the immaterial.’ (6)

‘God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth’ Jesus teaches in the Gospel of John (John 4:23-24). Not in words. Not in images. Words and images are of enormous value in helping us turn to God, in helping us open to God. But God is beyond all words. And God cannot be made into an image.

When we have turned to God, we don’t need to say anything. God is saying everything.

The spirit prays on our behalf, says St Paul, in a way beyond words, a way that is inexpressible (Romans 8:26). This, I was taught by the Benedictines of Prinknash Abbey, is the essence of contemplative prayer.

God is an infinite river of silent love. Prayer with words and images can help bring us to the river.
Now, at the water’s edge, the invitation is to lay everything down. And get in…