'Christian' meditation

A brief response

Christian meditation courses are offered in many churches and circles. In one of them, for example, in four evenings, the Lectio Divina, the Ignatian prayer, the contemplative prayer and the image meditation are mainly discussed.1[1]. When someone addresses the pastor about this, he writes back, among other things:

"Our word meditation is derived from the Latin verb 'meditari' meaning 'to contemplate.' Contemplating God's Word and the events of the world is a good Christian virtue, which you also find in the Bible (cf. e.g. Ps. 119:24,77,92 etc. and Luke 2:19). It is hard to imagine how people come to an impression of God's will and of their own relationship to it if they do not "meditate. Countless believers and spiritual leaders throughout history have meditated on Scripture in silence and prayer. One could fill a large library with all the meditations that have been committed to paper over time. The disturbing thing about our time, then, is not that meditation is happening, but that there is so much distraction and turmoil that courses need to be set up to bring people back to meditation. Therefore, I am glad that there are people in our congregation who seek peace and time to let God's Word come to them - because that is what Christian meditation essentially is."

Of course, we are happy to agree that meditation on God's Word is necessary. But the question is whether there is no longer a problem with 'Christian meditation' and what the Bible says about this.

What people say about meditation

We are not finished when we say that Christian meditation is merely the contemplation of God's Word to learn God's will. Unfortunately, there is nevertheless more to "Christian meditation" than meets the eye. For meditation is not about cognitive2 understanding God's Word, but rather to let go of all cognition and come to an experience (the "beholding") of God. Advocates of meditation give us their own insight into this, such as Lex Boot or Thomas Merton3.

Boot4 writes, among other things:

On the necessity of letting go of thoughts and the practice thereof: “(…) return to the object of meditation again and again calmly. What that is depends on the type of meditation you practice. It could be the Bible word that sounds at that moment, the image the Bible story has conjured up, the icon that grabs your attention, the mantra, or whatever.”
"(...) on the meditative path we practice letting go of cognitions (...)".5

About the inner experience: "(...) a third level of presence. That presence relates to the transcendent or the spiritual. Many people today, both within and outside religious traditions, seek spiritual experience. If we may rely on the stories, it also seems that many people have had such an experience of a presence in recent decades. People articulate these experiences, for example, as a sensation of a sustaining universal energy, a field of being, a "flow" of love in all that is, an emptiness, the power of the now, a fullness of life, a sense of merging with all and in all, and so on. We are in that field and it is also inside us at the same time (...)."6
“God's presence cannot be fixed in one place. In majestic goodness and greatness all that is is divinely imbued. The Presence is close to your skin like a cloth around you, but at the same time the energetic power tingles in the farthest distances of this limitless universe. In the meditative movement we emphasize the presence and indwelling in our deepest inner self. (…) Some of the meditation methods covered in this booklet, especially Centering Prayer7, is aimed at practicing this awareness".8                                           

Merton9 for example writes:

“What does contemplation as 'prayer of the heart' want to achieve? (…) We do not reason about dogmas of faith or 'mysteries'. Rather, we seek a direct existential awareness, a personal experience of the deepest content of life and of faith by seeing ourselves in God's truth. (…) Concentration is the sense for the unconditional. Prayer then means longing for the pure presence of God . . .”.10

“Purity of heart then goes along with a new spiritual identity - letting go of the 'self' as we now know it in the context of God willed reality - purity of heart is the enlightened consciousness of the new man as opposed to the complex and perhaps not too honorable illusions of the 'old man'. The meditation is thus directed to this new insight, to this direct knowledge of the 'self' in its higher destiny. (…) And yes, our real self is not easy to discover. It lies hidden in darkness and 'insignificance' in that center where we depend directly on God”.11

“The unifying knowledge of God in love is not the knowledge of an object by a subject but a very different and transcendent form of knowledge in which our created 'self' seems to disappear in God and know Him alone. In a passive purification the self is then emptied, so to speak, and apparently destroyed so that it no longer knows itself as distinct from God.”.12

“We may therefore say here, if only in passing, that images, symbols, works of art, ritual gestures and, of course, especially the sacraments, rightly and effectively involve material things in prayer and meditation. They are just as many means to go deeper in prayer.”.13

These few quotes do make it clear that "Christian meditation" is more than contemplating the Word of God. The ultimate goal is the inner experience of the 'unification with God. Moreover, it is clear that these kinds of experiences (though otherwise called) occur and are sought after in all religions and beyond14.

Now we can discuss this extensively about 'Christian meditation', but it seems more sensible to me to leave God Himself to the Word.

What God's Word Says

The Bible says a lot about how we should or should not approach God. I quote a number of passages below without going into detail. Most speak for themselves.

The law of the ten commandments begins with it - for good reason.

“You shall have no other gods before Me. Thou shalt make for thyself no image, no image whatsoever of what is in heaven above, or on the earth below, or in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them, nor serve them (…)” (Ex. 20:3-5).

God does not want His people to use images or pictures in His service to draw near to Him. That would mean that 'other gods' come into view, so to speak.

What idolatry is in the Bible is clearly defined by Moses in Deuteronomy 12, where it says:

“(…) You shall not do as they do before the Lord your God. (…) take heed that after they have been swept from before your eyes you do not fall into the same snare, and that you do not inquire after their gods, saying, As these nations have served their gods, so will I also do it. . You shall not do as they do before the LORD your God” (Deut. 12:4, 30-31).

The meaning of this is unequivocal: we must not approach God in a way that the unbelievers use to approach their gods (in the invisible world). So it is about the way in which (the method) we want to get in touch with God and want to experience Him. If we do this in a 'pagan way' then we do not experience God, but the gods, the demons. While we believe that the experience comes from God.

The Lord Jesus Himself also warns against a pagan way of approaching God when He says:

“When you pray, don't use rambling of words like the heathen, for they think they will be heard for the multitude of their words. Then be not like them (…)” (Matt. 6:7-8).

The expression 'rambling of words' only occurs here in the NT. The Lord Jesus makes the link to 'heathen praying', where words without meaning15 be repeated.

Paul comes to the same conclusion as Moses when he writes to the Corinthians about idolatry.

“Therefore, my beloved, flee from idolatry. (…) What am I saying with this? That an idol is anything, or that an idol sacrifice is anything? No, I say this because what the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice it to demons and not to God, and I don't want you to have intercourse with the demons. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons. You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and of the table of demons (1 Cor. 10:14, 19-21).

It is clear from the context that Paul is writing about the Christian worship of the Corinthians. The heathen sacrifice to their gods; they use methods and means to contact the gods (actually demons). Paul argues that the Corinthians should not use those methods and means in their service to God, because doing so would also serve the demons. Mixing Christian service to God with pagan methods is not allowed: you can'not partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons.' You may think you have fellowship with God, but in reality you have fellowship with demons. What you experience comes from them and not from God. Hence Paul exclaims: “(…) I don't want you to have intercourse with the demons' (verse 20b).

The Proverbs knew of the two paths man can take. One way is propagated by the Lady Foolishness, and the other, the way Wisdom points out, is the way of reason and understanding.

“The Supreme Wisdom (…) Forsake the foolish things and live, and go in the way of understanding.” (Proverbs 9:1, 6).
“Lady Foolishness is restless (…) He who is without sense, to him she says: Stolen water is sweet,
and bread eaten in secret is pleasant. But they do not know that the dead lie there, her guests lie in the depths of the grave” (Proverbs 9:13-18).
“A man who wanders from the way of understanding will rest in the company of the dead.” (Proverbs 21:16).

When people – whether they are Christians or not – leave the way of the mind, they end up in the domain of the dead and the spirits. We can only draw near to God through Jesus Christ, who said it:

“I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through Me” (John 14:6).

Footnotes

  1. This successively concerns meditation with the help of a biblical word, bringing a biblical story to life inwardly, the so-called 'centering' or 'contemplative prayer' and meditating with the aid of icons. ↩︎
  2. Cognition is the ability to acquire knowledge through perception and the processing of the information thereby acquired by thinking. This may be more or less developed depending on imagination, memory, reason, experience and the ability to perceive and hypothesize ideas or beliefs. Strong cognition contributes to the ability for problem solving and decision making (wikipedia.co.uk). ↩︎
  3. Sam Harris, an atheist and 'scientific experience expert', also writes a lot about meditation (eg 'The present moment, 2014). ↩︎
  4. Lex Boot; 'Little Guide to Christian Meditation', 2012 ↩︎
  5. Boot, page 25 ↩︎
  6. Boot, page 27 ↩︎
  7. Also called inner or contemplative prayer. ↩︎
  8. Boot, page 29 ↩︎
  9. Thomas Merton; 'Contemplative Prayer', 2015 ↩︎
  10. Merton, page 64 ↩︎
  11. Merton, page 65.68 ↩︎
  12. Merton, page 72.73 ↩︎
  13. Merton, page 81 ↩︎
  14. See also, for example, Sam Harris, 'The present moment'. ↩︎
  15. SV has 'vain tale of words'; KJV: 'vain repetitions'. ↩︎