Christian Meditation

In my last blog I described Contemplative Christian Spirituality as the belief that we can best experience God as Jesus experienced God, by letting go of our thoughts and expectations and experiencing God in the silence and stillness of our souls.

I said that the cornerstone of Contemplative Christian Spirituality is the practice called Christian Meditation. In this blog I will discuss Christian Mediation and describe how you might incorporate it your prayer life.

Christian Mediation does not replace other Christian spiritual practices. It completes them. Most spiritual practices use our brain, either to talk to God (as in prayer), to understand God (as in Bible readings), or to worship God (as in church services.) Christian Meditation introduces a new dimension into our spiritual practice, the dimension of the heart. We have many ways of communicating with God and about God. Christian Meditation is about listening to God.

Listening is harder than you might expect. We are so busy fretting about the past or worrying about the future that we have few brain cells available for listening to what God is telling us right now.

You might think the solution is easy. Just stop fretting and worrying. Stop thinking and start listening. But not thinking is not so easy.

Allow me to demonstrate with a simple experiment. Sit down in a quiet place with no distractions. I am going to ask you to count your breaths, one by one, without thinking about anything. I want you to try as hard as you can not to think of anything at all except the counting. Before you try this, guess how far you can get. Can you make it to 50 breaths? 100? Write down your guess on a piece of paper.

Now let's try it. Close your eyes. As you slowly breath in, think to yourself, "in, one." As you slowly breath out, think to yourself, "out, one". With your next in breath, think to yourself, "in, two." As you breath out, think to yourself, "out, two."  Continue this until you find yourself thinking. Stop the moment you find yourself thinking about anything other than counting your breath, even if it is just a fleeting thought about picking up something on the way home for dinner or maybe how silly you feel counting your breaths. Once you have any non-counting thought, no matter how brief or insignificant, stop and note how far you got.

Try this exercise two or three times. Keep track of how far you get each time. When you have completed this, scroll this page down and continue reading.
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If you are like most of us, you will be doing well if you make it to 5 before your mind wanders off. Does this surprise you? And if you can't go 5 breaths without your mind becoming distracted, how can you find the interior silence you need to fully experience God's presence?

This is what Christian Meditation is about: creating a silence within which to experience  God.

The bad news is that most of us will find it difficult to ever make a perfect silence for God. The good news is that God can do an amazing job with even an imperfect silence. God doesn't ask that we succeed, only that we keep trying.

Think of meditating as like playing the violin. The first time you pick up a violin, you aren't likely to play very well. Neither reading about the violin nor taking violin lessons is going to make you a violinist. If you want to play, you must practice and if you want to play well, you must practice daily.

The same is true for quieting our minds. When you first tried to quiet your mind, you didn't get very far, did you? That doesn't mean that you are a bad person or an ungodly person. It just means that you need to practice. 

Christian Meditation isn't easy. Ideally you will practice at least twenty minutes at a time and repeat this twice a day. It is a definite commitment. But God is worth it.

Now down to the nitty gritty. How to do it. There are a number of variants that different people teach. I will explain the practice as taught by the World Community for Christian Meditation.

First, choose a word or short phrase. This will be your centering word. You will repeat this word over and over as a way of settling the turmoil that is typically going on in your brain. Unless you have a word or phrase that really speaks to you, the recommended word is Maranatha, an Aramaic word that means something like "Come, Lord."

Maranatha is pronounced in four syllables. The first is "mar" (rhyming with "far.") The second is "a" (sounding like "ahh.") The third is "nath" (rhyming with the English pronunciation of "bath.") The fourth is "a" (sounding like "ahh.")

One reason for choosing Maranatha is that it is in the language of Jesus (Aramaic). Another reason for choosing Maranatha is that so many other meditators use that same word. So many, in fact, that it is likely that at any given instant, somebody someplace in the world is saying Maranatha silently, and by using that same word you are joining in this collective never ending chorus.

Now that you have chosen your word, you need three more things. First, you need a quiet place. Second, you need a comfortable chair that will allow you to sit straight. Third, you need a twenty minute timer, preferably one that does not have a jarring finale. You can download such a timer from the link shown on this blog's home page, titled "Meditation Timers (MP3 Files)."

Next, practice thinking your word in time with your breathing. I like to think "Mara" with my in breaths and "natha" with my out breaths, but find a pattern with which you are comfortable.

Next, sit in a comfortable position with your back straight and both feet planted on the floor. Your goal will be to sit without moving for twenty minutes, so find a position that will be comfortable for a while.

Next, start the timer. Close your eyes lightly and start thinking your word in time with your slow breathing. Think the word quietly and peacefully, allowing it to permeate your whole body with each breath. Maintain the stillness of your body. Continue this until your time period is finished. That's it. Sounds simple, doesn't it?

Of course, you won't get far before your mind wanders off. When that happens, just start repeating your word in time with your breathing again. Don't feel bad about wandering, it happens to most of us most times we practice. As soon as you find yourself feeling or thinking or judging something, gently go back to repeating your word. When your mind wanders off again, just start the cycle again.

Some days it will seem hopeless. Your mind will seem to have a mind of its own! Other days, it will seem wonderful. Don't judge the days either way. Days that don't seem to go well may be setting the stage for good days down the line. Trust God to use whatever silence you make available, even if that silence seems to you measured in milliseconds.

How do you know you are meditating well? First, if you are doing it, you are doing it well. As Woody Allen said, success is 80% showing up. So if you are doing your practice twice a day, you should pat yourself on your back. And if you aren't doing it twice a day or for the full twenty minutes, you can still congratulate yourself for what you are doing. Anything is better than nothing!

The second way you will know you are meditating well is when you start seeing subtle changes in your life. You will see God more often in the day to day moments that before you took for granted. You will find yourself getting less tense and less angry at life's little irritations. You will notice physical differences, like lower blood pressure and more restful sleep patterns. I'll talk in future blogs about the many physical and mental benefits of Christian Meditation, but for now, know that the benefits are more than just spiritual. (As if the spiritual benefits aren't enough!)

So Christian Meditation isn't very complicated. John Main, the Benedictine monk who is one of the best know evangelists for Christian Meditation, said he could describe the practice on the back of a postage stamp. It is simple, he said. But it isn't easy. There will be a dozen reasons every day for not meditating. Your favorite TV show is on. You want a beer. You are too tired. The dog is barking.

Remember, God is waiting for you, patiently and lovingly. God wants to be present within you. God needs just one thing from you. A little silence.

Pax Christi,
Roger Sessions

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Would you like more information on Christian Meditation? Two good sources are the web site for the World Community for Christian Meditation (www.wccm.org) and the short paperback by Fr. Lawrence Freeman titled Christian Meditation; Your Daily Practice available at Amazon.

Contemplative Christian Spirituality

My blog is about different aspects of Contemplative Christian Spirituality. A good starting place might be to define what I mean by this.

Spirituality is that part of our life that is concerned with our relationship with The Divine, with The Great Mystery, with God. Our soul is that part of ourselves that hungers for this relationship. So spirituality is the relationship between our souls and God. We nurture this relationship by honoring and taking care of our souls.

Christian Spirituality has a particular understanding of Spirituality. As Christians, we believe that the ideal form of spirituality is that shown to us by Jesus Christ. So we try to understand how we can best relate to God by understanding how Jesus related to God. Of course, we realize that Jesus had a perfect relationship with God and that we will not attain this state of perfection. But still, this is the relationship for which we strive.

Contemplative Christian Spirituality teaches that the most authentic experience of God is not through the intellect, but through direct experience. Contemplatives believe that God is beyond words and beyond understanding. Our beliefs about God limit God, and, since God is beyond limit, these beliefs must be false. As our Buddhist friends tell us, our beliefs are, at best, fingers pointing to the moon. They are not the moon itself.

So Contemplatives believe that the way to experience God is by emptying ourselves, by letting go of beliefs, ideas, and desires and of the ego that stands between us and God. We believe that we can best find God in the silence and the stillness of our souls.

We  follow the example given us in Jesus. Jesus taught about God in public places but related to God in the the solitude of the desert, in the quiet of nature, in the darkness of the night.  It is in these places that Jesus fed his soul and renewed his relationship with God.

As Christian Contemplatives, we pray as Jesus prayed, without words, in direct relationship with God. Most of us do this imperfectly, but this is our hope.

What do we call a prayer without words? We call this Christian Meditation.

Most of us believe that the daily practice of Christian Meditation brings us closer to God. I'll talk more about about Christian Mediation in my next blog. For now, know that it is a cornerstone of Contemplative Christian Spirituality. Which means that as Contemplatives, it is our pathway to a deeper and more authentic relationship with God. And as Christian Contemplatives, it is our belief that this is the path that was laid down for us by Jesus.

Pax Christi,
Roger

Meditation Timers

I am primarily attracted to the contemplative Christian practices. The heart of this is Christian Meditation. I'll talk much more about Christian Meditation in future blogs. For now, Christian Meditation is about quieting your mind so that God can find some room to have a relationship with you.

If you are getting into Christian Meditation, the only tools you need are a place to meditate and a timer. A good timer should let you know in a non-jarring way when your meditation period has started and when it has finished. It is surprisingly difficult to find such a timer so I created a few that you can download. There is no charge. I just hope you find them useful.

The first five timers are a five minute, ten minute, twenty minute, thirty minute, and forty-five minute timer. Each starts with ten seconds of silence, then three chimes, then the meditation period, then three chimes to end the meditation. The thirty minute and forty-five minute timers both have a single marker chime at 15 minutes. The forty-five minute timer also has one at 30 minutes.

The sixth timer is a little different. It is what I call an e-Meditation. I call it this because it uses four different time periods, each of which is a power of e. E is a number that is frequently found in nature and some consider it a divine number. It is approximately 2.72. If you are interested in the mathematics of e, see this Wikipedia article.

The first period in the e-Meditation is 1 minute (2.72 raised to the power of zero.) The second period is 2.72 minutes (2.72 raised to the power of one.) The third period is 7.4 minutes (2.72 raised to the power of two.) And the last period is 20.1 minutes (2.72 raised to the power of three.)

The e-Meditation timer starts with ten seconds of silence followed by one chime. This chime starts the first period. Another chime will signal the end of the first period and the beginning of the second. Another chime will signal the end of the second period and the beginning of the third. Another chime will signal the end of the third period and the beginning of the fourth (and last) period. Three chimes will signal the end of that period (and the end of the meditation.)

All of the timers are MP3 files, so you should be able to download them and use the way you would any MP3 file. The are large files, so the download may take a while.

In a future blog, I'll discuss how you might use these timers in a meditation practice. But for now, just choose a timer, find a quiet place, and try to let your mind quiet down. This is harder than it seems. I'll discuss this much more in coming blogs.

Here are the links for the timers. The best thing to do is to save them to your hard drive, which you do by right-clicking on the link and then choosing save link. Good luck!

5 minutes (about 5 MB)
10 minutes (about 10 MB)
20 minutes (about 20 MB)
30 minutes (about 30 MB)
45 minutes (about 45 MB)

e-Meditation (about 30 MB)


Pax Christi,
Roger