Meditation

I recently started reading Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster.  I've been meaning to read it for years, and I'm finally getting around to it now.  The book opens with these words: “Superficiality is the curse of our age.  The doctrine of instant satisfaction is a primary spiritual problem.  The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep people.”  Foster's diagnosis is that much of our culture (including our religious culture) is shallow and lacking substance.  His solution is that we need the spiritual disciplines if we are to be people of substance and depth.

The first discipline he writes about is meditation.  If you're like me, when you hear the word “meditation” you picture a Buddhist monk sitting in the lotus position speaking the mystical syllable “om.”  I've never done meditation like that, but I have practiced meditation in some form or other for years and I've wondered about different types of meditation and the historical and spiritual roots of each type.  I'm very cautions when it comes to spiritual disciplines that have roots in other religious traditions.  Yoga, for instance, originated as a spiritual discipline within Hinduism.  I know of some people who do what they call “Christ-centered” yoga and I know of lots of people who practice yoga merely as another form of exercise.  But I still wonder about its place in the life of a Christian.  (For an interesting perspective on this topic read this.  I offer it without endorsement or criticism but simply as a perspective worth being familiar with).  Similarly, I've wondered about different forms of meditation and what role meditation should play in the life of a Christian.

Foster affirms that there is a long-standing and thoroughly orthodox tradition of Christian meditation that is fundamentally distinct from Eastern forms of meditation.  Eastern meditation aims to empty the mind, shed the illusion of one's personal identity, escape the cycle of reincarnation, and thereby come to nirvana.  The goal is total detachment.  By contrast, the aim of Christian meditation is to commune with a personal God, to listen for God.  This does require a kind of temporary detachment, but that is not the ultimate goal.  As Foster puts it: “The detachment from the confusion all around us is in order to have a richer attachment to God.”  Christian meditation is the discipline of listening for and responding to God's voice.

Foster outlines four different types of meditation, but the central form for Christianity is meditation on Scripture.  Foster differentiates this from exegesis or study of Scripture.  The point of scriptural meditation is not to dissect the text, but to internalize it.  I think of all the forms of meditation Foster talks about, this one may be the hardest for me.  My natural posture towards Scripture is academic.  I love to analyze, question, investigate, and dissect texts.  In high school my youth pastor made me aware of the various tools available for studying scripture at a deep level.  I particularly remember the studies he led in conjunction with our church’s Bible quiz team.  We studied I & II Corinthians, John, Hebrews and I & II Peter all at a depth that I had never done before and have not done since.  I felt like I was really digging into Scripture for the first time in my life.  We wrote outlines of whole books of the Bible based on what we thought the author was trying to communicate.  We summarized and analyzed arguments presented in pastoral letters.  We read commentaries and compared various perspectives and interpretations of passages.  All that biblical study was very meaningful and important for me, but at times I would have to say that despite studying Scripture I have neglected to meditate on Scripture.

Think of it like this: if Scripture is food, scriptural study is like a nutritional analysis of the food.  We can run tests on the food and analyze it to determine its makeup and nutritional properties and such.  This kind of information can be very useful for deciding what we should eat, or avoid eating, and what exactly it is that we are eating.  But we don't get nourishment from the food unless we actually eat it.  Scriptural meditation is eating the food.  It's a discipline aimed at internalizing the truth spoken to us through Scripture.  And while I'm convinced that Scripture needs to be studied, analyzed, and given careful exegesis, and that such study is part of a transformation of our minds that needs to take place, I also think that meditation on Scripture is equally important.  I think of the words quoted by Jesus: “Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.”  And then I picture devout Jews at the Wailing Wall chanting Scripture, reading it, reciting it, thinking deeply about it, consuming it.  That is what meditation on Scripture looks like.

Another form of meditation that Foster describes is “re-collection” or “centering down.”  Re-collection is the type of meditation that comes most naturally to me, probably in part because I'm introverted.  Foster writes that re-collection is “a time to become still, to enter into the recreating silence, to allow the fragmentation of our minds to become centered.”  I try to do this kind of re-collecting every day, usually during my lunch break.  It helps me refocus my attention and keep my life in perspective.

The other two forms of meditation are meditation on creation and meditation on current events.  I won’t take the time to outline those here but you can make some good guesses about what those entail.  The common theme in all of the forms of meditation is that they focus on communion with God and listening for God’s voice.  Meditation is a discipline aimed at fostering closeness with God.  My life is about to get very busy but I want to keep it from becoming frothy.  I want to be a person of depth who has something to offer a shallow world.  Meditation is one way that I hope to do that.


-David