About meditation

  • Read­ing through “The Diary of a Russ­ian Priest” this morn­ing, I came upon this advice he gave to a young person:

    There are two ways of read­ing the Gospels:

    1. To read very lit­tle at a time — a verse or two — then to read them over again, reflect­ing on them all day long, con­sid­er­ing them as words of Christ addressed to you personally.

    2. When you know the Gospels well, to read large por­tions of them (one Evan­ge­list at a time, or all four together), in order to grasp the sequence of events and the gen­eral spirit. If you have a weak mem­ory, this is a great help: indeed, it is even essential.


    And then as some­times hap­pens, a sec­ond read­ing seemed to coin­cide with the first as if I had planned it that way. I was still con­sid­er­ing the idea of read­ing one Bib­li­cal verse over and over when I picked up Met­ro­pol­i­tan Anthony Bloom’s “Liv­ing Prayer” and noted that the next sec­tion was about med­i­ta­tion and contemplation:

    The pur­pose of med­i­ta­tion is not to achieve an aca­d­e­mic exer­cise in think­ing; it is not meant to be a purely intel­lec­tual per­for­mance, not a beau­ti­ful piece of think­ing with­out fur­ther con­se­quences; it is meant to be a piece of straight think­ing under God’s guid­ance and God­wards, and should lead us to draw con­clu­sions about how to live. ..

    What­ever we take, a verse, a com­mand­ment, an event in the life of Christ, we must first of all assess its real obec­tive con­tent. This is extremely impor­tant because the pur­pose of med­i­ta­tion is not to build up a fan­tas­tic struc­ture but to under­stand truth….

    There are things which we can­not be under­stand except within the teach­ing of the Church; scrip­ture must be under­stood with the mind of the Church, the mind of Christ, because the Church has not changed. In its inner expe­ri­ence it con­tin­ues to live the same life as it lived in the first cen­tury, and words spo­ken by Paul, Peter, Basil or oth­ers within the Church have kept their mean­ing. So, after a pre­lim­i­nary under­stand­ing in our own con­tem­po­rary lan­guage, we must turn to what the Church means by the words. Only then can we ascer­tain the mean­ing of the given text and have a right to start think­ing and to draw conclusions. …

    And finally, he ends the pas­sage with say­ing the kind of med­i­ta­tion that is pos­si­ble for some­one who will do the work required to be what the Fathers call “an atten­tive person”:

    The spir­i­tual writ­ers of the past and of the present day will all tell us: take a text, pon­der on it hour after hour, day after day, until you have exhausted all your pos­si­bil­i­ties, intel­lec­tual and emo­tional, and thanks to atten­tive read­ing and re-reading of this text, you have come to a new atti­tude. Quite often med­i­ta­tion con­sists in noth­ing but exam­in­ing the text, turn­ing over these words of God addressed to us, so as to become com­pletely famil­iar with them, so imbued with them that grad­u­ally we and these words become com­pletely one. In this process, even if we think that we have not found any par­tic­u­lar intel­lec­tual rich­ness, we have changed.

    I just thought those were some inter­est­ing thoughts and good advice. I pass them along for what they’re worth.


    Related posts:

    1. Pub­li­can or Pharisee?
    2. “The Russ­ian Priest”: On our rela­tion­ship to the state
    3. Bright Week do’s & don’ts
    4. Poi­son by trifles
    5. Read­ing the lives of the saints

    February 23rd, 2007 | Grace | No Comments |

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