Christian meditation: Encyclopedia II - Christian meditation - History

Christian meditation - History

Formal Christian meditation began with the early Christian monastic practice of reading the Bible slowly. Monks would carefully consider the deeper meaning of each verse as they read it. This slow and thoughtful reading of Scripture, and the ensuing pondering of its meaning, was their meditation. This spiritual practice is called "divine reading", or lectio divina.

Sometimes the monks found themselves spontaneously praying as a result of their meditation on Scripture, and their prayer would in turn lead on to a simple, loving focus on God. This wordless love for God they called contemplation.

The progression from Bible reading, to meditation, to prayer, to loving regard for God, was first formally described by Guigo II, a Carthusian monk and prior of Grande Chartreuse in the 12th century. Guigo named the four steps of this "ladder" of prayer with the Latin terms lectio, meditatio, oratio, and contemplatio.

The contemplatio aspect of prayers is more fully described in The Cloud of Unknowing, an anonymous treatise written in England in the 14th century. It is a concise and practical primer on contemplative prayer. The author's premise is that God can be known, not with the head, but only with the heart.

St Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) practiced contemplative prayer for periods of one hour at a time, twice a day. In her Life she recounts that she found this very difficult for the first several years. She had no one to teach her, and taught herself from the instructions given in a book, The third spiritual alphabet by Francisco de Osuna. Her starting point was the practice of "recollection". Recollection means an effort of the will to keep the senses and the intellect in check and not allow them to stray. One restricts the attention to a single subject, principally the love of God. "It is called recollection because the soul collects together all the faculties and enters within itself to be with God", she says in The way of perfection. Because St Teresa found it difficult to concentrate, she would use devices such as short readings from an inspiring book, a scene of natural beauty or a religious statue or picture to remind her of her intended focus. In due course, the mind becomes effortlessly still. The initial practice St Teresa viewed as the voluntary effort of the individual, while the subsequent stillness and joy she saw as gifts from God.

Jeanne-Marie Bouvier de la Motte-Guyon (1648-1717) was a French mystic and writer. As a 19-year-old, she was greatly influenced by an encounter with a Franciscan priest who had just emerged from a five-year retreat. She asked him why she was having such difficulties with prayer, and he replied: "It is, Madame, because you seek without what you have within. Accustom yourself to seek God in your heart, and there you will find Him". In her mid-thirties, Madame Guyon wrote her Moyen court et très facile de faire oraison, which in English is titled A short and very easy method of prayer. It is an exceptionally clear, vivid and concise primer on how to pray. (Note that the book Experiencing the depths of Jesus Christ, which poses as a translation, is in fact an interpretive revision.)

Two contemporary forms of Christian meditation emerged during the twentieth century.

Dom John Main (1926-1982) learned mantra meditation from Swami Satyananda in Malaya. Swami Satyananda told him he must do "Christian meditation" and so John Main used the mantra Maranatha, which is Aramaic for "Come, Lord", as in I Corinthians 16:22 and Revelation 22:20. Dom John Main later found parallels with John Cassian's (4th century) mention of the repetition of a short verse as a focus for prayer. Fr Laurence Freeman continues Dom John Main's work.

Fr Thomas Keating and Fr Basil Pennington teach a contemplative form of prayer named "Centering Prayer". Here a sacred word is used only to express the intention to be in God's presence. The other part of the practice is a progressive letting go of the individual's psychological baggage. Centering Prayer draws on The Cloud of Unknowing and was developed from that work by Fr William Meninger.

The forms of prayer described above are part of the apophatic tradition and are quite distinct from, for example, the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "History", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki