Twenty five or thirty years ago (I am getting old) when I heard the word “meditation,” I understood it to mean something that only Christian or Buddhist monks and nuns did. I didn’t know of anyone who meditated, and if there was someone around who meditated, they probably would not admit it publicly. The practice of mediation was far from mainstream in our culture. The value and practice of meditation has thankfully come a long way from the hidden fringes of our society and much more into the mainstream.
In my first full time semester at Queens College as a young seminarian in 1993, Sister Anitra, a nun of the Anglican Sisters of St.John the Divine in Toronto, led the very first retreat that I was ever on. During that time, she introduced us to a little book titled “Seeking God” by Ester DeWaal, and with that, an introduction to Benedictine spirituality and the Christian mediation practice of Lectio Divine (Holy Reading). Lectio Divina is an ancient form of Christian meditation, but not the only form of Christian meditation. With the growing interest in Eastern Religion Spirituality (Buddhism and Hinduism) in the second half of the last century, Father Thomas Keating, a Cistercian monk in the USA, in 1975 emerged as one of the principle developers of what is known today as Centering Prayer - another form of meditation found within the Christian tradition (in the Christian Spiritual classic “The Cloud of Unknowing”).
Since that time a number of Christian schools for meditation have emerged including the Shalem Institute for Spiritual formation and the Center for Action and Contemplation. Again, over the last fifty years, the Buddhist practice of Mindfulness has become mainstream, being used in Health and Education institutions to promote mental health and wellness.
The practice of meditation crosses all religious and cultural boundaries, and it has everything to do not only with the universal evolution of the human consciousness as a whole, but it has everything to do with the evolution and deepening of every single person’s consciousness.
In the Christian tradition, to follow the Way of Jesus is to die to self - die to self consciousness in order to open up to and live out of the deeper Mind of Christ, the Love that is Christ. Meditation is the universal spiritual tool used to empty our selves of the prison of the unrelenting and repetitive thinking mind. Much of the rampant anxiety of our day comes from people being stuck in the cages of their thinking minds. In the Christian tradition, Jesus tells us that there is more to being human than the thinking mind. We have a soul. We have a spiritual heart, a deep treasure in the soul waiting to be discovered. Meditation is the path that will lead you from the prison of self consciousness to the open, spacious freedom of Love Consciousness. Too much of public and cultural life is lived at the self conscious level only, full of fear and division. As we learn to walk the meditative path, we will discover a deeper Unitive Consciousness, and we will have eyes to see the Oneness of all of life in every person and in all of creation. We will learn to be IN Love (In Christ) with all of life. What a world it would be.
