Excerpts

::mood:: independent
::still reading:: Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth by Richard J. Foster

(I do apologize for the excerpt. Mostly, i like to post creative articles. But sometimes, i just want to pass it on. And i can't say it any better than the original author! So...'nuff said. Enjoy, if you wish, or you may skip this post! I'll be back with some me-original thoughts later.)

The Discipline of Meditation

Eastern meditation is an attempt to empty the mind; Christian meditation is an attempt to fill the mind. The two ideas are quite different.

In meditation we are growing into what Thomas a Kempis calls "a familiar friendship with Jesus." We are sinking down into the light and life of Christ and becoming comfortable in that posture. The perpetual presence of the Lord moves from a theological dogma into a radiant reality. "He walks with me and he talks with me: ceases to be pious jargon and instead becomes a straightforward description of daily life.

Mediation sends us into our ordinary world with greater perspective and balance.

If you believe that we live in a universe created by the infinite-personal God who delights in our communion with him, you will see meditation as communication between the Lover and the one beloved.

Let me suggest we take an experiential attitude toward spiritual realities. Like any other scientific endeavor, we form a hypothesis and experiment with it to see if it is true of not. If our first experiment fails, we do not despair or label the whole business fraudulent. We reexamine our procedure, perhaps adjust our hypothesis, and try again. We should at least have the honesty to persevere in this work to the same degree we would in any field of science. The fact that so many are unwilling to do so betrays not their intelligence but their prejudice.

Human beings seem to have a perpetual tendency to have somebody else talk to God for them. That is why meditation is so threatening to us. It boldly calls us to enter into the living presence of God for ourselves.

As Albert the Great says, “The contemplation of the saints is fired by the love of the one contemplated: that is, God”