Staying On the Line

“I believe that prayer without meditation is like hanging up on God before God can speak.”

Julia Cameron, The Listening Path

“But meditation is dangerous. If you empty your mind, you’re making room for Satan to take over without you even knowing it.”

That’s a statement I’ve heard in various forms from my fellow Christians, and I find it sad. To me it means that the speaker has been given some bad intel on what meditation is – and isn’t. They’ve been cut off from an opportunity to hear God speak deep in their souls. Beyond the thoughts. Beneath the fears. Into a oneness we can’t orchestrate. 

This week in our beloved community, I’m going to try (yes, Yoda, try!) to dispel the misconceptions around meditation and offer some ways to allow it to be a companion tool on any spiritual path. Your path. Even if your mind is made up against it, no harm will come to you if you just hear me out. I promise. 

What meditation isn’t:

• An emptying of the mind. We don’t have the capacity to stop all thoughts. Human brains don’t work that way! As in, when the brain waves stop, we’re declared dead. 
• An opening for evil to enter. If in meditation we’re asking God to make Godself known to us and we make space for that … um … why would God step aside and let a non-God force to come in and take over? Who is more powerful here?
• A practice for the more woo-woo oriented. First of all, what is NOT woo-woo about God? About talking to a physically invisible being? About trusting in its power? This isn’t calculus we’re talking about here. This is Spirit. Second of all, centering prayer, a beautiful form of meditation, goes back to ancient Christian times. The earliest devotees of the faith practiced it. You know, those people who believed a man had risen from the dead and ascended into heaven to sit at the right hand of God? Those people. 

What meditation can be for the contemporary lay person:

•  A set-aside time to focus on one thing. We don’t empty the mind; we direct it. We ask it to concentrate on a word or an image or a question. When the mind wanders from that, we bring it back. How often do we allow ourselves that kind of freedom from “stuff”?
• A situation in which we, well, shut up and let God show Godself in a knowing that doesn’t come from us trying to figure something out.  Meditation doesn’t eliminate the need for prayer and the study of Scripture and the mental processing of our questions. It simply gets us out of the way so we can discern what is divine and what is our old patterns talking.
• Pure awareness of the good. As we practice meditation, we develop a deeper and deeper capacity to just be. We stop fighting that evil we’re so afraid is going to encroach on us and simply savor what is clear and right. It’s like this:

“Let your own ‘being you’ sink away and melt into God’s ‘being God.’
In this way your ‘you’ and God’s ‘his,’ will become a completely one ‘my.’”

Meister Eckhart

We can’t do that when we’re constantly jacking our jaws and chewing on our failings. 

Yeah, but how?

That’s what we’re going to talk about this week in our Facebook community. There are as many different ways to meditate as there are people showing up to explore it. You can’t “do it wrong.” Seriously, can you imagine God saying, “Look, I know you’ve come to me to hear what I have to say to you, but sitting that way, holding your hands like that … not gonna happen. Come back when you get it.”

See what I mean?

This Week’s Question:   

If you have any hesitation about pursuing the practice of meditation, can you set your fears and preconceived notions aside and see what might be waiting for you?