MEDITATION IN THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION: AN INTRODUCTION Session 2
Maybe the healing and guidance that we desperately need is not going to come from one more meeting or therapy session or sermon or self help book…but from simply listening to the voice still small voice of God. Rob Bell
Why apophatic prayer?
Apophatic prayer is prayer without words or images.
Gregory the Great spoke of “resting in God.”
Thomas Keating decribes this form of meditation as: “deep calling to deep.”
He also writes:
“Silence is God’s first language; everything else is a poor translation.”
Teresa of Avila, a great mytic of the Christian tradition described this kind of prayer : ”the prayer of Quiet.” and speaks of this form of prayer, which is knowing God, “but not through a concept. It is knowing Him through love.”
Apophatic prayer emphasizes prayer as a personal relationship with God and as a movement beyond conversation with Christ to communion with Him.
God is the friend of silence. See how nature – trees, flowers, grass - grows in silence;see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence.... Mother Teresa
Meditation is Practice In… Mindfulness, Awareness, Being present, Attentiveness and Living in the Present Moment
In a little book called Awareness, Jesuit writer Anthony De Mello writes that the heart of the spiritual life is to be awake, to be alert. And he says that our lives are saturated in the holy, in God’s presence, but we are asleep and do not notice. He uses the example of a sparrow.
See one for the first time and contemplate it and be amazed at the wonder of this tiny creature. But then see a second sparrow and we say: ” Oh well I have seen a sparrow before.” We have fallen asleep. For every sparrow is a wonder. Every creature is unique. Every moment is filled with grace and beauty. Anthony De Mello - Awareness
The great mystic Meister Eckhart wrote: “Notice God in all things, for God is in all things. Every single creature is full of God and is a book about God. Every creature is a word of God. If I spend enough time with the tiniest creature, even a caterpillar, I would never have to prepare a sermon. So full of God is every creature.”
Anthony De Mello writes: We start in life, we look at reality with wonder...then wonder dies and is replaced by boredom...then if we are lucky, we will return to wonder again...”
If we are awake, alert, we may notice life`s wonder; in the things, in the people around us we may see the eternal in the everyday.
“<em>Early this morning… I went out behind the house to weed. Was kneeling in the dirt by the stable with my pinafore a mess and perspiration rolling down my back, wiped my face on my sleeve, reached for the trowel and all at once thought, Why I believe that at just this moment I am absolutely happy…The Bedloe girl’s piano scales were floating out her window…and a bottle fly was buzzing in the grass, and I saw that I was kneeling on such a beautiful green little planet:
I don’t care what else might come about, I have this moment. It belongs to me.”From Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
by Anne Tyler
James Finley: Meditative prayer believes nothing… remembers nothing… wills nothing…feels nothing…experiences nothing… It gazes at belief and feeling and thought and memory. It allows one to see everything as if for the first time.
Meditative prayer allows us to be free of the tyranny of memories, thoughts, feelings – not to be subject to them. It gives us facility to be in the moment, to experience and not be captured.
Thomas Keating writes of this kind of prayer: “it is training in letting go…”
It is resting in the One who is beyond our words, feeling, ideas and thoughts…
“I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them,and discovered them again." Annie Dillard.
