FINDING YOUR SPIRITUAL CENTER
Making sense of meditation
The contemplative experience is at the
center of all religious tradition, expert says
By RICHARD VARA
Copyright 2006
The Rev. Laurence Freeman, a Benedictine
monk and founder of the London-based World Community for Christian Meditation,
will speak in
The author of six books and numerous articles
on Christian meditation, Freeman is a noted international lecturer. He has
participated in several interreligious conferences and counts the Dalai
Lama as a friend.
He was born in
Freeman, 55, recently spoke with Chronicle
religion editor Richard Vara. Excerpts of that conversation follow.
Q: When did you begin to meditate?
A: I have been practicing meditation since
1975. I was introduced to it by my teacher, an Irish Benedictine monk named
John Main. I was in the first year of university at
I began to meditate seriously two years after
university. I decided to spend six months in a (
Q: Doesn't meditation come from
Eastern religions and traditions like Buddhism?
A: You will find meditation in all the great
religious branches of the human family. Christianity, particularly Western
Christianity, has lost its sense of the contemplative tradition.
That is due to many reasons: the
intellectualism and imperialism of the West, the activism of the West, the
relationship of the church to Western culture, the Reformation. There are all
sorts of reasons one can give as to why Western Christianity lost its sense of
the centrality of contemplation.
The point is that every religious tradition
has a contemplative consciousness or contemplative experience at its center. If
a religious tradition loses the centrality of that awareness, it goes off
course. It becomes a religion without spirituality.
Q: What is the difference between
contemplation and meditation?
A: Meditation is the work that we do to enter
into that state of contemplation in which we are most fully human and fully alive.
Meditation is the practice of contemplation, sort of the daily discipline of
contemplation.
Q: Then w hat is
contemplation ?
A: We really mean the experience of our own
spiritual nature, finding our own heart and our own center. The meaning of that
is that we find a direct and personal encounter with God in our heart.
St. Catherine of
The early fathers of the church were immersed
in this experience of contemplation. The theology of the doctrine that formed
over the first five centuries or so of Christian history was a combination of
contemplation and a reading of Scripture.
Q: So contemplation has Christian
roots?
A: The Christian tradition of contemplation
goes back to the Gospel.
Jesus is a teacher of contemplation. If you
study his teaching on prayer in the Sermon on the Mount, for example, in
Matthew 6, he is not talking about external forms or rituals or particular
beliefs you have to
subscribe to.
He is talking about interior silence, freedom
from anxiety, and mindfulness and living in the present moment. These are the
elements of concentration. So Jesus is as much a teacher of concentration as he
is of nonviolence.
We are saying that Christians have a
theological, historical, Scriptural tradition of contemplation that gives a
harmony and a depth to all other forms of prayer and practices of the Christian
life.
Q: How do you contemplate?
A: There are three elements of contemplation
that are universal: silence, stillness and simplicity.
Silence is the movement from not only
external noise or speech but even from thought. In contemplation we move beyond
conceptual thinking into the heart.
In the Eastern Christian tradition — the
Orthodox tradition — they speak about bringing the mind into the heart. You
want to choose a quiet room, a quiet time, take the phone off the hook and make
sure your cell phone doesn't ring in the middle of meditation. There is an
inner silence and an outer silence.
The other element is stillness. Stillness
also has a physical, external aspect, which is not moving around and also
having the discipline of sitting still physically. "Be still and know that
I am God (Psalm 46:10)."
The stillness of mind that we come to is
moving from the constant activity and desire of mind to move on to the next
thing, the desire to acquire something, achieve something, to prepare for
something.
If the mind is not still, we are not in the
present moment. In meditation, stillness means not just physical stillness but
coming into the present moment, which, for the Christian, is the moment of
Christ, entering into the mind of Christ here and now. It is understanding the
revelation of God that was made to Moses in the name God revealed to Moses: I
Am.
The third element is simplicity, which is
really about dealing with the complexity and need for self-consciousness and
taking the focus of self-consciousness off yourself and putting it into God. In
other words, stop thinking about yourself — or as Jesus says, leave self
behind.