IB World Religions 3.5.3. Meditation, Contemplation and the Writers on Spirituality Notes

3.5.3. Meditation, Contemplation and the Writers on Spirituality

Meditation and contemplation

1. Christians use prayer as the general word and divide it into forms. Vocal prayer uses set words, meditation works over a text or a mystery with the mind, and contemplation rests in God's presence without words.
2. Christian meditation does not mean emptying the mind. The Catechism of the Catholic Church describes it as a search in which thought, imagination, emotion and desire are all engaged so that conviction deepens.
3. Contemplation is described as receptive rather than active. Writers in the tradition call it a gaze of faith fixed on Christ, given by God rather than achieved by technique.
4. Two vocabularies run through the whole tradition. Kataphatic prayer uses images, words and scenes, while apophatic prayer strips them away on the ground that God exceeds every image of God.
5. Protestant churches often use plainer words for the same practices. The quiet time, a daily period of Bible reading and reflective prayer, does much of the work that monastic reading does elsewhere.

Lectio divina

1. Lectio divina, holy reading, is the oldest structured method in Christian use. It treats a short passage of scripture as something to be listened to rather than studied.
2. The Rule of St Benedict, written in the sixth century, sets aside several hours a day for it, and the practice spread across Europe with the Benedictine monasteries.
3. Guigo II, a Carthusian prior of the twelfth century, set out four steps in The Ladder of Monks: lectio (reading), meditatio (reflection), oratio (prayer) and contemplatio (resting).
4. The steps are not a method for extracting meaning from a text. Practitioners read slowly, wait for a phrase to stand out, and stay with that phrase instead of finishing the passage.
5. Ruminatio, chewing over, is the traditional image, borrowed from the way cattle return to their food. Monastic writers used it for repeating a verse until it is memorized and absorbed.
6. Pope Benedict XVI commended it to the whole Roman Catholic Church in 2010 in Verbum Domini, and Anglican and Methodist churches use it in small groups and quiet days.

The Jesus Prayer and hesychasm

1. Eastern Orthodox spirituality centres on the Jesus Prayer: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner". It is repeated many times, often in time with the breath.
2. The tradition built around it is called hesychasm, from hesychia, stillness. Its stated aim is to bring the mind down into the heart so that prayer becomes continuous rather than occasional.
3. The practice is grounded in Paul's instruction to pray without ceasing, and in the tax collector of Luke 18, whose plea for mercy supplies the words.
4. The Philokalia, a collection of Greek patristic texts assembled in 1782 by Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and Makarios of Corinth, is the standard sourcebook for it.
5. Gregory Palamas, a fourteenth century archbishop of Thessalonica, defended monks who reported seeing an uncreated light. He argued that God's energies can be experienced although God's essence cannot.
6. Orthodox Christians often count the repetitions on a knotted wool cord, the komboskini, and the monasteries of Mount Athos remain the practice's best known teachers.
7. The Way of a Pilgrim, a nineteenth century Russian narrative, carried the prayer far beyond monastic circles and made it familiar to Western Christians in the twentieth century.

Ignatian prayer and the Exercises

1. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, wrote the Spiritual Exercises in the 1520s and 1530s. He wrote them as a handbook for a director guiding someone else, not as a book to be read straight through.
2. Their central method is composition of place, an imaginative entry into a Gospel scene in which the person prays with sight, sound and smell as though standing there.
3. The Exercises run in four weeks, moving through sin and mercy, the life of Christ, the passion and the resurrection. Made in full they take thirty days in silence.
4. Because thirty days is impossible for most people, Ignatius supplied the nineteenth annotation, a version spread over several months while the retreatant carries on working.
5. The Examen, a short daily review looking for where God was present and where the person turned away, is now the most widely used Ignatian practice.
6. Discernment of spirits is the skill the Exercises are built to teach. Ignatius told retreatants to notice consolation and desolation in themselves and to weigh decisions against that pattern.
7. Ignatian retreat houses are used well beyond the Roman Catholic Church, and Anglican, Methodist and Reformed Christians now train as spiritual directors in the tradition.

Writers on spirituality

1. The Cloud of Unknowing, written anonymously in fourteenth century England, is the classic apophatic text in English. It tells the reader to put everything known about God under a cloud of forgetting and to reach out with love alone.
2. Thomas à Kempis wrote The Imitation of Christ around 1420, and after the Bible it became the most widely printed Christian book. It presses inward simplicity against theological cleverness.
3. John of the Cross, a sixteenth century Spanish Carmelite, wrote The Dark Night of the Soul. He reads the loss of all felt consolation as purification rather than as failure or abandonment.
4. Brother Lawrence, a seventeenth century Carmelite lay brother who worked in a monastery kitchen, taught what his editors called the practice of the presence of God, prayer sustained through ordinary work.
5. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Lutheran pastor executed in 1945, wrote Life Together, which places private meditation inside the daily discipline of a shared Christian household.
6. Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk in Kentucky, made contemplation a public subject with The Seven Storey Mountain and later opened conversations with Buddhist monastics.
7. Henri Nouwen and Richard Foster brought the material to a wide modern readership, and Foster's Celebration of Discipline introduced many Protestants to practices they had assumed were Catholic.

Contemplative practice today

1. Centering prayer, taught from the 1970s by the American Trappists Thomas Keating and Basil Pennington, uses one sacred word as a way of consenting to God's presence, drawing openly on The Cloud of Unknowing.
2. John Main, a Benedictine, revived the repeated word from John Cassian, and the World Community for Christian Meditation now teaches his method in more than a hundred countries.
3. The Taizé community in France draws tens of thousands of young people each year to short repeated chants and long silences, in a form built to work across denominations.
4. Quakers meet for worship in shared silence with no set liturgy at all, and members speak only when they believe they are moved to do so.
5. Evangelical and Pentecostal Christians have received these practices unevenly. Some leaders welcome them as a recovery of Christian tradition, while others warn that borrowed silence can displace scripture.
6. The Vatican addressed the same worry in 1989 in a letter on some aspects of Christian meditation. It accepted the use of eastern bodily methods while insisting that Christian prayer stays a personal dialogue with God.