Editor’s note: This is part 33 of a series, “The Kingdom of Grace.” Part 32 can be found here.
The life of prayer is primarily an interior response to the God who first loved us, yet the life of prayer grows and shows itself through many different acts of prayer. One of the most important acts of prayer is meditation.
When many people hear the word meditation today, they likely think of a specific form of mental prayer involving the use of imagination, the imaginative composition of a scene from the life of Christ, a dialogue or colloquy with the characters in the scene, and the formation of various resolutions for action. Instruction in such meditation typically involves step-by-step enumeration of what to do. First, quiet yourself and place yourself in the presence of God. Second, recall the topic, e.g. the Crucifixion of the Lord. Third, compose the scene using your imagination. Consider all the people in detail. Imagine the sights, sounds, and smells of the place. Fourth, enter into dialogue with the characters in the scene. And so on. Illustrious Saints such as Ignatius of Loyola, Francis de Sales, and others have taught generations of Catholics to no small profit how to meditate and pray in such a manner. The practice is salutary, but is not the whole meaning or the most ancient meaning of the term meditation. In fact, it is a very specific and fairly modern form of meditation or mental prayer.
The broader and more ancient meaning of meditation is also worth understanding. In the previous article, we discussed Lectio Divina. Most people are taught the practice of lectio divina in terms of four steps: reading, meditation, prayer, and contemplation. It is a simple, practical, and time-honored way to learn the practice. The first step – reading – involves the selection of a text, a slow reading of it, and a certain readiness to listen should something jump off the page or strike you personally. The second step – meditation – is not necessarily an imaginative composition of a scene, a perusal of the sights, sounds, and smells of the place, or a dialogue with the people involved. Meditation is, rather, a broad term for thinking things through in any way at all.
Meditation might consist of an imaginative composition of the scene depicted in Scripture, but it might consist of other things. One might draw connections with other passages of Scripture, consider prefigurations and fulfillments, make applications to present life circumstances, or simply wonder at what is going on for a moment. Meditation might also mean raising questions, seeking answers, consulting concordances, considering the overall context of the passage, the particular book in the bible, or remembering illuminating remarks from sacred Tradition or teachings of the Church. It includes many other things too. In short, meditation is a word for a rather open form of inquiry. Meditation is not one specific method, but a free-style mulling over of the meaning of Scripture.
When the Fathers of the Church and ancient monks spoke of meditation, they meant a certain ordinary activity that anyone could do. Meditation simply meant thinking upon the meaning of various passages of Scripture. It meant going over the words in one’s mind, letting God speak through them, trying to understand what he says, and applying it to one’s life. In order to carry out such an activity, one need not necessarily be sitting down with a bible in one’s lap or on the desk. In fact, bibles were rare in ancient times and many monks were illiterate.
The common practice was to memorize large portions of Scripture either upon reading it or hearing it. Meditation normally meant recalling certain passages of Scripture that had been committed to memory and thinking through the meaning of various passages. In this way, meditation was something the monks aimed to do throughout the day – even during periods of manual labor. One of their favorite analogies for meditation was the cow. Just as a cow eats food only to draw forth the cud later to chew on it, so the monk takes the word into memory only to draw it forth for meditation later on. Chewing the cud is not a brief activity. Cows can chew the cud up to eight hours a day! Similarly, the monk aims to meditate on Scripture all day long.
Psalms 39:3 says: “in my meditation a fire shall flame out” (Douay-Rheims). Christians can experience the truth of the passage. The person who meditates on Scripture with faith should expect his or her heart to become a burning furnace of charity. The Word on fire, burning within the depths, purifies the heart, illuminates the mind, points out the path to virtue, and more. The ancient monks learned by experience that ongoing meditation on the words of Scripture was one of the chief pathways of metanoia. For this reason, they devoted themselves to it as a discipline. Meditation, one might say, was their life.
Although you and I might not be able to live like the monks of old, and other sorts of reading have an essential place in our lives depending on our state in life and profession, the practice of monks should inspire us nonetheless. Their example illustrates what our life of prayer might be too. You and I can also give ourselves to memorizing Scripture, recalling it frequently, and meditating on it throughout the day – even if only in snippets. As we meditate, we should draw connections with passages of Scripture, the sayings of the Fathers of the Church, the lessons of catechesis and sound theology, the lives of the Saints, the mysteries of the rosary, the liturgy, and more. As we do so, we should also listen for what God is telling us about our daily lives. All such acts belong to the practice of meditation in the broad and ancient sense of the term, and such meditation should generally be a normal and ordinary part of the spiritual life. It is one of the most basic pathways of metanoia. Meditation on divine truth disposes the heart to grow in grace.
Is God done raising up men and women of great prayer in his Church? Is a life devoted to meditation on the Word of God a thing of the past? On the contrary, meditation remains a perennial path to holiness, divinization, and growth in contemplative prayer. Contemplative prayer is the topic of the next article in our series.
_______________________________________________________
Image: Depositphotos
