Meditation Excercise

Having trouble meditating on Scripture, or medittion in general? Well, Duh! Anything that is good for us is usually not easy, but can be be learned (and enjoyed) through Practice. Check out Meditation Is A Practice by Heath Davis Havlick at the Uncovery Discovery Blog:

My husband recently asked me to write something for him because, as he put it, “I’m not good at that.” The response that flew out of my mouth surprised me: “You don’t get better at it by not doing it!”

This is what I call a “divine duh” moment. It’s a thing that you may not have articulated, but when you hear it, you instantly know it’s true. So true, in fact, that it seems on the surface to be a “No duh!” statement – except that its implications are too profound to dismiss it as a truism.

As soon as the words came out, I thought of meditation (or, for our purposes, also called Centering Prayer). That’s because I know it’s a common complaint that people have regarding meditation: they just don’t feel like they’re any good at it. And because I was thinking of one particular friend who dislikes the practice because it feels like failure to her; it’s hard to measure progress, so it just feels like a waste of valuable time.

However, that’s just the personality talking. Did Yo-Yo Ma set his cello aspirations aside after hitting a few bad notes? Did Simone Biles give up gymnastics after her first few falls from a balance beam? Did Tiger Woods hang up his clubs after a few weeks of attempting the perfect swing?

No, or else we wouldn’t know their names. But this isn’t about fame; it’s about practice. These people really wanted something, and they were willing to be less than perfect to start. Or, in some cases, for a long time. They put in untold hours of practice.

The goal of meditation is not to be perfect at it. The goal is to create a quiet, still space that enables you to hear, feel, even see God. Sure, it’s frustrating to attempt this and get nothing but a head full of noise and distraction, particularly when your goal is deeper union with God. But that’s a worthy goal whose very attempt is success.

In other words, if you practice meditation and “fail” at it, you have succeeded. The attempt is success. Because stillness and quiet must be practiced; they are not natural behaviors for us. But they can be learned – not by avoiding them, but by practicing them.
So, the question to ask yourself is, “Am I willing to do something that I’m probably going to feel bad at in order to get better at it so that I can encounter God at a deeper level?” That’s a question only you can answer. I sure hope it’s “Yes.” God longs for you with a longing beyond words, and he is waiting in stillness for you.

Confused about how to start? Here’s what I do. I go to a place that’s quiet and has a door. I close that door and sit with a straight back. (This is so you can breathe easier.) I close my eyes and welcome the Holy Spirit. As thoughts come to me—and they will—I notice them and release them; I don’t start making the grocery list or rehearsing the conversation. Let those thoughts go and pay attention to the sound and feel of your breath. There’s nothing magical about breathing; it’s just that focusing on this helps you to stay focused on what’s happening right now rather than on grocery lists etc.

I also use an app from the Centering Prayer folks. It’s handy because you can set a timer—start with five minutes if you’re new to meditation—and you can choose from a wonderful array of chimes, from Gregorian chants to lutes to singing bowls! Anything to help this sometimes-hard practice, right? Do this every day. Yes, every day.

Please share your experiences, frustrations and breakthroughs regarding Centering Prayer. We all learn from each other.

Cud Chewing

Chewed any cud lately? Chewing the Cud of Scripture by Chris Hall at Renovare

John Chrysostom was the late fourth-century archbishop of Constantinople, present-day Istanbul, Turkey. He was thoroughly experienced in his practice of the discipline of imitation. Rather than installing Demosthenes or Homer in his soul, Chrysostom substituted Paul and Christ. During two years spent in solitude in a cave above Antioch, a “learning space” for immersion in Paul’s letters, Chrysostom memorized most, if not all, of the New Testament. As Margaret Mitchell, a noted Chrysostom scholar observes, “Chrysostom inscribed on his brain a lot of Paul, and, at that, a lot of Paul speaking in the first person, now vocalized through [Chrysostom’s] own mouth. Not only did constant rereading and memorization of these texts serve to lay the foundation for a life of Scriptural exposition, but it also oriented Chrysostom’s own consciousness in a Pauline direction.”

During the years in the cave, Chrysostom developed key habit patterns he would later encourage his own congregation to develop. He writes: “The inexperienced reader when taking up a letter will consider it to be papyrus and ink; the experienced reader will both hear a voice, and converse with one, the one who is absent … The things their writings said, they manifested to all in their actions … You have a most excellent portrait [of the apostle Paul]. Proportion yourself to it.” In Chrysostom’s thinking and practice, to proportion oneself to Paul—through the use of a highly developed memory soaked in the Scripture and through concrete imitation of key aspects of Paul’s life—is by definition to proportion one’s mind and life to Christ.

All of us probably have individual teachers and mentors whom we want to emulate. For many at Renovaré, Dallas Willard was just such a person. If they are still living, we want to spend time with them whenever possible; if they have died, we want to read their works and find out more about their lives. In the case of Christ himself and of his apostles and prophets, one can hardly go wrong by entering into the Holy Scriptures, as Chrysostom did, with careful, gracious imitation always in mind. To imitate Christ is to regard his words and deeds as precious treasures, to contemplate them, memorize them, meditate upon them, to chew on them as a cow chews its cud. To imitate Paul is to ask how he conducted himself from day to day, and what were the practices that nourished and sustained his own life in Christ?

Now, this call to attend carefully to the biblical witness regarding Christ, Paul, Peter, Mary, Martha, and others is not merely in order to imitate; we are also attending to an instance of imitating, since both our Savior and his apostle were (like all good Jews) steeped in the Scriptures. If we are to follow them in the knowledge of God, our thinking, too, must be profoundly shaped by the steady, paced memorization of the Word of God. This need not, and should not, signal slavishly rote memorization, but creative practical application as well. The aim of memorization is not to pass some cosmic Bible quiz but to have our intellectual and imaginative consciousness shaped by God himself. We need not have a biblical phrase to toss into every conversation, but we do want to speak and to live in the world in the way that Scripture itself illustrates.

This sort of thoughtful, committed, creative imitation of the exemplary lives we see in Scripture (and elsewhere) prepares us for deeper entrance into the knowledge of God that such lives embody. Thinking and behavior, behavior and thinking, are all one piece, one whole. Let’s close this week’s blog with some advice from Athanasius of Alexandria, bishop of Alexandria in the early fourth century. They are still worth our attention today:

“One cannot possibly understand the teaching of the saints unless one has a pure mind and is trying to imitate their life … Anyone who wants to look at sunlight naturally wipes his eye clear first, in order to make, at any rate, some approximation to the purity of that on which he looks …”

Enlarged

HT: @BiblicalT -Bill Mounce

Warm Up

HT: Tim Challies

22 Benefits of Meditating on Scripture

What do you get out of the practice of meditating on Scripture? Joel Beeke, in his essay on “The Puritan Practice of Meditation,” (quoted at the Gospel Coalition) lists some of the benefits as follows:

1. Meditation helps us focus on the Triune God, to love and to enjoy Him in all His persons (1 John 4:8)—intellectually, spiritually, aesthetically.
2. Meditation helps increase knowledge of sacred truth. It “takes the veil from the face of truth” (Prov. 4:2).
3. Meditation is the “nurse of wisdom,” for it promotes the fear of God, which is the beginning of wisdom (Prov. 1:8).
4. Meditation enlarges our faith by helping us to trust the God of promises in all our spiritual troubles and the God of providence in all our outward troubles.
5. Meditation augments one’s affections. Watson called meditation “the bellows of the affections.” He said, “Meditation hatcheth good affections, as the hen her young ones by sitting on them; we light affection at this fire of meditation” (Ps. 39:3).
6. Meditation fosters repentance and reformation of life (Ps. 119:59; Ez. 36:31).
7. Meditation is a great friend to memory.
8. Meditation helps us view worship as a discipline to be cultivated. It makes us prefer God’s house to our own.
9. Meditation transfuses Scripture through the texture of the soul.
10. Meditation is a great aid to prayer (Ps. 5:1). It tunes the instrument of prayer before prayer.
11. Meditation helps us to hear and read the Word with real benefit. It makes the Word “full of life and energy to our souls.” William Bates wrote, “Hearing the word is like ingestion, and when we meditate upon the word that is digestion; and this digestion of the word by meditation produceth warm affections, zealous resolutions, and holy actions.”
12. Meditation on the sacraments helps our “graces to be better and stronger.” It helps faith, hope, love, humility, and numerous spiritual comforts thrive in the soul.
13. Meditation stresses the heinousness of sin. It “musters up all weapons, and gathers all forces of arguments for to presse our sins, and lay them heavy upon the heart,” wrote Fenner. Thomas Hooker said, “Meditation sharpens the sting and strength of corruption, that it pierceth more prevailingly.” It is a “strong antidote against sin” and “a cure of covetousness.”
14. Meditation enables us to “discharge religious duties, because it conveys to the soul the lively sense and feeling of God’s goodness; so the soul is encouraged to duty.”
15. Meditation helps prevent vain and sinful thoughts (Jer. 4:14; Matt. 12:35). It helps wean us from this present evil age.
16. Meditation provides inner resources on which to draw (Ps. 77:10-12), including direction for daily life (Prov. 6:21-22).
17. Meditation helps us persevere in faith; it keeps our hearts “savoury and spiritual in the midst of all our outward and worldly employments,” wrote William Bridge.
18. Meditation is a mighty weapon to ward off Satan and temptation (Ps. 119:11,15; 1 John 2:14).
19. Meditation provides relief in afflictions (Is. 49:15-17; Heb. 12:5).
20. Meditation helps us benefit others with our spiritual fellowship and counsel (Ps. 66:16; 77:12;145:7).
21. Meditation promotes gratitude for all the blessings showered upon us by God through His Son.
22. Meditation glorifies God (Ps. 49:3).

The Mode of Our Transport

"The key in all of our Scripture praying is to let the Word become the mode of our transport. Scripture is not just the basis or background of our praying but a prayer itself. When we are reading the Scripture, the border between Scripture and prayer become so thin that they meld into each other and we are united with God. At such times our separation is bridged, and we are transported into the very presence of the holy Trinity. Praying the Scriptures can become a way to make all areas of prayer effective. It can be used to add substance to each of the other models of prayer, providing the context that makes all forms beautiful and effective."

Calvin Miller, The Path of Celtic Prayer: An Ancient Way to Everyday Joy