For much of my life, prayer was all about talking ... framing sentences either mentally, verbally, or in writing. These days, I pray more, but use fewer words. Turns out, this is what a lot of Christian people do, and have been for centuries. Things like contemplation, meditation, centering prayer, prayer of the heart, resting in God, and the like
have been a key part of the spiritual lives of followers of Christ for centuries, especially in the Catholic mystical and Eastern Orthodox traditions.
But I'm especially interested in what happens to our hearts, to our character, when we spend time in God-focused meditation. By "God-focused meditation" I mean holding a name of God, a Bible verse, or spiritual concept as the thing you keep coming back to in your consciousness as you meditate, as opposed to just coming back to the breath, as many forms of meditation
suggest.
Listen to these words from Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, and Richard Rohr, Fransiscan priest and director of the Center for Action and Contemplation. First Rowan Williams:
“Contemplation is very far from being just one kind of thing that Christians do: it is the key to prayer, liturgy, art and ethics, the key to the essence of a renewed humanity that is capable of seeing the world and other subjects in the world with freedom—freedom from self-oriented, acquisitive habits and the distorted understanding that come
from them.
"To put it boldly, contemplation is the only ultimate answer to the unreal and insane world that our financial systems and our advertising culture and our chaotic and unexamined emotions encourage us to
inhabit. To learn contemplative prayer is to learn what we need so as to live truthfully and honestly and lovingly. It is a deeply revolutionary matter. ...
"To be converted to the faith does not mean simply acquiring a new set of beliefs, but becoming a new person, a person in communion with God and others through Jesus Christ. Contemplation is an intrinsic element in this transforming process. To learn to look to God without regard to my own instant satisfaction,
to learn to scrutinize and to relativise the cravings and fantasies that arise in me—this is to allow God to be God, and thus to allow the prayer of Christ, God’s own relation to God, to come alive in me.
"Invoking the Holy Spirit is a matter of asking the third person of the Trinity to enter my spirit and bring the clarity I need to see where I am in slavery to cravings and fantasies and to give me patience and stillness as God’s light and love penetrate my inner life. ...
"And as this process unfolds, I become more free—to borrow a phrase of St. Augustine—to ‘love human beings in a human way,’ to love them not for what they may promise me, to love them not as if they were there to provide me with lasting safety and comfort, but as fragile fellow-creatures held in the love of God. I discover … how to see other persons and things for what they are in relation to God, not to me. And it is
here that true justice as well as true love has its roots." - Rowan Williams
Richard Rohr goes even further in talking about prayer in general as something primarily done in quiet and silence:
"Prayer is largely just being silent: holding the tension instead of even talking it through, offering the moment instead of fixing it by words and ideas, loving reality as it is instead of understanding it fully. Prayer is commonly a willingness to say ‘I don’t know.’ We must not push the river, we must just trust that we are already in
the river, and God is the certain flow and current. That may be impractical, but the way of faith is not the way of efficiency. So much of life is just a matter of listening and waiting, and enjoying the expansiveness that comes from such willingness to hold.” - Richard Rohr
Bottom line: meditation and similar forms of contemplative prayer allows us to inhabit the ups and downs of our lived experience, and allow us to understand and accept them in new and deeper ways. Contrast this to what can often happen when prayer is oriented to verbal requests of God ... which can lead to more unhappiness and frustration when God doesn't "answer the prayer" in ways that seem
satisfactory.
