Meditation - Our invitation to commune with God

In the past week, I came across two different people who told me that they are either very cautious or confused about meditation. They also voiced concern about whether meditation is compatible within the Catholic tradition. Actually, I have heard many such comments from God-fearing folk as well as God-hating folk alike, and often, they come with a certain mental backdrop that somehow influences or determines why they think this way about meditation.

One of the more common comments about meditation is that nothing happens during the time of the prayer. Well, that’s the point. It’s not meant to be anything that excites and titillates our senses. It’s precisely because our senses seem to be running on overdrive in just about every area of our lives that we need some training or discipline to quell this buzz of hyper-activity to be able to have our heartbeats beating in tandem with the heartbeat of God. And meditation came way before the advent of the likes of Face book and Twitter, which incessantly keeps our minds occupied.

Kenosis, which is the Greek word for “the emptying of the self”, has always been at the heart of Christian discipleship. St Paul used this word to describe Christ’s taking on of humanity in his letter to the Philippians. In Christian spirituality, we are all urged to also empty ourselves of all that is not of God, and all that doesn’t auger well with the Christian life. Included in this list would be attitudes like selfishness, pride, the false self and the like. Sin in its various forms would find its heart in any one of these.

That is what meditation helps us to do – to become truly empty vessels so that God can ring out loudly in our lives. Mary has always been for us, the model empty vessel, who allowed God to resonate in and through her the greatest clarion call to all humanity of his love for humankind. And because she was so empty of herself, her ego, her agenda, she was filled so completely by God that she was full of grace.

One of the common fears or misconceptions about meditation is that when you empty yourself, the devil can somehow ‘fill’ that space. My response to this is that this means that there should be so many empty minds around the world for there to be so many people who seem to be filling their lives with ungodly pursuits. But the contrary is true, because evil has lurked in the lives of many people who were hardly empty of themselves. On the contrary – it is when we are so filled with our egos, with our own ideologies, and agenda that we can put so much focus on the self and so little on God. Besides, it would also necessarily mean that Mary would be the ideal vessel not for God, but for the devil. Yet, this is not true.

My suspicion is that many people actually fear facing what God ultimately wants to reveal to them in deep and intimate prayer - their raw naked selves. When the false self gets stripped away, when all the external trappings and décor and facades reveal themselves as cosmetic, the only thing that can emerge is the raw true self. It is at that raw level that we become aware of how silly, arrogant, egotistical, proud and fearful we really are. That is the self that meditation helps us to reach, to come to a conversion point and reach the need for metanoia – getting a new mind.

The fruits of meditation are never going to be during the prayer period. Perhaps that is what turns many novices off. We are too mired in a world of instant results, and we expect some feeling, some lights and some consolation during the prayer.

But in my experience with meditation through the years, it has been revealed that the fruit of meditation comes not during the silent moments, but after that – when the errant driver cuts into my lane in traffic; when someone keeps me waiting with no apology or explanation; when people around me display some degree of ignorance or when someone seems to be irascible. That is when the fruit of meditation will show itself. It may not always happen, as is the case with myself, but when it does, it becomes a true moment of kenosis and I know that the heartbeat of God has been felt.

In one of my travels, I remember seeing a very clever bumper sticker that said “Meditation – it’s not what you think”. How true.