All truth is God's truth, right? I remember way back in middle school thinking that meditation was what weird people do while assuming the lotus position. Then it was one of those naughty words in the KJV that my sunday school teacher had to explain away, "meditation is all that bad new age emptying-your-mind-stuff, read the word as 'devotions' or 'Bible study' or 'prayer' or something."
A few months ago I heard an article on NPR about this guy who went to Tibet to study with some monks for a while. He came back to the US and wrote a book about meditation and how it is really good for people; about how it decreases your cholesterol and increases your mental focus and lowers your car insurance by at least 20% per month and stuff like that. Then the interviewer asked him to describe the process of meditation. The monk-laureate outlined a surprisingly simple method:
-select a single idea or object
-look at the idea from every angle, think about what other people might do with that idea, how does it make you feel, does it float or sink in water, what have people written about it, does it melt, how do most people react to it, can you break it apart or add to the object, where does it show up most often, etc.
-focus on what it means to you personally or how it affects your behavior
*POOF* you meditated
The object of my meditation since hearing the broadcast has been the compassion of Christ. When did He feel compassion? For how long? On whom did He have compassion? What did He do after He felt compassion? What did He say about His compassion? How often did He feel it? Was His compassion easily triggered?
The answers to these questions draw a big red circle around the fact that the last step is extremely hard to implement. I completely lack compassion. My very nature cringes at some of the fellow clods on whom Christ was so easily compassionate. It is easier when you surround yourself with people that don’t need your compassion.
I've been training my replacement for about a week before I left my petty-cash job this past Thursday. Christ would have compassion for him. He definitely fits the description in Matthew 9:36. But when I'm working along side this guy who is a little younger than I and he's telling me about how he doesn't like his wife even though he loves his kids and that he's tried to do stuff to make her leave him in the past but it never worked and that he'll probably leave her when something better comes along and how he's lied about quitting the drugs but he feels like he can tell me about it because something makes him trust me and I just want to clam up and go far away and mop something. But I drum up the nerve to converse. I try to think about what Christ would see: a depraved, lost soul as rotten to the core as I am and in desperate need of healing.
The interesting thing about Christ's compassion is that it never comes without an immediate action. Christ's compassion makes Him heal someone, feed five thousand people, or deliver salvation. Compassion without action is empty. It doesn't exist. And that's where meditation fails. Everything works perfectly in theory (especially the scenarios in my head where my coworker gets saved and becomes a travelling evangelist who preaches about how to let God fix your family), but practice seems too esoteric to the theorist now without a petty-cash job. But he has my phone number and I know where he takes lunch breaks.
Posted by timf at July 30, 2005 11:42 AM