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jenny_islanderAfter examining what Christian meditation is and is not, Foster goes on to describe how to begin meditating. The first heading in this section is "Desiring the Living Voice of God." That is a lot to unpack. Understand that Foster is not using a metaphor: meditation arises from a desire for the living voice of God. However, there are barriers. Here is the first:
There are times when everything within us says yes...But those who meditate know that the more frequent reaction is spiritual inertia.
Books have been written about this inertia--about "coldness and lack of desire." Often accusations are flung about it. But the answer is simpler than we tend to make it: ask God for help. So why don't we do that more often?
Human beings seem to have a perpetual tendency to have somebody else talk to God for them. We are content to have the message secondhand...The history of religion is the story of an almost desperate scramble to have a king, a mediator, a priest, a pastor, a go-between. In this way we do not need to go to God ourselves. Such an approach saves us from the need to change, for to be in the presence of God is to change. We do not need to observe Western culture very closely to realize that it is captivated by the religion of the mediator.
This inverts the conventional wisdom that flim-flam men co-opted or invented religion in order to hoodwink other people. But doesn't it ring true? Is our history not filled with accounts of people obsessively worshiping some creep who they had hardly heard of a year ago--someone who told them exactly what they wanted to hear? The mortal object of worship does not manufacture this need to feel oneself to be in communion with great power. They capitalize on it, accumulating followers who want the comfort of communion without self-examination or examination by a truly greater power. If you believe yourself too enlightened ever to be swayed from your rational independence into such worship, or too thoroughly saved ever to be tempted, you are another pigeon for the con.
But it's possible to be unable to begin meditation without being so far into the thickets of self-important borrowed glory. The second barrier is the difficulty in believing that the One who made the Sun and other stars simply wants to listen to and talk to you, and that what God may have to say to you may be very ordinary. In my own meditative life, I have been instructed to go down a particular sidewalk I had no reason to walk down and look in a particular direction. There was something there that a stranger had lost. I was able to reunite them with it. The lives God gave us are made of such daily moments and decisions, and God is very interested in them. And if it's hard to believe that--once again, ask God for help.
So as we begin meditation, we yearn to yearn for God; we listen for God's help in listening to God's living voice. Okay, now what? How do we "descend with the mind into the heart"? Foster quotes three people in one page to answer this question, and they all say the same thing: Use your imagination.
This is a stumbling block to many. "Imaginary" is a pejorative adjective. But Foster observes:
Perhaps some rare individuals experience God through abstract contemplation alone, but most of us need to be more deeply rooted in the senses. We must not despise this simpler, more humble route into God's presence. Jesus himself taught in this manner, making constant appeal to the imagination.
He goes on to quote St. Francis de Sales (1567-1622): "[B]y means of the imagination we confine our mind within the mystery on which we meditate, that it may not ramble to and fro[.]"
Certain denominations and non-denominational congregations teach that the imagination is wholly and irrevocably evil. Certainly every part of our nature has been marred; equally certainly, every part of our nature has been redeemed. If you are worried that your imagination is running away with you--then, again, ask God for help. (Aside: If you are bedeviled with intrusive thoughts, I have found that identifying them as products of the marring of creation can help to cut them down to size, if you are not too tired or disoriented at the moment to do more than suffer. Imagine them as persistent, horrid little beasts that can be briskly escorted out of your home at the end of a broom. "Oh, you again. I do not have time for your mess. Out!")
Back to Foster, on the imagination:
In fact, the common experience of those who walk with God is one of being given [emphasis his] images of what can be. Often in praying for people I am given a picture of their condition, and when I share that picture with them, there will be a deep inner sigh, or they will begin weeping. Later they will ask, "How did you know?" Well, I didn't know, I just saw it.
To believe that God can sanctify and utilize the imagination is simply to take seriously the Christian idea of incarnation. God so accommodates, so enfleshes himself into our world that he uses the images we know and understand to teach us about the unseen world of which we know so little and which we find so difficult to understand.
Next post: Now that beginnings have been laid out for us, how do we go on with meditation?
There are times when everything within us says yes...But those who meditate know that the more frequent reaction is spiritual inertia.
Books have been written about this inertia--about "coldness and lack of desire." Often accusations are flung about it. But the answer is simpler than we tend to make it: ask God for help. So why don't we do that more often?
Human beings seem to have a perpetual tendency to have somebody else talk to God for them. We are content to have the message secondhand...The history of religion is the story of an almost desperate scramble to have a king, a mediator, a priest, a pastor, a go-between. In this way we do not need to go to God ourselves. Such an approach saves us from the need to change, for to be in the presence of God is to change. We do not need to observe Western culture very closely to realize that it is captivated by the religion of the mediator.
This inverts the conventional wisdom that flim-flam men co-opted or invented religion in order to hoodwink other people. But doesn't it ring true? Is our history not filled with accounts of people obsessively worshiping some creep who they had hardly heard of a year ago--someone who told them exactly what they wanted to hear? The mortal object of worship does not manufacture this need to feel oneself to be in communion with great power. They capitalize on it, accumulating followers who want the comfort of communion without self-examination or examination by a truly greater power. If you believe yourself too enlightened ever to be swayed from your rational independence into such worship, or too thoroughly saved ever to be tempted, you are another pigeon for the con.
But it's possible to be unable to begin meditation without being so far into the thickets of self-important borrowed glory. The second barrier is the difficulty in believing that the One who made the Sun and other stars simply wants to listen to and talk to you, and that what God may have to say to you may be very ordinary. In my own meditative life, I have been instructed to go down a particular sidewalk I had no reason to walk down and look in a particular direction. There was something there that a stranger had lost. I was able to reunite them with it. The lives God gave us are made of such daily moments and decisions, and God is very interested in them. And if it's hard to believe that--once again, ask God for help.
So as we begin meditation, we yearn to yearn for God; we listen for God's help in listening to God's living voice. Okay, now what? How do we "descend with the mind into the heart"? Foster quotes three people in one page to answer this question, and they all say the same thing: Use your imagination.
This is a stumbling block to many. "Imaginary" is a pejorative adjective. But Foster observes:
Perhaps some rare individuals experience God through abstract contemplation alone, but most of us need to be more deeply rooted in the senses. We must not despise this simpler, more humble route into God's presence. Jesus himself taught in this manner, making constant appeal to the imagination.
He goes on to quote St. Francis de Sales (1567-1622): "[B]y means of the imagination we confine our mind within the mystery on which we meditate, that it may not ramble to and fro[.]"
Certain denominations and non-denominational congregations teach that the imagination is wholly and irrevocably evil. Certainly every part of our nature has been marred; equally certainly, every part of our nature has been redeemed. If you are worried that your imagination is running away with you--then, again, ask God for help. (Aside: If you are bedeviled with intrusive thoughts, I have found that identifying them as products of the marring of creation can help to cut them down to size, if you are not too tired or disoriented at the moment to do more than suffer. Imagine them as persistent, horrid little beasts that can be briskly escorted out of your home at the end of a broom. "Oh, you again. I do not have time for your mess. Out!")
Back to Foster, on the imagination:
In fact, the common experience of those who walk with God is one of being given [emphasis his] images of what can be. Often in praying for people I am given a picture of their condition, and when I share that picture with them, there will be a deep inner sigh, or they will begin weeping. Later they will ask, "How did you know?" Well, I didn't know, I just saw it.
To believe that God can sanctify and utilize the imagination is simply to take seriously the Christian idea of incarnation. God so accommodates, so enfleshes himself into our world that he uses the images we know and understand to teach us about the unseen world of which we know so little and which we find so difficult to understand.
Next post: Now that beginnings have been laid out for us, how do we go on with meditation?
