Hey folks! Posting another article from Substack, link is here if you'd like pictures, otherwise text is reproduced below in full. Overall discussing Christian contemplation & meditation, especially with regards to Buddhism and the overlap there.
If you’ve paid any attention to modern online Christian discourse lately, you may have noticed a lot of controversy around meditation, Buddhism, New Age spirituality, and Eastern religions.
Oftentimes, the conversation will go something like this: a modern Buddhist or New Ager talks about how useful meditation is, and a Christian comes in and says something along the lines of, “Oh, meditation is sinful or evil.”
Sometimes Christians will say that meditation is emptying the mind so that demons can possess you, or that trying to use meditative techniques is sinful because you are trying to achieve grace yourself rather than allowing Christ to do it for you.
Unfortunately, these Christians are speaking out of a deep, deep ignorance of their own tradition.
If you actually look back into the ancient historical record, you’ll see that from the very beginning, the apostles (in line with their Second Temple Jewish tradition) likely did deep meditative visualization practices and other contemplative practices that modern Christians, especially Protestant and evangelical Christians, would see as demonic, evil, or sinful today. You can reference the book The Religion of the Apostles by Father Stephen De Young if you’re curious for some more details here.
In short, meditation and contemplative prayer have a deep, important, and long-standing tradition throughout Christianity from the very beginning.
In this article, I want to lay out some of the background of this controversy, and explain why the Christian arguments above are in fact dead wrong. Throughout Christian history, ancient meditative practices have been attacked multiple times. I also want to discuss some of the historical factors that have led to modern American Christians, especially, being so incredibly opposed to any sort of meditation or contemplative practice for deepening their connection with God.
Then I’ll get a little spicy, and make the case that many Western Buddhists are actually better at Christian contemplative practice than we are. ;)
Christian Contemplation Has Often Been Controversial
There have been a number of periods throughout Christian history where contemplation, a retreat from the world, and trying to connect directly with God have caused the hackles of the more exoteric-focused Christians to rise.
One of the major and well-known examples is the exodus of the Desert Fathers from Roman society after Rome was Christianized around the fourth century. Now, this was largely controversial because Christian Roman society was becoming corrupt at the time, and many of the Desert Fathers explicitly spoke out against the Church for becoming too concerned with worldly politics. These people wanted less politics, and more of a direct connection with God. (a common drive for mystics and contemplatives)
In fact, you can see some Protestant parallels there, and the more intellectual and historically aware Protestants have even called back to the Desert Fathers to argue their case for rejecting clerical authority during the Reformation.
Later on, in the 14th century, we see in both the Orthodox and Catholic Church another rise of attacks against contemplatives. On the Orthodox side, we have Barlaam of Calabria attacking Athonite monks and other contemplatives, outright mocking their practices. On the Catholic side, you have more contemplative or esoteric approaches to the faith coming under scrutiny, including famous Catholic contemplatives like Meister Eckhart, whose teachings became the subject of an inquisitorial investigation and later papal condemnation.
Now we move on to the Protestant Reformation. This is an extremely complicated topic because the Protestant Reformation obviously involves a ton of different groups, but I want to sketch out the broad history, especially in America, of contemplative prayer and how Protestants viewed it.
So initially, the Protestant colonists actually had a strong contemplative tradition. You see this the most in groups like the Quakers, that heavily focused on inward silence, attention-training practices, and other meditative, contemplative types of prayer.
During the 18th century and the First Great Awakening, you still see some focus on prayers of the heart. Many of the famous preachers during this time, like Jonathan Edwards, were positively disposed towards contemplation: “True Religion disposes Persons to be much alone, in solitary Places, for holy Meditation and Prayer.”
Unfortunately, over the last couple of centuries, especially with the rise of biblical fundamentalism, American Protestants have moved farther and farther away from quiet contemplation and more into a focus on conversion, evangelizing others, reading Scripture, preaching, and spontaneous, emotional, verbal prayer. In the most extreme forms, you see the Pentecostal speaking in tongues, that sort of thing.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that contemplative prayer goes away, but it does start to come under some suspicion, especially by Christian groups that align themselves with conservative worldly politics in America.
Another dynamic here is that Protestantism essentially wiped out the monastic tradition, especially in America. Historically, the Christian contemplative tradition has been mainly kept alive by monastics, and I mean, this is true in Buddhism and pretty much every major religion as well. It’s not unique to Christianity.
But regardless, by wiping out the monastic tradition, Protestants sort of shot themselves in the foot because while, yes, it’s great for lay people to practice contemplative prayer, and I definitely encourage people to, ultimately it’s a lot easier for folks living in a monastic community to keep the deep contemplative tradition alive.
It doesn’t help that modern life, after the Industrial Revolution, in general has made contemplation and meditation harder. Despite our incredible material wealth, modern people tend to have less free time, attention, and generally just less ability and inclination to rest our minds than our ancestors did.
The pace of our lives is incredibly fast, and even when we do have free time that our material wealth buys us, our spiritual condition is such that we find it extremely difficult to rest and put down our busy, hurried schedules in order to contemplate and meditate and be watchful over our own hearts and minds.
There’s also a dynamic where Protestants hate Catholics (back in the day more than now, to be fair), and because the Catholics had a stronger focus on contemplative prayer, occasionally you see Protestants associating contemplation with the evil papists.
Now, during the 20th century, especially in the 1950s through the 1970s, when Zen Buddhism, yoga, Transcendental Meditation, and general New Age spirituality became incredibly popular in America, you have a sort of perfect storm where most Christians in America know very little about their own contemplative traditions. They don’t meditate. They don’t even understand that Christians are supposed to meditate.
And then the Eastern religions start popping up and teaching meditation. They try it. They’re like, “Oh my God, this is amazing,” and they get converted pretty quickly. Because if you’ve ever spent much time in meditation, you realize that, yes, the effects are profound and quick, and they do allow a connection with the divine.
Unfortunately, the Christian reaction, by and large, instead of educating people and telling them, “Hey, this is a part of our own tradition,” has been instead to demonize Buddhism, Hinduism, and other traditions, even when there are extreme similarities between our historical practices and the sort of New Age Western Buddhist practices that many people are actually doing nowadays.
Contemplation Is Not a Replacement for the Church
Now, I want to be clear here that not all of these persecutions of contemplatives were entirely unfounded. In some of these cases, depending on the specific author or person who was pushing meditative and contemplative practices, there genuinely was a real problem with their approach to the faith.
Meditation and contemplation are not able to bring us to God entirely on their own. We do need the liturgical life of the Church. We need the sacraments, and especially the Eucharist, in order to be united with Christ. This is a clear teaching of the Orthodox and Catholic Churches, and I do believe it strongly.
While it may be possible to approach God via various meditative and contemplative practices on their own, I don’t think we can achieve full union and theosis with God without being wedded to His Church.
Furthermore, I think that for the vast, vast majority of people who seek a closer relationship with God, they would be far better off coming home to Mother Church, coming home to the hospital where their souls can be healed, rather than trying to do everything on their own.
Western Buddhism Is Overwhelmingly Compatible with Christianity
Now for the controversial part.
One of the funniest, or I guess sadly ironic, things about modern Christians hating on Buddhist meditation is that many Buddhists in America are actually better at practicing fundamental disciplines of the Christian spiritual life than they are!
I’ll admit that there is a grain of truth in critiques of Buddhist practices. The scare tactics Christians use when they talk about meditation being meant to empty your mind so that demons can fill you up do have some basis in reality. Especially in Vajrayana and other esoteric schools of Buddhism, there are explicit practices where the goal is to take on some sort of aspect of a deity and invite them to possess you.
However, it should be obvious to anyone who has met many Buddhists in America that the vast, vast majority of people who call themselves Buddhists and meditate regularly are not doing anything like this.
When it comes to American and Western Buddhists in general, most of them are just practicing what we in the Christian tradition would call watchfulness. They are paying attention to when their mind wanders. They are noting when difficult emotions come up that distract them or bring them into difficult and closed-off states. Perhaps they are repeating a mantra in order to help center their mind, as we do in Christian hesychasm with our prayer or prayer word. Sometimes they use meditation beads, which we also use, especially in the Orthodox and Catholic traditions. The common depiction in media is the Catholic rosary.
Furthermore, most Western Buddhists and New Agers believe in a sort of generally benevolent, all encompassing "Source” that aligns quite well with Christian theology, albeit minus the Christ part.
Compare basic Buddhist meditation practices to St. Hesychios the Priest explaining the Christian practice of watchfulness:
One type of watchfulness consists in closely scrutinizing every mental image or provocation.
A second type of watchfulness consists in freeing the heart from all thoughts, keeping it profoundly silent and still, and in praying.
A third type consists in continually and humbly calling upon the Lord Jesus Christ for help.
These types of watchfulness, my child, act like doorkeepers and bar entry to evil thoughts.
St. Hesychios the Priest, On Watchfulness and Holiness, in The Philokalia.
Or St. Theophan the Recluse explaining Christian ‘mantras’:
In order to teach the mind to rest on one thing, the Holy Fathers used short prayers and acquired the habit of reciting them unceasingly.
St. Theophan the Rescluse, The Art of Prayer: An Orthodox Anthology
Frankly, I would be surprised if more than 1% of self-described Buddhists in the West have ever actually done any sort of ritual or meditation where they explicitly invite a demon to come and possess their mind. It’s just not a very common thing. The vast majority of Buddhists are doing simple meditative practices to cultivate watchfulness and basic attention. I’d bet if the Holy Fathers were to observe these Buddhists (the vast majority that are only training attention, not inviting demons in) they would likely approve of their discipline in developing watchfulness!
A lot of fearmongering Christians in the modern world spread the absurd idea that if you spend 10 minutes listening to a Buddhist teacher telling you to focus on breathing deeply, or focus on feelings of loving-kindness, you’re somehow inviting demons to come possess you. The same thing is true of polemics against yoga.
Unfortunately, the state of most Christians’ prayer life in the West is dramatically impoverished compared to the history of our traditions. I personally believe that one of the major things we must do if we want to get closer to God is revitalize the ancient Christian tradition of watchfulness, meditation, and contemplation.
If we aren’t able to guard our thoughts and our hearts from distraction, from our own sinful habits, and yes, from actual demonic influence, then we have very little hope of learning to live a Christian life and become more like Christ.
As a caveat, know that I am a relatively new convert to the Orthodox faith and to Christianity in general. I’m not speaking with any real authority outside of my own experience and opinions. Please feel free to challenge the claims I’ve made in this piece.
Regardless, I hope that this article helps change your mind on contemplative prayer and perhaps convinces some of you to take at least 10 or 15 minutes a day before or after your daily prayers to sit in silence and spend some time in self-emptying so that God’s grace and love can fill your heart in the space left behind.
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