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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
At least in Western Christian Mysticism, Contemplation and Meditation should not be conflated.
There are three levels of prayer - Vocal prayer, Meditation, and Contemplation. Vocal prayer is the easiest for a person to initiate - saying prepared prayers like the Our Father, talking with God conversationally, or petitioning God for things. Meditation is perhaps more like your Buddhist meditation but instead of focusing on the self or on emptying the self, the purpose is to focus your mind on something relating to God - imagining you were there at key points in Jesus' life, thinking deeply about God's one-ness, etc. There are similarities to modern meditation practices in that redirecting wandering thoughts is crucial. The big difference should be glaring - the point is to grow in admiration of the goodness of God and through admiration to imitate Him.
The last stage of prayer, Contemplation, is a gift from God that cannot be obtained by any special techniques or training. It is only given to a soul prepared for it through mortification and a rejection of all sin, even venial sin. A consistent meditative practice will help the soul grow in the virtues needed to achieve this infused, contemplative prayer.
This taxonomy of prayer was gathered through cumulative experiences through the life of the Church. However, the seeds of it are in the Bible. The Psalms and Song of Songs resonate strongly with mystics. The New Testament also has indications that the Apostles were familiar with contemplative prayer:
(FIRE WITHIN St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, and the Gospel—on Prayer, by Fr. Dubay.)
Despite wholeheartedly agreeing that this is what Christians should practice, I would caution people that they can do a lot of harm to themselves without a competent spiritual director guiding the process. You can get stuck on the Dark Night of the Senses, shut out the beginnings of contemplation because you don't recognize it, and other mistakes.
Yeah I will admit I've made a lot of mistakes in my own path towards meditation sigh. Problem is there seems to be a great dearth of competent and available spiritual directors in Christian circles when it comes to deeper prayer!
There's very little "infrastructure" for lay people to find spiritual directors, let alone good ones. And unfortunately, "keep trying new ones until you find one that confirms all your biases" is the wrong tact as well.
In general I think you should look at the fruits. Start with finding people who seem full of virtue, and ask them who their spiritual director is. Otherwise, pray to God to send you a good one and wait for Him to move first.
Heavily recommend reading Fire Within and Abandonment to Divine Providence.
Yep that is my goal, currently have booked a couple retreats and in the process of finding a spiritual father besides my priest, who sadly doesn't have time for me. I appreciate the response.
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I’ve been trying to figure out how to structure my thoughts in response. I am no expert in such things, but I’ve decided to start with my more academic thoughts and progress to the more personal ones. I want to be upfront that I am a member of that stream of evangelical Protestantism that treats most mystical disciplines as dangers to be avoided. My bias is opposite yours, but hopefully there is something here of use to you.
Historical concerns
The biggest reservation I have with your narrative is that it treats Christian mysticism as a monolith across time and geography. I haven’t read De Young’s book, and I can’t comment on it. But there is a tendency in Eastern Orthodox (and some Roman Catholic) sources to make claims of apostolicity too readily. Something may be very ancient and yet not apostolic. Or its origins may be apostolic, but subsequent developments have built on the apostolic foundations and must be distinguished from them.
When Palamas used the word hesychasm, he had something more developed in mind than the desert fathers had. They in turn weren’t just passing on what had been handed down to them but seeking new, heroic forms of spirituality in a world where Christianity seemed to have become too safe. Medieval Western mystics were doing other things, often quite varied. And I think that striving to understand that variety and development will help you to better understand the critics also, because you will know to which particular schools and practices they were reacting.
An evangelical analogy about knives
When the Bible speaks about believers as children of God it does so in several different senses, so don’t take this analogy too broadly. But it seems to me that, with reference to the fatherhood of God, the greatest saints are ten-year-olds.
For me to pursue potentially dangerous spiritual practices under an experienced spiritual director is a lot like a five-year-old learning knife skills from an eight-year-old who has studied the teachings of the most learned ten-year-olds. I will accept that he knows more than I do, and that his teachers know much more, and so there is a lot that they can teach me. But I would want strong evidence that there was an adult in charge of curriculum somewhere before I got involved. Without revelation from God the Father, we are just children playing with knives.
(I suppose in this scenario demons are bullies who give us a good shove whenever our fingers cross the path of the blade. Or maybe they are evil knives trying to tempt us to cut what we shouldn’t. The analogy needs more work.)
Maybe don’t carry anything smaller than a twenty?
Taken straightforwardly, this principle can send us to strip clubs that we might mortify lust. Of course you wouldn’t apply it so naïvely, but be careful of subtler traps. It is true that we have “a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control” (2 Tim. 1:7). It is also true that sometimes our best way out of temptation is to avoid it in the first place.
You’ve said that you are young as a Christian yet. When I was a young believer, it seemed to me that many of the old-timers were lukewarm and complacent. Some of them were! But others had been humbled over time by the Lord’s discipline, and they were pursuing the kind of quiet, humble spirituality to which He had called them in contrast to the heroism I expected to see (Heb. 12).
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As someone who's developed an interest in the topic recently, I suspect most belief systems have developed something that could be described as meditation. For that matter, I suspect there are non-religious practices that resemble contemplation. I'd be really interested to compare brain-scans of say, a sniper spending hours in a hide site with someone sitting in meditation for the same period. I do think with Protestantism specifically these contemplative practices were devalued because of a) as you say the collapse of the monastic tradition and b) the industrial revolution. Protestantism really took off right as the western world was entering a period where we focused on quantified ROIs for every activity. How does one quantify the value of sitting still? There's no easily-measured productivity associated with it, and it doesn't appear that you're "doing something" in the same way going to Church or memorizing scripture is doing something.
From what I understand talking to my pastor, the 'monastic tradition' is not emphasized because it is a retreat from the world. At least for evangelicals, the Great Commission is the considered one of the most important commands from Christ. A monastic abandons this for their own spiritual development, which is fundamentally selfish.
There is, though (at least in my tradition) a history of temporary removal from the world for spiritual development, recovery from sin or trauma, or just to reset. Think either sabbatical or rehab. These sometimes include meditative practices alongside typical prayer. However, they are always intended to refresh or prepare a person to reenter the world so they can do the good works God has prepared for them.
The difference in Orthodox axioms is that 1) prayer does something and 2) having someone be highly purified and holy who only occasionally interacts with the wider world is a very valuable thing, with John the Baptist as the prototype of someone who lived on the edges of society for spiritual reasons
John the Baptist lived on the edges only in the sense that his lifestyle was untraditional. He had disciples, he engaged frequently with the larger populace, he even involved himself in politics by criticizing Herod. He looks nothing like a monastic.
The idea that isolating yourself will lead you to be 'highly purified and holy' is also not backed up by reality. One example I came across recently is in the journals of St Jerome, who famously shut himself in a tiny cell with only one window to receive his meals and no other contact with the world. Did he become 'highly purified and holy'? To the contrary, he writes in his journals that he was plagued by sinful thoughts and desires just as before.
Sanctification does not and indeed cannot come about by a program of self improvement. It only comes about by the work of the Spirit. That's why monastic practice is inherently wrong-headed, it seeks to use human effort to become holy, when that work can only be accomplished by God.
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I think the underlying reason behind the controversy is that since Christian leaders are afraid of losing adherents to other religions, when something from another religion becomes popular, such as meditation, there are two possible responses:
And now that you have two approaches, where one emphasises that meditation is good, and the other that meditation is bad, you have a controversy.
It's amusing to see that when something like mindfulness becomes popular, someone discovers that there is a thing called 'watchfulness' in Christianity that is supposedly an ancient tradition, just like mindfulness supposedly is in Buddhism.
Another thing is that there is no one thing called "meditation", same as there is no one thing called "a sport" or "a game" (there is even an overlap between sports and games).
Except it is? I'm not pulling out of my ass as you seem to be implying...? Did you even read the quotes from Saints in the 3rd and 4th centuries?
I suspect that these saints living in 3rd and 4th centuries did not write in modern English, which would mean that the quotes we have at hand have been translated at some point, and perhaps the translator chose words that sounded fashionable at the time?
I could be wrong, but quick googling tells me that the "watchfulness" in the original texts was actually a word that means "soberness" (literally "no wine"), but for some reason it has been translated with a word that matches "*fulness", which is amusing, since there is another fashionable word that also matches that same pattern. I think the word that was translated as "mindfulness" was in the original Buddhist texts a word that meant "remembering".
The Christian Yoga Association has a page with bible quotes justifying the practice of yoga as a Christian. Their term for mindfulness is "Christfulness", which is just as amusing, if not even more.
Your quick googling is indeed wrong. St. Hesychios the priest and Evagrius and many others literally directly use the word when referring to thoughts and meditation, in tons of passages.
So are you claiming that people that lived in the Middle East some 1500 years ago "literally directly" used a modern English word, before modern English as a language even existed?
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I don’t think it’s about losing adherents per se. But I don’t think you can simply rip a practice out of a different religion and incorporate it into Christianity without it changing Christianity. It comes with baggage, philosophical, religious, and cultural. I don’t think you could adopt the Kabbalah out of Judaism without some integration of ideas. It even happens between denominations to some degree. I don’t think you could pray the Roman Catholic Missal without it having some impact on your Christian beliefs.
But somehow I don't get the feeling that if everyone left the church and joined some other form of Christianity with Buddhist ideas, that all the priests and bishops would be content with it as long as everyone remembers to declare that this is a different form of Christianity. And this is of course only relating to the "meditation is bad" approach. The "meditation is good" side is perfectly happy to change their religion, as long as they can pretend that nothing has changed and this is an ancient tradition that was always so.
They aren’t content because it very likely isn’t Christianity anymore. Christianity makes a lot of actual commitments to the nature of religion, God, humanity, sacraments, behaviors, etc. sooner or later, you either have to drop the tenets of Christian beliefs, or drop the pagan beliefs. Jesus is not one of many religious leaders, he’s either your Lord or you are not a Christian.
But everyone is already openly declaring that this new religion is different from the old religion that people are leaving behind. So why would the priests not be content with their churches being empty if all they care about is accurate taxonomy of denominations?
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A lot of people have driven them insane doing intense Buddhist meditation without accepting any buddhist theory. Things can get very scary fast. This person fucked up her 3D vision, had difficulty hearing at noise or processing speech, and gave herself panic attacks. Among other issues! You need a way to make sense of the world. Meditation can easily destabilize your existing worldview. If you arent going to accepting the buddhist replacement you are likely to be lost at sea.
A Christian is much better off doing Christian spiritual practice. If you are Eastern Orthodox you can intensely and repeatedly pray the Jesus prayer. Various forms of this are called Hesychasm. It is strongly encouraged to only engage under the spiritual direction of your priest. Many people have correctly observed that Hesychasm is similar to many buddhist and Hindu practices. This does not imply that Orthodoxy copied or incorporated those religions. Mediation like practices are fairly natural independent developments. If you are not Orthodox you should likely find a practice that is part of your own tradition. And tread carefully. While its dangerous to practice Hesychasm as a non-orthodox Christian I think you are way better off following a Christian practice than a Buddhist one! Way closer to your worldview.
Doing ten minutes of practice every so often isn't very dangerous. But all these practices can be very effective at changing how you perceive reality. Tread lightly. Don't follow these practices if you don't accept something very close to the philosophy behind them.
Yeah agreed. I destabalized myself with Buddhist meditation and it's a large part of what led me to Christianity! I am very familiar with hesychasm don't worry. I didn't mention it here because this was more of a fluff piece I wrote quite quickly heh. I am indeed an Orthodox Christian.
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Damn. Reading that blog I am reminded of Christopher Hitchens' bon mot: "I believe everyone does have a novel inside them. In most cases that's where it should stay." At least she know (or says she knows) she's neurotic.
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There’s no textual evidence of visual or Buddhist-like meditation practices among the early Christians. We have, at most, Paul’s “third heaven” passage and the Book of Revelation, but we don’t have any details as to whether Paul’s experience was due to a “practice” or a dream or God simply placing it within him, and we don’t know whether Revelation was inspired by a visual practice or if it was always intended to be symbolic. That doesn’t mean that such practices are bad or a Christian shouldn’t do it, but afaik it has no firm grounding in the first 300 years of Christianity. It may have existed among the Essenes or whatever, but if the apostles and post-apostolics approved of it, we should expect to see it somewhere in the early works (in Origen, Tertullian, Clement, etc).
The 100% authoritative, default, and obligatory Christian meditation is prayer. Using words and inner attention to ask for something with the expectation it will eventually be obtained. You find this everywhere, naturally. Then you have the hearing of scripture, which is actually a kind of meditation. You have the dwelling on God in worship, which is also meditative, and then you have the Passion. It’s probable that when the ancients were hearing or reading things, they were using their imaginative faculties, because they lived in a more stimuli-starved world.
Well we’re supposed to have lovingkindness for your brother, your neighbor, for God and for yourself. You don’t need a Buddhist to tell you to do this. It’s interesting, though, that there once was a practice of making oneself seem “pitiable” before God, asking for His pity / mercy, which in a weird sense is making oneself feel deservèd of love. In our insane and ridiculous culture, large swathes of the Left feel undeserved of love; if you’re White and come from a rich family you are essentially banned from feeling God’s love unless you become a new gender or whatever.
I think the Christian prayer method is more socially optimal than Buddhist meditation. There is an explicit and an implicit dimension to every spiritual practice. It’s true that, for both Buddhism and Christianity, the explicit content may be the same sometimes, eg wishing love and happiness upon a friend. But there is a whole other implicit dimension to Christian prayer:
the use of social language, which acts as a soft practice for sociality, which is the bedrock of civilization and thus love for neighbor. The Christian uses his own words to direct the love, which increases the ease and frequency with which he communicates with these words to others. If you pray twice a day with loving words about a friend, after a month you might find yourself using there loving words to a friend, which is good.
the trust aspect. The Christian is supposed to trust that his request will be answered. This builds generalized social trust which is the oil of civilization. The act of requesting makes it more likely that we will request from someone in a community.
the implicit reminder that God is the Father and Boss and Christ is our heroic model. A year of praying twice a day and you’ve reminded yourself 700 times that God is your Father and Christ is your helping interceding High Priest. (I agree with Origen that all prayer ought to be directed to God alone, and we should understand Christ as praying with us and aiding our request to God
the retrieval of information. Buddhism might emphasize a general feeling of compassion, but we are specific beings with specific connections and practical problems. Prayer retrieves our own life and that of another and our predicament, increasing our awareness of the practical ways we can help specific people. A general compassion might actually be worthless unless it can be delivered to someone in our community.
The humility aspect. Prayer reminds us we are a servant and the subject of a humiliating rescue operation, and the most precious and costly antidote had to be expressly sent to keep our soul alive. I think this is something the traditional Catholic prayers always mention: the cross, the blood.
Really? Reading Religion of the Apostles, Fr. Stephen seemed to be pulling from quite a few sources at least from the second temple Jews, which led directly into Christian practice. I haven't looked into it deeply myself though admittedly.
Yes but then there's contemplative prayer, often using a repetitive prayer word / mantra. Do you not think this overlaps quite a lot with the Buddhist approach?
Interesting point on social optimality. I do think there's more prosocial stuff baked in on the Christian, but I also think we need monastic contemplation to help course correct when the social side of things gets out of whack, as it seems to be nowadays.
Prayer and Mantras are not the same thing. A mantra is more internal to the self, and trying to reach an internal state of consciousness. Prayer is a request to a being. If im praying, im asking God for something. If im praying the Jesus Prayer, im asking Jesus Christ, the Son of God to have mercy on me a sinner. If Im reciting a mantra, it’s not directed to a being I have a relationship with. It’s not a request. It’s me wrestling with my mind trying to achieve a mental breakthrough.
Many Buddhists pray to the Buddhas when reciting mantras. Western Buddhism is weird and unique in that they are trying to like fix their own minds. The two are closer than you might think.
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While it is not as formalized as the traditional monastic practices you bring up, I think for a lot of Christians' personal devotion in terms of prayer and Bible reading does have some overlap with more contemplative practices even if Protestants (or at least Evangelicals) typically don't talk about it in those terms. Protestants are definitely encouraged to take some time and read Scripture and pray on their own. Maybe a more formal structure of doing this like Lectio Divina can probably be a useful tool to do this, but it seems to me that a Protestant who starts his day with 15 minutes of personal Bible reading and prayer is fundamentally doing the same thing as somebody starting his day with 15 minutes of Lectio Divina.
One thing I see around me with secular people who are talking about yoga and mindfulness and mediation and stuff, is that their spirituality seems to very self-centred. A lot of naval-gazing and thinking very hard about your own feelings, but not so much transcendence. I know very little about hinduism and buddhism so I am not claiming this tendency is representative of those religions and their spiritual practices and I am sure this tendency is simply a degeneration of such practices wrought by modern western hyper-individualism. But in general I feel like in the modern western world people spend too much time sitting at home alone naval-gazing - the homo incurvatus in se, which st. Augustine talked about. If anything I feel like most people should be told to stop thinking so much about themselves and their own feelings and to start thinking more about the world around them and the people that inhabit it.
That being said, besides going out more and relating to others (and the Other) learning how to do introspection in a good and healthy way through contemplative prayer might be an important part of the cure for the homo incurvatus in se as well. The condition I am here lamenting might be caused by qualitative problems with introspection as much as quantitive ones. The solution would not just be less introspection, but also better introspection. So I don't necessarily oppose the general point of your post to be clear.
Very much agree, I think it's contemplation by a different name / form but functionally it's a similar thing. It gets annoying because it makes communication about contemplation difficult when Christians sort of smuggle it in under different things.
I do think that modern mindfulness can be self centered. That being said our own tradition teaches us that the world is empty outside of God, and we find God in our hearts! It's not necessarily a bad thing to be "self-centered" in a way in the spiritual life, as long as the ultimate goal is to become more like Christ.
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This is a very interesting post, and I'd heard of the Christian contemplative tradition back when I was interested in Buddhism, though I never looked into it (ie, Christian contemplation) very closely.
On the other hand, Buddhist and Christian metaphysics are very different. They're fundamentally distinct philosophies. Perhaps Western Buddhists are largely practicing a kind of secularized 'mindfulness' without a strong commitment to Buddhist philosophy, but that probably says more about current Western cultural trends than Buddhism.
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The issue I have specifically with modern meditation is that the older version of this was explicitly Christian and often was meditation on Christian themes and often explicitly the Bible. David might have meditated, but he was mediating on the Bible, not just sitting there with an open mind watching his thoughts. The Orthdox use the Jesus Prayer, again not just sitting and breathing. Some older traditions use the psalms. The idea that Lectio Divino is the same thing as New Age mantras is not only silly but potentially dangerous syncretism.
Part of my issue with modern Buddhist and New Age meditation is that it makes a distinction in practice between the spirit and body. You are supposed to be training your spirit to be better often by ignoring the outside world. It thus tends to, in practice, lead to a kind of mind body dualism (which Buddhist philosophy accepts) where the practitioner identifies with his spirit as “his real self” and his body as a shell.
I disagree. If you read the quotes I put in there, or many of the Saints writing on this, contemplating in complete silence is very often taught. Their lives were far more suffused with religion, but the actual practices are no mystery. Sitting in silence or with a single prayer word is not uncommon.
I do agree that Buddhist dualism is problematic. Unfortunately the vast majority of Christians nowadays accept dualism implicitly anyway, so I think this is a sort of tilting at windmills type thing.
Okay, maybe you can explain this because I've never really understood what the Christian position on mind-body dualism/monism is. If one is a monist, then it seems that one has to accept that the dead are well-and-truly dead until the final resurrection, and that nobody goes to heaven or hell until the Last Judgement. But I don't think any Christians accept this. But also, many Christians insist that they are not dualists.
A human person is a body-soul dyad. It's not that a human is really the soul and the body is incidental baggage that needs to be managed. The body and the soul interact with each other in various ways and together an entire human person is formed.
However, while the body is (currently) perishable, the soul is imperishable. Upon death, the soul still exists in an un-ideal state, waiting for the resurrection. What these souls experience is impossible for us to fully understand. That said, there are plenty of Christians I've talked with who argue that the dead are insensate until the resurrection of the body (and other Christians who argue that there is no resurrection of the body, gnostic heresy though it be.) The Catholic view is that dead souls are aware in some way but not the same way they will be after the Resurrection.
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I am not sure what the classical Christian view is! I don't think it's dualistic, but surely there are elements since Descartes came out of a Christian tradition. Studying theology of the body is on my to do list.
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I can only imagine most Christians denying ethical dualism (i.e. that good and evil are essentially equal but opposite forces), not that body and soul are distinct things.
The only Christian groups that could potentially be considered monists in the body-soul sense are probably those that believe in annihilationism, i.e. Jehovah's Witnesses or Seventh Day Adventists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind%E2%80%93body_dualism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethical_dualism
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Any primers on contemplative prayer that you can recommend?
Into the Silent Land by Martin Laird.
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