Pints With Aquinas - The Practice of Christian Meditation | Fr. Gregory Pine, O.P.

Episode Date: September 8, 2023

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Hello, my name is Fr. Gregory Pine and I'm a Dominican friar of the province of St. Joseph and this is Pints of the Quinas. In this episode I'd like to talk a little bit about Christian meditation. So you've probably heard the word meditation before, maybe you heard it in a secular context, maybe you heard it in the context of another religion, but you know, certainly we talk about Christian meditation within the Catholic Church and I imagine, you know, without in Orthodoxy and in Protestant ecclesial communions. So what's distinct about it? You know, do we actually have a coherent tradition of prayer?

Are there different steps or methods that you might follow? And if so, how do they lead to holiness? So we'll just think about a little bit of that together as we journey further up and further in to God's plan for our lives. Here we go. Okay, so there are a lot of sources in the tradition that we can use to kind of pull together a theory and practice of Christian meditation. Certainly a lot of folks will, you know, justly start with the sacred scriptures and with the councils that our Lord gives and the instructions that he gives. Another great source for our understanding of Christian meditation is the

monastic tradition. So like in the third century, in the fourth century, you start having individuals going out into the desert, and we think here of like Egypt in particular, and then cultivating certain practices of prayer as a way by which to kind of recollect themselves and cultivate ongoing intimacy with the Lord. And then that kind of recollect themselves and cultivate ongoing intimacy with the Lord. And then that kind of gets codified in the monastic tradition, or at least it gets laid down with greater rigor and vigor. And then you'll have spiritual authors who write about this in the Middle Ages and then

certainly in the modern times of the church, which is to say since the Protestant Reformation, you've had various Christian authors like you can think of St. Ignatius of Loyola or St. Francis de Sales, who have written treatises or instructions on the method of Christian prayer. So there are a variety of ways to go about it. And provided that we have certain things in place, I don't think that we have to worry too terribly much about going wrong. So maybe we can start with the method of Saint Francis de Sales and then just flag certain things as they come up, you know, as far as they're helpful for orienting our particular understanding and practice. So Saint Francis will say,

you know, you recall yourself to the presence of God, and this is typical in Christian prayer, is that you would take a moment, right, to place yourself in God's holy presence. Obviously, we're always in God's presence in so far as He's giving us being, He's giving us doing. And if you enjoy the state of grace, He dwells in you as in a temple. But we don't necessarily advert to that fact. And so it's helpful, it's necessary, one might say at the beginning of a time of prayer, to call that consciously to mind, because part of how we go to God is by these acts of

knowing and loving and you might say principally by these acts of knowing and loving. So we start then with recalling that we are in the presence of God. Now this is probably easier when done in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament and so the church for instance will assign a plenary indulgence for those who spend 30 minutes of silent prayer in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament. So there's something there. There's something there. And then at the beginning of prayer, you might ask for the grace of prayer or intend the

time of prayer. So it's not a given that prayer is going to go well, but prayer is a meritorious act. So you know that a meritorious act is an act that gains for you a certain reward because God has ordained that graced acts gain for us a certain reward. Well, because there's an interior logic too, but there's also this exterior arrangement. So prayer is a meritorious act and you can intend that your prayer be for the glory of God and the salvation of souls souls and that makes it good. Now within that intention, obviously, we try to pay attention and a lot of what's proposed

to us in prayers for the purpose of retaining our intention and then kind of sharpening our attention. And so, certain spiritual authors, I'm thinking here of Father Eugene Boylan who wrote in the 20th century, a Cistercian, a Trappist in fact, O.C.S.O. And he'll talk about three kind of stages, as it were, not necessarily in the time of prayer, but two antecedent stages and then one stage in prayer. And so he'll say, we have to have time for reading, spiritual reading, because it's necessary to have grist for the meditative mill.

And then he says, we also should have time for reflecting, which I think many of us probably don't, yeah, we don't retain the conscious thought of that fact throughout the course of our Christian lives because we get busy. And so we have times in which we're busy and then we have times in which we purposely set aside those busy concerns so that we can be present to the Lord in prayer. But it's helpful that we cultivate an ongoing habit of recalling ourselves to the presence of God, but also thinking about things, thinking about things of God, thinking about things in light of God, so that when we enter into a time of more deliberate prayer, it's not as jarring or it's not like you have to

wall off your mind with ramparts of, you know, main force, but rather that's something that kind of comes naturally, you can slip into and out of prayer as a kind of seamless coming and going. So, yeah, spiritual reading and then reflecting and then meditating itself or making an act of mental prayer. He doesn't especially like mental prayer as a category because he thinks that it occludes or obscures that these necessary antecedent steps are part of the process, spiritual reading and reflecting, before meditating. Now when it comes to the actual meditation itself, again you have

different methods described for how one might progress. You know, there's these traditions of what is called discursive prayer where you work through certain points that you may have prepared or had prepared for you and thinking about certain doctrines of the faith. The basic idea here is that in prayer we're typically thinking about God. It might be, tempting isn't the word because it's not necessarily bad to think about yourself, but it might be like gravitationally tending in the direction of yourself, but it's often

good in prayer to kind of break that out or break out of that tendency and then direct your attention to God and things in light of God. So a nice schema that you might use for that schema, what a crass word, is the creed. You can think about the fact that God is Father. And just think about that in God's holy presence. And so Saint Francis de Sales in Book One of the Introduction to the Devout Life, he prepares ten distinct meditations and like creation features prominently into that. So you can think about God, you can think about the persons of the Most Blessed Trinity, you can think about creation, you can think about the gift of grace, you can think about the life of Christ, specifically the mysteries of the

life of Christ and their different dimensions, you can think about the sacrament, you can think about all kinds of things, these different Christian mysteries, because each of them is grace-bearing and each of them, insofar as you're thinking about them and that you're leaning into them, they're going to have an effect in your life. And so it's worthwhile just to consider them. It's worthwhile to talk to God about them. But then what we come to discover is in doing so, he begins to rearrange our interior life so it more closely cleaves to his, which is wonderful. So after a time then of, of meditating, which is like working discursively

through different doctrinal points or thinking about God in some way, shape or form, then we'll often try to formulate what some people call affections or what some people call resolutions, where in, in marveling at the mysteries of God and things in light of God, you kind of push them through your heart and you say, wow, like, Lord, help me to respond to the grace that you have revealed to me in this time. You know, help me to be shaped by the grace that you have revealed to me in this time, or whatever else you might say. That doesn't necessarily mean that you say at the end of a time of prayer like, I am definitely going to do X, Y, or Z. Like, it's not resolution in the sense that this all relies on you. But what you're trying to do is motivate a more perfect response to what has been revealed and mediated in the dispensation of salvation.

So then, yeah, you have this next stage, as it were, which helps you to concretize, right? It helps you to apply. It helps you to take home. And then St. Francis de Sales will say that you conclude time of prayer with a little thanksgiving, with gathering together what he calls a little spiritual bouquet. You'll sometimes hear it described as a spiritual nosegay, but like the freshest flowers from your time of meditation

and affections, and you pull together a little bouquet so that way you can kind of sniff it throughout the course of the day and recall the beautiful scent of what passed probably in the morning. I think a lot of us pray in the morning. So yeah, that's like a basic shape of prayer. You'll have also heard probably about the steps of Lectio Divina. Typically they're enumerated as four. What first is reading, oratio.

Second is meditating, meditatio. Third is prayer, oratio. And fourth is contemplation or contemplatio. And the basic idea here is, you know, we're, we're prepared for this in so far as we've talked about the broader act of reading, reflecting, and then meditating, but that you read the text, you kind of permit the text very slowly to work on you. You, you know, different people have different images whereby to describe this stage of reading, but one will say, you know, like you're working over a piece of cloth and trying to find

certain, not imperfections in the cloth, but certain things in the cloth that stand out to you. And then with meditation, you begin to pull on those imperfections or pull on those things that stand out. So there might be a phrase in the sacred page where you'd be like, that's weird, or why is it that our Lord does that? Or how was he motivated to respond in that particular way? And then this becomes the kind of discursive meditation whereby you work over the mystery, you work over the encounter. Now in the context of Ignatian prayer, for instance, it's more typical that you would picture yourself in the scene as one of the Dramatis persona, which is cool if that works for you. And in kind of gauging the different ways in which the persons in the text or in the story relate, then you yourself experience something of that in its depths and in its

intimacy. And so after having meditated, then you start to pray as it were to form these affections or resolutions, which is to say to ask the Lord for the graces that are, you know, revealed and mediated in this text and to ask the Lord for a deeper love and, you know, fidelity to the things that you have encountered. And then contemplation is just the recognition that it's for God basically to reveal Himself and then to mediate His interior life according to His own sovereign designs. And in contemplation we typically think of ourselves as more receptive to the revelation of God,

or as kind of like laid bare before the revelation of God. So it's not so much something that you do as something that God does unto you, while not wholly bypassing your mind and your heart, yet still kind of bringing them along in a more steady and constant way. So yeah, other considerations that you might think about in meditation is sometimes it's worthwhile to look into the origins of a particular prayer. So some people have considerations about centering prayer or mindfulness. There's a debate, there's an ongoing debate. I'm not going to weigh in on it because I don't actually know enough about the subject. But there's an ongoing debate of how much the actual form of meditation

is related to the origins. This also comes up with yoga. So I think it's a good question to ask and it's good to consult experts on the subject. I myself am not an expert on the subject, but what you want to make sure is that, you know, like Christ is at the center of your prayer. So I think often centering prayer is its practice in a non-Christian context. I mean, it doesn't have Christ at the center. And there's a question as to whether it should be imported into Christianity insofar as it seems like without the bounds of the Christian Church that it seems

inimical to the Christian shape of prayer. Or at least that's, I've heard people make those arguments. And then a similar thing with like mindfulness and and yoga insofar as their world, religion, origins are make those arguments. And then a similar thing with like mindfulness and and yoga in so far as their world religion origins are non-Christian. And then, and the specifically in the case of yoga, since it's an embodied type of meditation and the, you know, bodily postures that one assumes are postures of worship, that's another big thing that causes concern. And I think justly so. But again, not not an expert, so I'm not going to weigh in any further because there are people who are far better studied, far better informed about

those matters than I myself am. But I think that it's good to kind of have those in mind when you begin a prayer practice. So it's good to start with the greats, you know, the saints and their recommendations for the life of prayer. One thing that you'll find throughout the tradition is a call to recollection, and it's something that I've mentioned throughout the course of this video and I want to conclude with. So, you know, John Cashin, when you read one of his conferences, he'll talk about how some of the monks will pray, Oh God, come to my assistance, O Lord, make haste to

help me, semi-continuously throughout the day so as to recall God's holy presence. And then you'll read in the medieval tradition the practice of the presence of God by Brother Lawrence of the resurrection, how he recommends a similar kind of modality of prayer, constantly recalling to mind the presence of God so that you can abide in it. And then you think about the hesychast movement, this idea with like the Jesus prayer saying it in and out with your own life breath, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me as sinner, amen. So there are various notes sounded throughout the course of the tradition that encourage us to a kind of recollection. And I think that this is a very important practice,

because it's one way by which to push back against the general tendency of this present evil age to creep into our mind and heart without our even realizing it or seemingly consenting to it. It's a way of kind of carving out a sacred space within which we can abide. And so one thing that I do is I set an alarm mid-morning and mid-afternoon during my long work periods. And during that time, I just, you know, close my eyes or recall myself to the presence of God or make it just a short visit to the chapel. So I recognize the fact that as a religious, you know, living next to the

church, I am spoiled in that regard, but all of us have the ability to check in with the Lord more consciously at certain times throughout the day and to break this conversation, which we are often in the habit of conducting with ourselves about ourselves, open to God so that we can have a conversation with Him, about Him, which is infinitely more sanctifying and infinitely less anxiety inducing. So if you would like to hear more about Christian prayer, the practice of Christian prayer, I contribute to a podcast called Catholic Classics with Ascension Press. The first season that we did was about the introduction to the devout life, so that's

a good resource if you are interested. But any of the authors that I've mentioned to this point I think will be valuable in your studies and in your formation. So that's what I wanted to say. This is Pince of the Quinas. If you haven't yet, please do subscribe to the channel, push the bell, get email updates when sweet things come out. Also, if you haven't yet checked out God's Planning, Do So, it's a podcast that I contribute

to with four of the Dominican friars, and we often talk about prayer. So it's kind of like all things Catholic but with the intent of helping you to live a contemplative life in the midst of a busy and yuckitude. That's a noun. Yucky world. At times yucky. So there's that. And then the last thing is we've got our Dominican Rosary Pilgrimage coming up at the end of the month. So that's September 30th in Washington, D.C. at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. Check out rosarypilgrimage.org for more details. And then the last, last thing is, God's planning, we have a young adult retreat in Malvern, Pennsylvania, just outside of Philadelphia, November 3rd through 5th, and applications

remain open for that for the next several weeks or few weeks, I should say. So I look forward to seeing you there, to meeting you there, to praying with you there at those last two events. Okay, that's all I got for you. Know of my prayers for you. Please pray for me, and I'll look forward to chatting with you next time on Pines with Aquinas.