5 Good Pieces of Advice About Meditation

Section Two: The Prayer Filled Life

Thomas Merton 1915 -68
Excepts from Contemplative Prayer

Meditation:

1. Meditation should not look like a method or a system but an attitude or an outlook in prayer. There are ways to go  in meditation but one should not expect to magical systems which will make all the difficulties go away.
2. Meditation is sometimes quite difficult.
3. Merton suggests that certain temptations and delusions are to regarded as a normal part of the life of prayer. I find this fact quite concerning, especially when he says that it can in some instances put us in spiritual danger if we go off the right track.
4. For this reason he suggests we need to be open to sound advice. A Spiritual Director is someone who is capable guiding the beginner in prayer while detecting signs of misguided zeal and wrong effort. He  suggests that the results of direction will probably be more focussed on developing humility and patience in developing our insight through our difficulties.
5. Merton suggests one can  begin to face the real difficulties of our life of prayer and meditation unless one is perfectly content to be a beginner and really experience the fact one knows little or nothing about the subject and is prepared to be desperate to learn the bare rudiments. 

My own experience with meditation has been erratic and reasonably undisciplined. I totally agree that meditation can be difficult for a 21st Century Christian. Being a child of "The Age" I wanted to grab the skill, master it and move on. Well let me suggest that I did move on without much success. So that is the state of the play, I do not have a great degree of success in meditation. I may however  be accomplished in moving on!!

However what this article did do, was remind me hat I had a Spiritual Director for a couple of years who walked me through a difficult phase of my spiritual life. As the picture below suggests it did not always make the water smooth............................................... but there was a path to follow.

Maybe it is time to look at going back to my Spiritual Director.

 Definitely a worthwhile insight with or without meditation..