The World Of Christian Meditation

Christopher Harding explores it:

People from all sorts of Churches — and none — come together to practise: meditation builds its own ‘community of faith’, Freeman says — faith, in this sense, being ‘our capacity for relationship, for enduring, transcending the instinct to run away and have an easier time somewhere else’.

This is ‘faith’, then, not as some watered-down alternative to propositional belief, but a commitment made and remade even while its object comes into view only gradually and uncertainly (‘through a glass, darkly’, as St Paul put it). It’s a commitment, too, to facing whatever silence throws at you. Boredom and busy schedules are familiar obstacles in any meditation practice, Christian or otherwise, but tougher still are those times when practitioners find themselves frightened or unwilling to follow where the silence seems to be leading them. Questions of theology and Church teaching will come up, of course, but Freeman insists that we must allow them to emerge in the midst of all the other doubts — about ourselves and the world — that arise as we practise. As he puts it, meditation ‘opens Pandora’s box… everything starts to look different’.