CHRISTIAN MEDITATION:
GUIDED BY HOLY SPIRIT
Nithin
The basis of
Christianity is “the experience of God.” It is not an intellectual experience
but experiencing His love with our hearts. Christian meditation is a method of
prayer to experience God with our heart. In this method of prayer only our
heart is used not our head. Be still and silent and invoke the Holy Spirit to
guide us and slowly repeat the ‘manthra’ and be fully in the love of
God. This is the egoless prayer and the perfect prayer. This is an ‘Affective’
method of prayer in which we are not seeking the help of our own intellect but
rather we allow ourselves to be guided by Holy Spirit.
I remember when
I was doing the first year of Philosophy we had a subject called ‘Spiritual
Theology’. In that class the professor taught us about two kinds of prayer
methods and the examples that he used to explain those methods gives the clear
indication of how to do those prayers. In Sanskrit we call them: “markada
marga” and “marjara marga”. The term markada means ‘monkey’
and the term marjara means ‘cat’. We know how these animals take care of
their small ones. The small child of monkey has to take effort to hold tightly
to its mother when she moves from one place to another but, the kitten, the
small one of cat, doesn’t have any effort when it is moved from one place to
another. It is taken in the mouth of the mother safely. The two methods of
prayers are also same as the above examples. In the affective prayer we do not
have much effort, we allow Holy Spirit to guide us but in the speculative
method of prayer we must use our intellect and our imagination; it requires our
efforts much. So the Christian Meditation is an affective prayer where we
experience the love of god without much effort of our intellect.
Now going more
deep into the Christian meditation we can see that it is an ‘ego less prayer’.
So to make our meditation effective we must find our true self by denying the
ego self. Denying the ego self is as painful as denying ourselves and taking
our daily crosses. The means and end of Christian meditation is Renunciation;
not possessing God. We find our true self in the Christian meditation. Our true
self is the image of God and to know God we need the help of Holy Spirit. That
is why we invoke the Holy Spirit at the beginning of the meditation and ask to
guide us. As a conclusion we can say
that Christian meditation is all about our relationship with God not knowledge
of Him. What actually happens is god seeks us not we seek him. He Himself helps
us to understand our true self. It is a journey of spiritual life through
Christ to the Father.
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