Copyright: This article is reprinted with permission from Spirituality (January-February, 1998) on the Lift Up Your Hearts web site http://www.worship.ca/.

Pneuma is a journal on spiritual direction and formation in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada. Paul T. Harris, who lives in Ottawa, is Canadian Coordinator of Christian Meditation and each year gives retreats and seminars in Canada and abroad.

In a recent issue of the New Yorker magazine there is a cartoon of a heavenly office with a very elaborate closed door marked "God." A secretary with wings sits outside the office. Along comes a worried man, sheaves of paper in his hands, who says to the secretary,"Is he the God of the Old or New Testament this morning?"

Unfortunately many Christians have been conditioned from early childhood to have a warped Old Testament image of God. We think of God as either being a harsh judge of our frailty or as being distant from ourselves. He is the God of Genesis, a Sistine Chapel God who sits somewhere way out there and created the world. The problem with this image of God is that he seems far away and distant.This image portrays a God outside of us.

Thomas Merton, the American Cistercian monk (1915-1968), points out that for many people God is a sphinx-like and arbitrary force bearing down upon us with implacable hostility, leading us to lose faith in a God we cannot find it possible to love. For some people God is a God of retribution, a policeman, a bogeyman. But God is not pitted against us, he is not our adversary or our taskmaster from whose anger we try to escape. This is not a New Testament image of God. The New Testament image of God in St. John's gospel tells us that in fact he is just the opposite, that he is the deepest source within us, an inner presence that is closer to us and deeper within ourselves than our own conscious self.

Jesus gives us an aspect of the real image of his Father in the story of the prodigal son. The prodigal son leaves his father and sins in the big city. When he returns his father doesn't criticize him, judge him, isn't even angry with him. In fact, it's just the opposite. The father embraces the son, declares a holiday, and kills the fatted calf for a big celebration. This is the New Testament image of God. A God who loves us, embraces us, can hardly wait to welcome us back when we have strayed. This is the God who says, "Behold I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come and eat with them and they with me" (Rev. 3:20).

But this prodigal son story still falls short of the New Testament image of God. St. John's gospel is all about a God who lives within us. In the practice of daily meditation we are involved with the inner Jesus who dwells in our hearts. This is the Jesus who lives within us and tells us, "in that day you will know that I live in the Father, and you live in me, and I in you" (John 14:20). Meditation is this inner journey to find God within. But in reality we do not have to seek God's presence. He is already within us. He has already found us. We must simply experience and realize this truth through the spiritual discipline of our daily periods of meditation. And as the Irish Benedictine monk and teacher of meditation, John Main (1926-1982) says, "in some mysterious way God reveals himself to us in the silence of meditation."

This is the inner Christ in St. John's gospel who says, "make your home in me, as I make mine in you. If anyone loves me they will keep my word, and my Father will love them and we shall come to them and make our home with them" (John 14:23). "I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me, bears fruit in plenty" (John 15:5). "God is love and anyone who lives in love lives in God and God lives in them" (1 John 4:16). This living within is beautifully acknowledged by St. Paul in his letter to the Ephesians. "Out of his infinite glory, may he give you the power through his Spirit for your hidden self to grow strong, so that Christ may live in your hearts through faith, and then, planted in love and built on love, you will, with all the saints, have the strength to grasp the breadth and the length, the height and the depth; until knowing the love of Christ, which is beyond all knowledge, you are filled with the utter fullness of God" (3:16-19).

In the writings of St. John and St. Paul, we discover the risen Christ of the New Testament who lives within us. But how can we find this God within? The answer: by becoming silent and still before the Lord in daily periods of meditation. Christian Meditation is a contemplative spiritual path and daily discipline that manifests itself in the growth of love in our life and relationships because it turns us away from egotism to be absorbed in Christ.

But this seeking after silence in meditation is not easy. Even Christ and the apostles got caught up at times in activity and busyness. In Mark's gospel it is recorded that one day the apostles gathered around Jesus and reported to him all they had done and taught. Then, because there were so many people coming and going, Mark says, "they did not even have a chance to eat." Jesus at this point, observing the frenzied activity, said to the twelve, "come with me by yourselves to a quiet place" (6:31). Mark continues that they went away by themselves in a boat to a solitary place. How many times in the gospels does Jesus withdraw to pray in a solitary place?

This is the heart of Christian Meditation; we also have to withdraw each day from excessive noise and activity and find God in the solitary place of our own heart.

And just as Jesus and the apostles were caught up in activity, we also often allow our lives to become too busy, too noisy. We live in an age of frenetic activity. Television and radio programs bombard us.We have wall-to-wall distractions. Anthropologists tell us we are cramming in twice as much noise and activity into our lives as our ancestors. We have lost the contemplative dimension of life, and we are paying the price. Noise is drowning our the voice of God. Like Jesus and the apostles, we must withdraw to a solitary place, into the inner silence of our own soul. Meditation is therefore both a psychological as well as a spiritual need.

Christian Meditation is also a Trinitarian prayer. John Main elaborates on this in one of his talks when he says: "The Prayer of Jesus is just like a rushing torrent flowing between Jesus and the Father. What we have to do is to plunge ourselves into that and be swept along by it. It is a torrent of love, not a torrent of words and that is why we have to learn to be totally silent."

Christian Meditation is about entering into this prayer of Christ, into the life, the risen life of the glorified humanity of Christ and following his way to the Father. As already mentioned John's gospel is all about an inner Christ: "The Father dwells in me. . . The Father and I are one. . . He who has seen me has seen the Father. . . Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?" (John 14:10, 10:30, 14:9-10). Meditation is participating in this love that flows between the persons of the Trinity.

Thomas Merton in his booklet What Is Contemplation? points out that the promise of Jesus that he and the Father would come to abide with us "is essentially the same beatitude as the blessed enjoy in heaven."

We need to understand that this prayer of the Trinity is already present with the Christian meditator; the reality of the Kingdom is already present in the centre of our being. We simply need to become conscious of this reality through daily periods of silent meditation. The fourteenth century Julian of Norwich, one of the greatest Trinitarians, helps us here. She says, "where Jesus appears the blessed Trinity is understood."

St. Irenaeus puts this Trinitarian prayer in another way. He says that the Spirit comes to seize us and give us to the Son, and the Son gives us to the Father. Whatever way we understand it, the practice of Christian Meditation ultimately reveals itself as the silent life of the Trinity praying within us.