ON CONTEMPLATIVE PRAYER

Some thoughts regarding meditating prayer and "the new spirituality."

A former Hindu has stated that Hindus do not pray--they only meditate. Practitioners of eastern mystical religions do not pray for reason that to them no personal God exists to pray to. To them God is identified in the creation--in people, animals, trees, rocks, and so forth--and because the immanent equates to the divine, through meditation these mystics seek only "the silence," a paranormal sense of their union with the cosmos.

But biblical Christianity possesses a different mindset with regards to prayer. Christians pray to a personal Creator. Jesus instructed disciples to pray in words. Other great prayers in Scripture consist of thoughts linked to words and propositions. In the Great Commandment Jesus tells disciples that they are to "love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your heart, and with all your mind " (Matt. 22:37). Rational and loving discourse between the beloved and their God lies at the heart of the biblical faith. Yet despite this overwhelming evidence, there are those within the evangelical tradition instructing us to seek to pray in an alternative way.

Richard Foster offers guidelines for prayer at variance with the biblical examples and instructions. He advises that, "Every distraction of the body, mind, and spirit must be put into a kind of suspended animation before this deep work of God upon the soul can occur. . . . There comes inner silence, peace, stillness. During such a time Bible reading, sermons, intellectual debate--all fail to move or excite us."[1] To achieve such a state of soul, he advises repeating the same word (mantra) and breathing exercises. Resulting from these stimuli, prayer becomes a non-rational state of soul ("new consciousness") induced by repeating a word or listening to one's breaths. Contemplative prayer seeks to bypass the logical and verbal to experience God. Prayer becomes neither thinking nor talking, but just "the silence." For them prayer lies beyond words, including the words of the Bible.

So what should the Christian discern about this? First, let it be said that the Scriptures are not against meditation. One cannot read the Psalms without noting their emphasis upon the exercise. Wrote David, "I will meditate on Thy precepts . . ." (Ps. 119:15-16; see Ps. 1:2b). Paul instructed, "Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, let your mind dwell on these things" (Phil. 4:8). But Scripture points out that meditation/contemplation is to be directed upon God's words (Josh. 1:8) and God's works (Ps. 143:5), which then direct the reader to consider God's person (Ps. 119:55). Meditation is thinking upon something rather than trying to induce a state of nothing in one's own soul.

Second, the love relationship between God and His people is personal, and between two persons, love is communicated in words. In thinking upon their spouse, husbands and wives say to each other, "I love you!" Loving relationships are based upon good communication. God rationally communicated His love for us in the Bible and through His Son, the Logos. Why should we expect that the experience of love expressed between God and His children should be any different? Words attend to love.

For reason of the state of soul it attempts to induce among its practitioners, Contemplative Prayer is not scriptural. Rather it belongs to the family of mystical religion.

Pastor Larry DeBruyn

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[1] Richard J. Foster, Celebration of Discipline, rev. ed. (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988) 103. See also Foster quoting Thomas Merton, Prayer (San Francisco: Harper, 1992) 160.