Meditation has a Role in our Faiths

by Bill Tammeus - The Kansas City Star

The Western world is increasingly full of opportunities to learn about and engage in meditative practices, religious and secular.

Several weeks ago when I was in the Washington, D.C., area attending a seminar on religion, I heard the Rev. Martin Marty, a widely published religious expert, say this:

“I believe in meditation but I just can’t do it. I get too relaxed and fall asleep. But just because I can’t meditate doesn’t mean I can’t be spiritual.”

Marty’s friends know that he regularly engages in what he calls “power naps.” They generally last only eight or nine minutes, and he sets an alarm on his cell phone to wake him up — quite refreshed, he says.

But his comment about meditation has moved me to think about its role in religious practice. It turns out meditation is one of those techniques or traditions that crosses all kinds of religious lines. It is mostly associated with Eastern religions, but also has had a long and honored place in the Abrahamic faiths — Judaism, Christianity and Islam (or at least the mystic path of Islam, Sufism).

Meditation is not a big part of the Protestant tradition of which I’m a part. Oh, you can find some Christians in my area of the faith who engage in contemplative prayer or something called centering prayer. But, truth be told, a lot of us seem to be satisfied with what true contemplatives and people who do serious meditation probably would call drive-by prayer.

A few years ago I attended a weekend-long retreat on contemplative prayer — and confirmed I am not a contemplative, though I was glad to know more about the practice. Nor do I have much experience with meditation, though I saw it practiced in various ways when I lived in India for two years as a boy.

But the world — and increasingly the Western world — is full of opportunities to learn about and engage in meditative practices, both religious and secular.

I think the most engaging book I’ve read on this subject is Keeping Faith: A Skeptic’s Journey, by University of Arizona scholar Fenton Johnson. In it, Johnson describes growing up Catholic (in fact, as a neighbor of a famous Catholic monastery in rural Kentucky) but having to find his way back to Catholicism through experiencing the meditative practices of Buddhism.

There also are countless other books by people who have become known as meditation leaders. For instance, Sant Rajinder Singh Ji Maharaj, a native of India who was educated as a scientist in the United States, has written such books as Inner and Outer Peace Through Meditation and Empowering Your Soul Through Meditation.

The common thread, if there is one, among practitioners of meditation seems to be a desire to tap into the benefits — physical, emotional and spiritual — of focusing one’s mind in healthy ways. The term meditation gets used to refer to many kinds of practices, including prayer. So it’s hard to be very specific about what meditation is. But concentrating the mind in some way seems nearly always to be part of it, and it has been adopted even in many parts of the secular world as a tool for achieving better physical and mental health.

Some religious traditions use meditation as a primary tool. Buddhism certainly fits in that category. Indeed, Buddhists often name and distinguish between and among various types of meditation, such as “samatha” and “vipassana,” each of which has its role in the effort to achieve what the Buddhists call enlightenment.

But other faiths make use of meditative techniques, even when they don’t always call what’s going on meditation. In Catholicism, for instance, saying the rosary sometimes is classified as a type of meditation that focuses on a specific object. Even in Eastern Orthodoxy, one finds a historic movement called “hesychasm” — sometimes “quietism” — that relies on a mystic tradition of meditation and other aspects of asceticism to move one toward a mysterious light.

A simple Google search on the word meditation will yield 68 million Web pages dealing with the subject. That’s not as many as the 130 million that show up when the word “prayer” is the search subject, but it’s a pretty crowded collection of sources of information.

In a world full of profound religious anger and violence, maybe we should pay more attention to a technique that can put Martin Marty to sleep. It’s hard, after all, to meditate and murder at the same time.

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