Meditation for Thursday 19th September 2024
It takes faith to regularly be committed to meditation practice. So what is faith? Well, let me give you an example. A student of Christology, i.e. the study of Christ, gained top marks in his end of year exams and yet he was not a believer. He was an avid fan of the philosophy of Christ but in writing his thesis he was not doing theology. The starting point in theology is faith.
With meditation you can play on the fringes by reading and going to seminars about meditation but it’s not until you are committed to practice that you are faithful. To be a sincere meditator you need to have faith in the process, a faith that brings you to meditation every day. The Hebrew verb ‘amān’ means to be firm, to be solid, to be true, to have faith. When we have faithin meditation we accept unequivocally its benefits.
Theology is often said to be “faith seeking understanding.” In the same way meditation can be about knowledge but not of the type that is assimilated independently of our belief or faith in meditation.
Faith in our daily practice is a solid reality of hope, the conviction that meditation is true. So while our act of faith in our meditation practice has an intellectual element it is not just any act of the intellect; it is thinking with assent, it is faith.
So to sum up! Faith is not merely knowledge in the cognitive or intellectual sense, although it is that, too; it is a knowledge which implies trust and total commitment, a commitment of the heart as well as the mind.
Meditation
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