Wednesday, November 24, 2004
STILLNESS IN MEDITATION
Robert brought up the issue of emptying oneself during prayer vs. filling oneself with thoughts of God.
John Paul II has indicated that we need to recapture the mystery of Eastern Christianity, and so Orthodox meditation practices are of primary interest.
In PATHS TO THE HEART: SUFISM AND THE CHRISTIAN EAST, Vincent Rossi is describing hesychia with this quote:
Summing up the value of stillness coupled with the Prayer of Jesus, St. Hesychios adds that the way of hesychia with the invocation of the Jesus Prayer preserves all the precious gifts that keep all evil at bay:
(Quoting St. Hesychios:)
We should strive to preserve the precious gifts which preserve us from all evil, whether on the plane of the senses or on that of the intellect. These gifts are the guarding of the intellect with the invocation of Jesus Christ, continuous insight into the heart's depths, stillness of mind unbroken even by thoughts which appear to be good, and the capacity to be empty of all thought. (p. 76-77)
While it's true that repeating the Jesus prayer is not the same as a completely empty mind, his description still more closely fits an empty mind of Eastern meditation than it does western meditation which concentrates on thoughts of God, such as the mysteries of the rosary.
As you can guess, I had a hard time with that particular passage.
(For readers who are not familiar with the Jesus prayer, it has a couple of forms. One of them is "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner." Another form is simply repeating the word "Jesus" over and over. Justin, are there other forms?)
