Adventures in Prayer: Meditative Prayer

Chapter 13 is entitled Meditative Prayer.  I have never much understood the practice of meditation, perhaps because the term has been so marred through its current, secular, more-popular meaning of emptying our minds of anything that is good and allowing ridiculousness to fill it up while we twist our bodies into strange knots.  But this chapter really seized my heart.  Foster distinguishes these two types of meditation: “It is the ethical call to repentance, to change, to obedience that clearly distinguishes Christian meditation from it eastern and secular counterparts.  The story of Jim and Jogging Monk touched my heart, because I am certainly Jim, unable to slow down enough, unable to rest and let go and receive from God or meditate on a simple text for that long.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s words are perfect: “Just as you do not analyze the words of someone you love, but accept them as they are said to you, accept the Word of Scripture and ponder it in your heart.”  Now, there is good caution here.  I have been trained to be oh so careful about placing myself in the middle of scripture, because plenty of what is written cannot be directly applied to me.  How often well-meaning young believers have perhaps “claimed” promises in Scripture that were never meant to be claimed as promises (i.e. Prov. 22:6)!  But that is not what is meant here, this is a different idea entirely.  This is for those place in scripture with clear meanings (we probably wouldn’t meditate on problem passage in the New Testament that scholars argue over—although perhaps it might help the arguments if scholars meditated more!), where we need to learn to move from our heads to our hearts. I am challenged in this way:  I read through the Bible, is its entirety, each year.  This year is my 10th time through the Bible, and I love this spiritual exercise because I love getting to take in the whole of scripture, plus it keeps me on track with reading and keeps me from getting lazy!  However, as I read this, I’m challenged.  Is reading through the whole Bible a thing of pride right now? Would I be willing to let that discipline go and say, read only 52 verses this year, meditating on one verse for an entire week?  That sounds like more than I can handle, and I don’t want to jump from one extreme to another, but it does make me wonder.  I do know one thing for certain, less quantity and more quality, at least for a season.  I need God to do a fresh work in my reading of Scripture, to engage my heart more than my head.