Friday, June 10, 2005

The Discipline of Meditation

Its been a long week of deadlines (hence no blog posts), but thankfully I got chance to read this next chapter of Celebration of Discipline earlier on. My thoughts are recapped here:
"Christian meditation, very simply, is the ability to hear God's voice and obey his word."
Great! That sounds so simple...but I was struck by the reference Foster then makes to the Garden of Eden.

"Adam and Eve talked with God and God talked with them - they were in communion. Then came the Fall...Adam and Eve hid from God"
That got me thinking - just how many different ways do I try to hide from God? Too much work (particularly in my case this week), need to spend time with friends, too sleepy (often as a result of the previous two). I've listed some pretty lame excuses here, but the scary thing is - I've actually used them, and way too often. God isn't fooled by all this. What's needed 'down under' (I work with lots of Aussies!) is an attitude change. My heart needs to feast again on the delights of knowing God, to be struck once again by who he is.

I say the following with full-knowledge that I can only change with God's help. (But I know he wants to help me, so its time I got on with it!) Meditation is one way to get my heart straight. As Foster says,
"In meditation...The perpetual presence of the Lord (omnipresence, as we say) moves from a theological dogma into a radiant reality. 'He walks with me and he talks with me' ceases to be pious jargon and instead becomes a straight-forward description of daily life."
That's where I wanna get to. To experience the 'intense intimacy and awful reverence' of God, not some cheap idea of a mushy friendship which I seem to have been happy to settle with.

"For to be in the presence of God is to change." This echos the words on my heart.
"Regardless of how it is done, the aim is to center the attention of the body, the emotions, the mind, and the spirit upon 'the glory of God in the face of Christ' 2 Cor 4:6"
This will be my plumbline as I delve in deeper. Time to get on with it...

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