Walk into any busy Zen center and you will more than likely find Christians practicing meditation. Many famous Christians, including Thomas Merton; Trappist monk, poet, writer and social activist, recommended meditation as a means of directly communicating with God. Whatever we can do to calm our worldly minds so that we can hear God, (through the noise of ourselves), is a good thing.
Meditation is a form of concentrated, high-power prayer that can quickly bring you closer to God. When we are able to purify our hearts, we open to God in ways previously unapproachable. Before, when we were tied up in knots with all kinds of worries and concerns, (things that God views as silly), He would wonder why we had such little faith!
Therefore, if we want to purify our hearts and concern ourselves less with selfish things not relating to God, we need some good advice. The trouble is; simple instructions and tips on how to purify ourselves in a practical manner are difficult to find. If someone tells us to, "Be good!" that doesn't quite cut it as far as a being a proactive method to clear our heads and become one with God.
Of course, some just wait around for God to bless them with grace. This is fine, but if you find that your worries and concerns are not abating, and that your life is becoming more complicated and stressed rather than simplified and content, maybe God is waiting for you to get off your duff and take some action yourself; to show Him that you are willing to go that extra mile! You know, "God helps those that help themselves, etc."
Meditation has nothing to do with religion. Religion is in its own world, and if we try to bring religiosity into meditation, then meditation cannot fulfill its function. Meditation has to do with the human mind; that's where meditation is grounded. Until we understand our human mind, we can't get past its interference so that we can directly communicate with God, and until we can directly communicate with God, our troubles will only continue and worsen. When we depend upon our minds to save us rather than God, we are foolish, and this is what we do every day if we are honest with ourselves. We think that we are smarter than God, but when we look at our lives, are we?
Unfortunately, there are many instructions on how to worship and how we should act as Christians, but few good instructions on how to transcend this worldly mind of ours. This is a shame, because to really hear God speaking to us, we have to get over ourselves! Getting over ourselves would make such a dramatic change in our lives.
We might want to purify our hearts, but how do we go about it? "Acting like a Christian" by mimicking other pure hearts; i.e. trying to become a Mother Teresa, doesn't do us much good. That is only playacting. The important thing is to make a fundamental change within ourselves so that instead of playacting, our hearts truly become pure. This is the challenge.
If we are prejudicial and fearful, and view meditation as a new age, hippy, anti-Christian thing, we are missing the boat. Meditation has been the quintessential method of directly communicating with the metaphysical, which would be God, perfected over thousands of years and probably a method used by many of the prophets in the Bible. Prayer, on the other hand, a derivative form of meditation, is mostly devoted to our worldly pursuits nowadays, "Please God, let me win the lottery," but meditation weans us from this narrowness and is more useful in transcending our stubborn selfish identity, and switches us on to God.
Meditation is not easy, however. It's not light and love as many may think. Meditation is serious business, as is the pursuit of God. Meditation is for Christians who understand where salvation really lies, which is in God's hands . . . and beyond themselves.
E. Raymond Rock of Fort Myers, Florida is cofounder and principal teacher at the Southwest Florida Insight Center, http://www.SouthwestFloridaInsightCenter.com His twenty-eight years of meditation experience has taken him across four continents, including two stopovers in Thailand where he practiced in the remote northeast forests as an ordained Theravada Buddhist monk. His book, A Year to Enlightenment (Career Press/New Page Books) is now available at major bookstores and online retailers. Visit http://www.AYearToEnlightenment.com