Meditational Prayer

[Paidiske]

Personally I've found Ignatian-style (imaginative) meditation allows for genuinely transformative encounter with God.

Now strictly speaking that's a discipline the Catholics developed, but it's not really polite for Orthodox members to come and lecture Anglicans about what we're doing wrong in our own forum, is it?

 

[God's Child]

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[everbecoming2007]

Personally I've found Ignatian-style (imaginative) meditation allows for genuinely transformative encounter with God.

Now strictly speaking that's a discipline the Catholics developed, but it's not really polite for Orthodox members to come and lecture Anglicans about what we're doing wrong in our own forum, is it?

There was a comment above remarking that Centering Prayer does not involve emptying the mind. This may be correct. I was taught to sit in God's presence: God is the focus of the meditation. I do not know how uniform this approach to centering prayer is.

 

[everbecoming2007]

I found in the past that centering prayer causes me too much anxiety to practice alone or regularly as do short repetitive mantra like prayers. I have to design my own prayers with a similar rhythm as the Rosary with different prayers breaking the monotony of the rhythm or it really affects my mind adversely, so I do use a Rosary but only in the way stated.

I find that since I most often must recite it privately the Daily Office is a meditation experience in my case. Some part of it catches my attention and I find myself without trying pondering that one bit for the rest of the Office or even subsequent Offices.

Sometimes after the Office I find myself simply sitting in silence.

 

[raschau]

Reformed theologian Emil Brunner had this to say:

There is, of course, a form of prayer which has in it nothing offensive to reason, namely meditation, quietism and contemplative absorption. To lose oneself in the divine mystery, to give oneself up to the feeling of reverence in the presence of the Inscrutable, the truth above all truths, the Being above all beings, the Ground and Abyss of all being, is an act which seems reasonable to thought. For this reason the “withdrawal of the intention of the One which never comes to our natural sight but must be conjured up with effort” appears as “recollection of the Spirit and turning inward of the same upon itself.” (Fichte). We need such moments of studied detachment from the distraction of sensuous life, in order to bring home the eternal truth to ourselves and to recollect ourselves.