Practices: Meditation

Slowly, day by day and year by year, meditation is becoming my favorite practice.  It has truly been years in the coming.  I remember reading books and sitting cross-legged on my bed at home, in my late teens or early twenties, counting my breaths up to four, then starting over again.  Mostly didn't get to four very often, and mostly didn't try very consistently, but it's been something that has called to me, quietly and patiently, over the intervening forty years.

Here's how we think of meditation in the Lindisfarne Community: "Daily periods of personal meditation and stillness; resting in the presence of God." (Italics mine.)  Stillness, resting, the presence of God.  Just now I experience those things more in their absence than in their presence.  But the absence does not feel a deprivation.  It feels more like an open space, a cave or a corridor, which invites exploration, and reverence, and trust - which is the root meaning of the word "faith."

Slowly, day by day and year by year, I am absorbing the message that God doesn't need me to do, or even to be, anything in particular in order to be loved.  I'm not quite convinced enough to trust that message yet, but it is only in the times I set aside for silence and stillness and contemplation that I can even entertain it.  Only in those moments when I'm not busy "earning" something (income, respect, self-image) or "doing" something (laundry, work, planning the laundry, planning the next work project) that I can remember that those things aren't all that necessary, at least to my relationship with God.

One side note: having a cat is a terrific aid to meditation.  My little Buddy loves "doing prayers" together.  Once he's on my lap breathing quietly, he keeps me in my seat far longer than I would stay by myself.  It's a good discipline.  If I can't stay focused on my own breathing I can listen to his.  If I can't yet feel God's love, I can feel Buddy's love and trust in me.  The best thing I can say about my times of meditation now is that I crave them, I miss them when I don't get to work it into the day.  And I know that Buddy misses them, too.

Maybe that sense of "missing" is all of a piece with the sense of "absence" and openness about the practice of meditation.  I will take that possibility into stillness with me next time I sit.