DAVID TORKINGTON: on the rise and demise of meditation
The role of Our Lady in the first decades of early Christianity cannot be exaggerated. That God left her on earth to be our Mother was so that she should teach the first Christians by both word and example how to develop their prayer lives. She did this in such a way that, in her Son Jesus Christ, they could be united with God the Father who had created them to enjoy eternal life with Him in the next life. She did not just want to guide people through meditation into contem-plation so that they could enjoy sublime otherworldly experiences of God’s love, but something much more. She wanted them to receive the fruits of Contemplation as both she and her son had done. For without these supernatural gifts, her son would not be able to con-tinue his redemptive work through them as intended.
Both she, the apostles, and the first disciples therefore taught new-comers how to come to know and love Jesus, as they did whilst He was on earth. It was for this reason that they introduced a new form of prayer called meditation. This practice was encouraged at four specific times. At nine o’clock in the morning, they were told to medi-tate on Christ’s condemnation to death, the scourging at the pillar, and the crowning with thorns. At midday, they were to meditate on His crucifixion and the sufferings that He had to endure as He was being nailed to the Cross. At three o’clock in the afternoon, they were to meditate on his death and the gruelling agonising moments that preceded his final act of Love. Christians were also encouraged to rise at midnight to meditate on the Resurrection. This of course might seem too much to ask of modern Catholics, but remember be-fore electric lights, people tended to go to bed much earlier than we do and rise much earlier too. For ancient people the evening was the time to tell stories at the fireside. With no distractions from the Mass Media, ordinary people developed prodigious memories. Some Jews, for instance, knew almost all the Bible by heart just as some Greeks came to know the Iliad and the Odyssey by heart.
For the early Christians, these evening get-togethers were the times when those who had known Christ personally heard endless stories about His life, death, and Resurrection and committed them to memory. At the weekly Mass, sometimes two or three Apostles or disciples would electrify their congregation telling stories of all that Christ said and did. But notice, when it specifically came to teaching their followers how to meditate, it was not on Christ’s life in general that they were taught to reflect, but on the most perfect act of Love ever enacted, when he gave His life for us on the Cross. Speaking many centuries later, St Bonaventure said, “I beg you to meditate on the Passion and death of Christ”. Yet again, I beg you to meditate on His passion and death. As I have described in my talks on prayer and in my books, it was while meditating for weeks on the passion and death of Christ that I was led on into contemplation.
I know the times set aside for this practice in the early Church would not be convenient to modern Catholics, but if they would travel further on this road to perfection they simply must find time for meditation. If you cannot find time to meditate on the love of God, then what is time for. Statisticians tell us that we spend many hours every week, if not every day, glued to the Mass Media in one form or another to please ourselves. Can we not spend a fraction of that time trying to learn how to love the God who can radically transform our lives for the better, when the Mass Media does the opposite? That is precisely what happened in the early Church when Christians were not only personally changed through the Meditation that leads to contemplation, but so were others and on a grand scale. What other power than the power of God’s Love working through simple, ordi-nary Christians could change a massive pagan empire into a Chris-tian Empire in such a short time? It was the God-given love that is generated in contemplation that worked such a miracle, but without the meditation that first taught Christians how to respond to the love of God in Jesus Christ, such a sublime form of prayer would be utterly unattainable.
For over three hundred years all was well, and it was hoped that what Christianity did for the Roman world would be done for the rest of the world. However, disaster struck when a heresy called Arianism crept into Catholic spirituality like a cancer to corrode and corrupt it from within. It is generally known that ninety percent of Catholics succumbed to this heresy that insisted that Christ was not God, but merely a mortal. That this heresy was an affront to God, His Son, and to the long held dogmatic teaching of the Church is well known. However, what is not known is that this heresy all but completely destroyed the profound contemplative teaching and practice of the early Church. If Christ was not God then no amount of meditation on His purely human loving could lead onward into His divine con-templation. The sublime spirituality that had been the vital living principle that made God’s new people radio-active with divine loving was simply destroyed from the inside.
Meditation was further undermined in the Eastern Church when Iconoclasm taught that all religious images should be destroyed in-cluding images in the mind. In the early Church, it was lay apostles working out of family life who evangelised the world. In the Dark Ages it was left to monks working out of monasteries who tried to fill the gap. But the number simply did not add up, and so the Church had to sail on, until at the end of the Dark Ages, a Christian renais-sance turned the clock back. Serious crimes against Christians in the Holy Land finally impelled Pope Urban II to announce a crusade in 1095. Once again, the Holy Land was opened to pilgrims and a new Catholic revival ensued.
Pilgrims returned full of exciting stories of how they saw where Christ was born, where He grew up, where He preached, where He lived, where He died, and from where He rose again from the dead. St Bernard of Clairvaux developed a new theology centred on Christ. What he did for academics, St Francis of Assisi, who visited the Holy Land himself, did for ordinary people. With the return to medita-tion, contemplation followed, and in the next six centuries or more, the Catholic Church produced the greatest crop of writers detailing the contemplative life ever known in its history.
Sadly, just as the heresy of Arianism had taken away contemplative spirituality before, Quietism, a new heresy, took it away once more at the end of the seventeenth century. This heresy insisted that to prac-tise contemplative prayer, and perhaps attain what St Teresa of Avila called the ‘Prayer of Quiet’, we should simply do nothing but wait on God. Molinos, Quietism’s founder, was not only leading people back into Protestantism, but into serious sin. He told his followers to do nothing about temptations, for only God could take them away. At his trial he and his followers were convicted of myriad serious sexual sins, clear evidence of his teachings.
The effect and influence of the anti-mystical witch-hunts that fol-lowed in the wake of Quietism have continued down to the present day. Despite this, the real danger and damage done by Quietism, unlike Arianism, is the fact that hardly anyone has ever heard of this heresy. The vast majority of the faithful, and that includes priests, religious, and theologians, do not even know that, thanks to the age-old reaction to Quietism, they have been living in a Catholic world that is bereft. It is bereft of the vital infused love that animated the first Christian communities and they are not even aware of it.
If it was by the fruits of contemplation that the Church first convert-ed the ancient world, it has been by the demise of those same fruits that the Church has scandalised the modern world. For without in-fused love given through contemplation, Catholics do not have the inner spiritual strength that vitalised their first ancestors. Just as it was once the laity who were the means of converting the ancient world, it is they who are once again being called upon to convert the modern world, beginning with themselves.
This article is an extract from David’s book Passport to Perfection.
Pic: Pentecost (Mary teaching the Holy Scriptures to the Apostles), 1477-1489. Kracow, St. Mary’s, side-wing of the altarpiece of the Virgin, by Veit Stoss. WCC Markus Schlicht
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David Torkington is a Spiritual Theologian, Author and Speaker who specializes in Prayer, Christian Spirituality and Mystical Theology.
For the past fifty years, he has been communicating to his audience his profound love of the traditional and authentic Mystical and Biblical Theology that has inspired all his writings on prayer.
He has done this through his ability to express profound truths simply and truthfully in his inspiring lectures and retreats to religious and laity, in England, Ireland, Europe and Africa.
He was asked to lecture on Mystical Theology at the Angelicum in Rome as the only speaker who had practical knowledge and experience in Mystical Theology.
More recently he has concentrated on writing, blogging, podcasting and broadcasting.
His website – https://metanoia.org.uk/ – includes David’s new FREE podcasts on Catholic Spirituality and Learning to Pray with Christ.