Links:

World Community for Christian Meditation

Medio Media

Other Programs:

Weekly discussion of next Sunday's Gospel reading. Every Wednesday at 7:15 p.m.

Group Spiritual Direction

Some guidelines for Christian Meditation

1. Sit quietly in a good posture for you. You may use a comfortable chair, the lotus position or whatever is comfortable for you. Keep your back relatively straight and place your hands in your lap. The position of the body is important because meditation is an embodied activity. Furthermore, the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit.

2. Try to empty yourself of all thoughts by concentrating on a word, or mantra. Choose a word like Maranatha, an Aramaic word with means "Come, Lord." Repeat the word slowly, thiniing only of the syllables: Mar-ra-na-tha. don't worry about distractions. Just keep coming back to the word. Listen to it for the whole duration of the meditation.

3. Make a commitment to meditate every day for six months. Each day should have two 20-minute periods, one in the morning and one in the evening. It is not that much of a gamble compared to the results. You may not realize the difference in your life at first, but people close to you will realize it before you do.

4. Meeting in a prayer group once a week in which a discussion and a question-and-answer period follows the 20-minute period of meditation is helpful in many ways. It can encourage you and guide you. In fact, it can be a source of spiritual direction.

5. The teacher of meditation is not the members of your group or a book or video, but the Holy Spirit. The Kingdom of God is within you. God is in the depths of your being. Meditation allows the Spirit to surface.

6. Meditation is not just a 20-minute period that calms you down, but something that pervades the 24 hours of your day. You may not be aware of it, but unconsciously or subconsciously the Spirit is within you in each breath you take and in each beat of your heart.

7. In meditation you meet God in your heart. Blase Pascal said that the heart has reasons that reason does not know.

8. Water on a mountaintop finds its way down to the sea. Sand and dirt can block the flow for only so long. Meditation removes the obstacles that prevent the Spirit from flowing into your heart.