Thoughts on meditation

Decades ago I read an article in Tricycle, a magazine for Buddhists, about meditation. The writer said something along the lines of, “If I have an hour, and I can spend it in meditation or in service, I choose meditation.”

The activist part of me was disturbed. As a Christian and as a leftist — moving toward my neighbor, wanting to work for a more just, generous, and generative world, even feeling religiously compelled to do so — the ideas of prayer or meditation in place of action didn’t sit right.

But as a person who tries to be aware that I have enormous blind spots, I wanted to know more. Can meditation benefit the world in any way that doesn’t insist on empty mysticism [apologies to my mystic sisters and brothers and others], but impacts the material realities we all inhabit?

Meditation is a psycho-spiritual technology that developed over millennia. It fits [kind of] in the folder along with ritual and prayer. Christians, Jews, Muslims, animists and even non-theist practitioners are all familiar with those modes of spiritual engagement. 

At the very least, ritual, prayer, and meditation allow practitioners to disengage the regular world and to reset.

Corporate worship gathers ritual, prayer, and meditation in one place. Sociologists refer to “collective effervescence”: that sense of connection we get in church, sporting events, concerts, sometimes even in political rallies. A feeling that you’re at once more than and less than yourself. In worship, people sing, sit, stand, and sway in unison. Hearts syncopate and breathing regulates. 

If I were being crass, I’d call it group hypnosis. Not the kind of hypnosis that makes people cluck like chickens, but a state of mind that opens us to suggestion. 

Of course, in the wrong hands, that openness can be abused to cement into our psyches images of a cruel and vindictive god. It’s used to plant suspicion against immigrants and to foster hatred of queer folx. I’ve been in spaces where collective effervescence is leveraged to get more money out of more wallets. Following songs and prayers about divine love and generosity, hateful words can be poured into open psyches.

But I’ve also seen that collective effervescence allows people to experience real acceptance, healing, and forgiveness and to grow in love for their neighbors and responsibility for the planet. I’ve been in spaces where ritual, prayer, and meditation lead people toward one another and toward themselves. When people open themselves, collectively or privately, the entire world can rush in.

I recently heard a theologian, Sierra Jones, say she worries that Christian prayer upholds systems of injustice. I thought she was about to rail against Christian nationalists, but she talked instead about modes of prayer: “There is a way that when you close your eyes on a Sunday morning, you’re not praying, you’re looking away.”

That got me thinking about how Protestant Christians pray: seated, hands folded, heads bowed, eyes closed. One could of course argue that it’s a posture of submission to God, but it can also be a pose of passivity. Jones asked, “How can we get you to pray with open eyes?”

Can people pray with eyes open to the devastating beauty and deep suffering of the world around them, hands open to the most marginalized or clenched to destroy systems of injustice? Can people pray on their feet?

I think the question I started with — service or meditation — is a false one. It’s impossible to live in binaries. It’s always both/and, this and that, alone and together.

I’m not really one to encourage people to go to church, much less synagogue, coven, mosque, sangha, or intentional hang-out groups, but I think that’s how I want to end this. Spend an hour and a half in song and silence with other people. Conspire to look after the material needs of your neighbors.

Then head out with those people and build the world we all want to inhabit. A world where everyone has enough and no one is burdened with too much.