And all men are idolators, crying unheard
To a deaf idol, if Thou take them at their word.
Anything can be an idol, even a thought …
I think an interesting practice is contemplation, which I would contrast with meditation in that it is more free form and can even include verbal thinking. There is a Christian version of this. Meditation tends to be more structured with a focus of exclusing the verbal, even if some words are stimulating the meditation.
It seems to me that anxieties and desires are a part of us (and perhaps a part of any deity). So for me I would include anxieties and desires as part of any meditation or contemplation. Emotions, including the ones judged in religions are a core part of us and if we are made in a deity’s image than they are likely a part of him her or it also. This is of course to some degree outside of Christian practice (and I am not a Christian, though I was partly raised in Christianity), but I think it is good to at least consider that the judgments against emotions might be cultural distortion or for some reason not in our best interest. If we cannot love them, we cannot love ourselves, I would say.
_
As a born Catholic, I witnessed no meditation from that demographic.
As a part South Asian person, I witnessed much meditation from that demographic.
Perhaps Christianity is different to Catholicism, in that regard? I do recall the matter being touched on, in Theology class, but it had little to no impact on me or my psyche, and was not deemed an important part of that religious belief system, so which of I had to gain from the East, but I did see the similarities between Catholicism and Eastern practices.
Much of Christianity focuses on prayer belief and ritual participation. That’s what most people do. And Christianity prioritizes believing (often called faith) and morals. Traditions like Buddhism, say, are more focused on practices like meditation and less interested in belief. You have to go to expert practitioners to get other Christian traditions like meditation and contemplation. Monks, priests, nuns, mystics.
There is a reason why meditation excludes words… it’s the most harshest way of forming thoughts and of triggering focused thinking, but yet also not harsh… a contradictory dichotomy I know, of which I cannot explain, but can express.
I grew up within that tribe of, them ^^^ but even then, no. It was more about personality/the person and character, than it was about any other thing.
Oh, yeah, true. The average practitioner of almost any religion is just part of a clique.
I agree, although it is my eternal monologue that I am silencing, not thoughts per se. Meditation can also be walking, sitting, standing, eventually laying down, but I can’t do that without falling asleep. The way I learnt it, mindfulness meditation just lets the thoughts pass without engaging in them, but I find myself having to centre myself again, and again.
Contemplation is indeed interesting and either the first or the second practise I do. You can take anything from a text to a mantra, a prayer, a song.
I am reading “The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible” by Charles Eisenstein. He has pointed to the fact that more of the same will not overcome our problems, we need a paradigm change. This is what Merton suggests and his advice is to that aim.
Let us ask, “What kind of human being is politically passive, votes from fear and hate, pursues endless material acquisition, and is afraid to contemplate change?” We have all those behaviors written into our dominant worldview and, therefore, into the institutions arising from it. Cut off from nature, cut off from community, financially insecure, alienated from our own bodies, immersed in scarcity, trapped in a tiny, separate self that hungers constantly for its lost beingness, we can do no other than to perpetuate the behavior and systems that cause climate change. Our response to the problem must touch on this fundamental level that we might call spirituality.
Eisenstein, Charles. The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible (Sacred Activism) . North Atlantic Books. Kindle-Version.
Thomas Merton was a Trappist Monk who identified a number of similarities in the monastic traditions in the world. Could be that you just didn’t know a Monk?
As far as I can see emotions are more and more pathologized and while worry is static, we generally deny fear. It drives us, but is never truly soothed. I don’t think adding more judgments is useful and in fact accepting emotions is a paradigm shift.
Much of that list deals with real problems, which to me means that our emotions are natural reactions to real problems. That the answer is not to treat the reactions as the problems but to see if one can shift the causes and also respect the reactions rather than seeing them as causal.
I think of it as a community, within a larger one… that of the Faith. 
Having thought on the matter this evening, I think it’s due to not wanting to fill my mind with prayers and psalms and rituals and such… or it could be because of 17 years of constant regular church-going.
Not personally, no… though we were honoured with being able to be in the company of the local monks (and nuns), but only the head monk could speak/speak to us, and his sense of humour was a surprising revelation. The other monks lived in silence, though they also reacted to his humour too, and tried not to make eye contact as much as possible. Funny thing was, we didn’t know our school/church had monks, until we turned of age to know/at 15, so only on a need to know basis.
They taught us bell-ringing and special monk prayer, and yes, contemplation… I remember that now. We would follow them around for many hours on certain days, to learn from them and their piety. School days became dull when they’d go, to wherever it was that they went, because they almost emitted a light/an energy. I think of them often still, to this very day…
I have been reading Charles Eisenstein who has taken a very interesting stance on how to change the world in his book “The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible” in which he asks why we fail to believe that by loving people around us, praying for them, seeking silence and solitude more, meditating, caring for the old and sickly, helping in various ways, we might be inadvertently solving the larger issues we are facing. We seem to be more focussed on the larger issues that we see as unassailable rather than the individual steps that might lead there. We want to affect the masses but fail to reach the few.
I think that we have been told too often that religious practise is otherworldly and old fashioned, superstitious stuff that we have been ashamed to keep up the care for the small things in life. We have a meaning crisis in the western world, and instead of those old religious practises there are people imagining rites and rituals anew, but noticing that they don’t work. They don’t work because they haven’t got the experience and they are probably not addressing the essential. The Christian and the Buddhist rituals have the meditator in the centre, looking for peace and concentration, being in the world, not being pushed by it. The upright position is a position of dignity. It finds the centre and finds peace. Based on that, one can move forward and contemplation serves to reach the depths of verses, prayers, poems, songs etc. Then intercessory prayer can set in and has the effect that they move outwards with their care, first to their immediate family or friends, then to neighbours, to acquaintances, and then on out into the world.
Good advice. Thank you for sharing!
Perhaps because local communities and the community-spirit that went with it, have been replaced by a global one, and one size does not always fit all… hence the discrepancy in care and need, for the disparate few.
Since our last exchange, I think that local community-spirit has been on an upward path of revival through the avenues of Faith and worship… and with such events as Carols by Candlelight drawing in the religious and non-religious alike, new and/or improved local-communities are gaining traction. There’s something very meditative about singing carols in candlelight. 
Like I’ve said before, One does not have to be religious to enjoy religious events or gatherings… something which I have been witnessing firsthand, through the various politico-philanthropic endeavours that I have been undertaking these last few years.
What is your view on it all, Bob?
…and a Merry Christmas to you, as well. 
I hope you had a good time over the festive season and you will have a wonderful New Year with lots of promise and perspectives.
Religious events and gatherings generally have an underlying connective spirit beyond what the people enacting the rituals try to do. If we are still receptive, it draws us towards a sense of belonging and affinity with other people, which I believe is primary spirituality. We, as critical individualists, tend to dislike some things. I, for example, appreciate the Christmas narrative but dislike it when the pastor goes over the top to make it historical in some way.
Although I have always spoken out for the underlying message of Christianity, I have also had a critical relationship with how the church has behaved and with fundamentalism. Instead, I am more a universalist who studies comparative religion and seeks out the common denominator, which, for me, is the meditative and contemplative practice, and which is non-utilitarian, or as someone said, “sovereignly useless” but valuable because of that. It is valuable for its own sake as an expression of human spirituality.
Another thing that religious events and gatherings do is transport us back to a time before we considered ourselves clever, when we were children and observed things with open attentiveness. This is why many people avoid that because this “beginners mind” tends to annoy those people who like to think themselves as above such “childish” ritual, and yet there are others who are glad that they can just relax into the emotionality of the situation and even shed a tear without shame.
Thanks… I had a quiet festive period. No FOMO, because I had JOMO… festive Xmas and NYD dinners and plenty of fizz… and now back to working on body and mind.
Oh yea… I attended a Carols by Candlelight event at the local church, but I left before the end… as one-and-a-half hours later and it was still going on 
so I missed the ‘by Candlelight’ entire church singing, finale.
…you can’t beat a good old-fashioned nativity story. ; )
Though St Nicholas was morphed into Sinterklaas/ later Santa Claus by the Dutch -after the Protestant reformations- long after his day of worship -on the 9th of December/the date of his death- was merged with Christ’s birth-day -as calculated by Sextus Julius Africanus- to become Christmas… invented by the Romans, in an effort to adopt and absorb the traditions of the pagan Saturnalia festival, which was itself essentially a celebration of the days getting longer after the winter solstice.” Christmas, being a Catholic invention… and Catholicism, having pagan roots and rituals, itself.
…as [all that^] I’m sure you already know.
All this time I thought you a Christian, Bob… I guess that must be due to your wide knowledge-base of the religion.
Bob: “It is valuable for its own sake as an expression of human spirituality”.
I wonder if a spiritual experience can be had without a person being/having been, religious? According to Lorikeet, he hasn’t, but that doesn’t mean that the same is applicable to all the irreligious.
I never thought of it in that way, but yes… we do switch off and enter back into a time, from when our minds were first confronted with our religion/s and the constructed world becomes no more, to be replaced with the sights and sounds and smells of the sacramental kind.
Do you go up for the Eucharist?
The one thing that Christmas is good for is to drive out the murky atmosphere of darkness and drizzle, and we have lights in the garden in front of our living room window over Christmas, but they are gone now. What remains are the candles, which have a symbolic value in themselves, especially as single flames defying the darkness. I haven’t been to a church service at Christmas for some time now, although the children dressed up for the nativity play are always an attraction.
Yes, but it is always worth repeating. I observe that Catholicism, as a power structure, drove a narrative and a subsequent dogma (that became increasingly complicated). However, I suspect that the figure of Jesus has little to do with that. In fact, after speaking with a person who studies Advaita Vedanta, he told me that a book from a Swami points out that Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount is very similar to his teacher’s instruction, and having read it, I think there is a common line of religious thinking that is just culturally adapted.
I was a Christian, and I was even an elder at one time, but through an MBSR course, I started looking at Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, and Confucianism, then identifying monastic Christians who opened the dialogue with these traditions, and mystics in the Abrahamic religions, I realised that religions are cultural expressions of an underlying truth: That we are one.
I realised that the exclusivism of Abrahamic traditions is a denial of that and, therefore, a danger to humanity. Where Christians are willing to give up their exclusivism and recognise others as equals, they can be a force for peace.
The religious aspect of understanding this Unity is about rituals and traditions that form communities around the idea and a lifestyle that has cultural roots. It is also about a form of discipline that enables people to gain insight, but unfortunately, this aspect is often misused.
Eucharist has a different meaning for me now, and I see it as a ritual of commitment to those who are suffering in the world, whether because of illness, old age, or oppression. That comes from my calling as a nurse, although I am now retired. Therefore, I do not go up because I don’t want to give the wrong impression. One priest I knew told me he thought I should still go up, but I know many who would disapprove. I also don’t believe in the Incarnation as it is taught, but I think that if one man is an incarnation of God, we all are – or none of us are.
A sacrament is a ritual of sacred significance. What is considered sacred can differ significantly from one society to another, and I hold many fundamental things as sacred: Various religious texts and places of worship, rituals and ceremonies; nature; certain objects, symbols, and artifacts; life and birth, death and burial; morality and ethics, and time and festivals. Certain situations can also have a sacramental aspect, and in nursing, I experienced some situations in which it became very clear that this one is special and used the symbolism common to the patient and relatives.
I’m sorry for going on a bit, but perhaps it is important to clarify now and again.