VIEW POINT
Exploring faith and spirituality David Newstead continues a monthly series looking at how the Christian faith relates to aspects of life
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N the 1960s a group of young men from Liverpool were regularly topping the charts with their music and being mobbed by hundreds of teenagers whenever they appeared in public. One of their members, John Lennon, boasted that they were more popular than Jesus. Despite all their wealth and fame, there was a void in their lives and they sought to fill it by exploring transcendental meditation, taught by the Indian yoga guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. According to its supporters, the ordinary thinking process is transcended and is replaced by a state of pure consciousness, which helps to create greater self-awareness. Meditation can take many forms. For some it can be related to religion while for others it can be a non-religious experience, such as connecting with nature, art, music or yoga. Many are based on Buddhist teaching or eastern mysticism. They can seem attractive because the human spirit craves spiritual answers, but most of these merely focus on the mind and the self. The premise is that what you think you become, because you are shaped by your thoughts. It supposedly leads you to free yourself from the illusion of selfhood. Many people who follow these techniques describe themselves as being spiritual, but in a non-religious sense. Today, such forms of meditation seem to have given way to mindfulness. This practice is intended to promote a calm and clear awareness of your thoughts and feelings in the present moment and encourages you to accept them without judging them as right or wrong. Mindfulness is a practice of purposely
living in the here and now by bringing one’s attention to the present moment without evaluation. Definitions and techniques are wide-ranging but, like transcendental meditation, it derives from elements of Buddhist traditions and techniques, such as how past, present and future moments arise and cease as momentary sense impressions and mental phenomena. There has been an important debate in recent years, particularly within the Roman Catholic Church, about mindfulness and its benefits or otherwise. A document written in 1989 by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, entitled Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on Some Aspects of Christian Meditation, acknowledged that there can be positive benefits from techniques that are similar to mindfulness – such as those used in eastern Christian meditation that ‘range from a specific bodily posture to the basic life functions, such as breathing or the beating of the heart’. However, the document warned of some limitations: ‘Understood in an inadequate and incorrect way the symbolism can even become an idol… It can degenerate into a cult of the body and can lead surreptitiously to considering all bodily sensations as spiritual experiences.’ Tom Wright, in his book Broken Signposts, makes a shrewd comment: ‘For many people today you can have any variety of spirituality you like, as long as it is not Christian.’ However, it is Christian spirituality and meditation that can take you closer to God than any manmade religion, because it stands for something greater in life than the
physical or material world. True spirituality is the fruit that the Holy Spirit produces in a person’s life: ‘love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control’ (Galatians 5:22 and 23 Revised Standard Version). In the context of Christian worship, prayer and meditation are integral to each other. In prayer we speak to God and in meditation God speaks to us. In a sermon preached at the Lambeth Conference in 1930, Archbishop William Temple said: ‘Worship is the submission of all our nature to God. It is the quickening of the conscience by his holiness; the nourishment of the mind with his truth; the purifying of imagination by his beauty; the opening of the heart to his love; the surrender of will to his purpose.’ There are many meditative practices that can be helpful for Christians, including contemplative reading of the Scriptures and hymns. Salvationists have a treasure trove of music that is an excellent aid for reflection. In the foreword to the 2015 Song Book of The Salvation Army General André Cox wrote: ‘Through our songs we gain insight into the wonder of salvation and the beauty of holiness, fuelling our deep desire to live in the presence of God and in a manner that brings glory to his name.’
DAVID SOLDIERS AT CANNOCK Salvationist 23 April 2022
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