Coral Reefs, Bird Nests, and Meditation

By Kurt Mahler
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08/26/2024
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As we wrestle to overcome profound disappointments in our faith journey, we must learn how to manage our thoughts. We must set the inner agony in order through intentional meditation.

That word is seldom neutral. For some, meditation is a fad in the woo-woo category. For some, it’s their private spa. For some, it’s a suspicious character ready to deceive.

But here’s the thing: We are all into meditation whether we know it or not, for we are designed to continually behold something with the eyes of our hearts. By day and by dreams, the workshop of our minds constantly whittles away at whatever is at hand. Whether it is limiting beliefs, liberating truths, or the show we watched the night before, we are always meditating on something. If this is so, how can we develop it into a disciplined art positioning us to behold our Creator?

First, let us save the baby from the bathwater. Out of the countless ways our Creator communicates with us, I have found a curious thing: on the one hand, the Christian who says, “God doesn’t speak. He spoke in the Bible;” and on the other hand, the Christian who says, “Meditation on a one-word sound has cured me of anxiety.” Both answers are on a spectrum of nuances, and very few live at the polar extremes. Nevertheless, my question to both of them is the same: “If your Lord has no real-time voice by which to guide and heal you, who are you listening to?” For both reading the Bible and meditation are forms of listening, the one with the head, the other with the heart. (Or, if you will, the one with the left hemisphere of the brain and the other with the right hemisphere.1)

When it comes to head and heart, I propose a marriage of both. I propose a return to the ancient Hebrew practice where meditation and Scripture reading blend into one disciplined art form of healing and guidance.

This marriage is essential for the meltdowns to come, be they in your own life or in the nations, for, when crisis comes, if your Christian God has been an abstracted set of values lacking a living voice, it takes no prophet to foresee you will listen to someone else. Let’s just hope the voice you are tuned into at that time is an angel of the mute deity you worship and not an imposter.

Margaret in Church by Eugène Delacroix, 1828

What I often find is the declaration, “God doesn’t speak” is code for “I don’t want to be a swooning fool for religious melodrama.” And I often find the declaration, “I’m into meditation” is code for “I know there’s a deeper reality than reading correct religious words.” I am sure virtually everyone, Christian and otherwise, would agree with these two statements.

But here’s the thing: We are full of foolishness whether we like it or not in the same way our bodies produce uric acid whether we like it or not. We need our kidneys to filter it out, and we need His voice to filter out our foolishness. And no reading alone, like so much water running through a pipe, ever filtered anyone of anything; it is the penetration of those words into our active person that did so.

And here’s still another thing: to go deep is to enter a perilous realm in the same way scuba diving a coral reef is to enter a perilous realm. True, it is full of beauty, mystery, wonder—even relief from our gray day-to-day—but it is not a tame place. The colorful creation harbors poisonous creatures who use deception and cunning to paralyze their prey. Our swim with the stingray may cost us our heart, and we may never return to the light of day. 

But, if there is as much as an ounce of bravery in us, we have no other choice but to lean into both. We must descend into the deep and we must make time for the humbling filtering process common to all when it comes to ridding ourselves of poor judgment leading to injury and loss. We had better learn to marry our meditations and our Scripture readings to the voice of the Bridegroom. 

Here are three suggested practices for that. They are not the only ways, and they are not a formula for making our Lord say something He is not. He is the Creator and we are the created. A proud heart can ruin any good thing, and these suggestions are no exception to that danger.  But done in a humble spirit, these suggestions might position us with the potential to experience the life-giving presence of our Lord. 

1. Pair Verses

Take two peaceable elements from the Scriptures and repeat them thoughtfully for a few seconds to a few minutes. The psalms are a good place to start. Here are some examples:

The Lord is my shepherd (Psalm 23:1a)
Behold, I am with you always (Christ, Matt 28:30b)

or

You are my portion (Psalm 16:5)
I am the bread of life (Christ, Jn 6:35)

or

My soul clings to the dust (Psalm 119:25a)
Give me life according to your word
(Psalm 119:25b)

This is the seed of a vast garden. You can see how this practice can enter all manner of variations: You could form a series of pairs. You could pair well-known scriptures with special ones uniquely fitting to your life. Of course, you can always mediate on two lines already paired up; in the above example of Psalm 119, the entire prayerful petition is a set of two-line meditations. 2

In the same way dribbling a basketball is preparation for the flowing freedom of the game, the paired verses are preparing you for other forms of communication with our Lord. The pairings become the substance of a nest built little-by-little until life is released and breaks open in them. 

This habit picks up the ancient synagogue and early-church tradition of the antiphon, the worshipful chanting of two groups one to another. (If you are part of a liturgical community, you are at an advantage, for you inherit time tested forms of pairing.) By employing this practice personally, the  “Yes and Amen” dynamic has a chance to descend with the mind into the heart, where the Lord’s Spirit and your spirit commune inside the “house” of the words. 

It is instructive that the ancient Hebrew term for “meditate” (hāḡâ / הָגָה) includes the idea of muttering, moaning, groaning, and whispering.3 To the Twelve Tribes, meditation was no spa-day treat. It was an orderly form of agony, a wrestling with the angel as their father Jacob had done. True, as with Jacob’s post-wrestle limp, meditation slows you down. You don’t get stuff done as fast as you would prefer because you stop to meditate. But, like Jacob, your identity is transformed in the process and you get your inheritance. It is the wrestlers and not the hustlers who inherit the kingdom of God.

Jacob Wresting with the Angel by Georgi & Mariya Chimevi, Bulgaria. Note the match’s heavenly referee.

2. Use a Timer App

Setting a time limit elevates focus. Limits often release creativity, and a time constraint can potentially release a greater internal freedom by virtue of the simplicity the limits require. I often use a timer app called Flow | A Simple Pomodoro Timer. I do so because, in a sense, I am an athlete: a long jumper who needs a running lane and a pole vaulter his landing pad. The structure of a beginning and an ending to just about any spiritual practice acknowledges the athletic reality of our life in the Lord. (See 2 Tim 2:5 and 1 Cor 9:25). 

Los Angeles Olympics, 1984

Timers train us to enter into the arena where we overcome our flesh and passions to meet the Lord in the core of our being and run with endurance the marathon of faith set before us, whatever that looks like for each of us. This is why the desert father Macarius (AD 300-391) exhorted his disciples with the following word picture as they wrestled to know the Lord: “The chief task of the athlete is to enter into his heart.” Timer apps can help us do that. 

3. Manage Your Body

You are one part spirit and one part DNA. You have a spiritual side and a physical side. It is your calling to integrate the two. Therefore, while doing the verse-pairing exercise, make the body participate. Kneel. Stand. Walk. Face east. Open your hands, fold your hands—do something other than the slouch-on-the-couch posture before the flatscreen or the stoop-and-stare stance before your smartphone. Even brilliant intellectuals like Thomas Aquinas and C.S. Lewis knew body posture mattered. Unless you are absolutely bedridden or on life support, a faith puttering away inside your brain only is no faith at all. Train your body, therefore, that when you are in certain physical positions, it needs to let go of other concerns and permit the non-bodily core inside you (what the ancients called the nous) to have prevailing influence.

Let us expand on this physical aspect: To maintain basic mobility and good breathing practices (insofar as your unique condition allows) is to steward your frame of dust and water into a more generally peaceful state whereby there is space in which our Creator speaks when we aren’t looking for it. I have had words of encouragement for others come to me while stretching my limbs and solutions to problems come to me when I was “off grid” in non-prayer but “on point” in a routine exercise session. This should not be a surprise. It is our Lord tutoring us into the integrated wholeness we were designed for. That’s what shalom means. 

The ancient believer Enoch modeled this for us by “walking with God” (Hebrews 11:5), an epithet indicating the man did not sit cross-legged on the ground for endless hours emptying his mind though a monosyllable, nor endlessly reciting righteous words in a corner, but practiced integrated communication with his Maker as he went about his day, a part of which no doubt included prayerful silence and reverent words. 

I use an exercise app by Mark Lauren requiring virtually no equipment and relying on one’s own body weight in the exercise routines. Of course, health is a full-orbed affair beyond the scope of this essay, including sleep, nutrition, etc., and even simply walking daily goes a long way in helping you; but the point I am making is that your body is given you as the training ground whereby you get to know the One who made both it and you.

Conclusion

Why could this form of meditation be a transformational habit? Because you are filling your mind with liberating truths on a regular basis. Why is Scripture a wise choice for your meditation content? Because you are relying on words that have proven their worth and reliability for millennia. Why could this practice be life-giving? Because it is a way of hosting the resurrection life of our Lord, who became like us so that we could become like Him, free of darkness and full of joy.

Consider the way the bird positions twigs, grass, and string to form a nest for the life that will hatch in its midst. The three suggestions here are such material. Each piece, day-by-day, may seem as inconsequential as a single twig or piece of straw. But when gathered and woven together over time, they produce life in the same way the bird produces life. The whole point of the nest is not the nest, it is the life begotten through it. 

Likewise, when it is all said and done, it is not words we are living for. They are the host of the life we hope for, and that life is found in Christ. When Peter, James, and John beheld Him as He truly was in effulgent light and great glory, conversing with Moses and Elijah atop Mount Tabor, the time for words was over. The time for wonder had begun. And when Peter, ever unfiltered in his words, piped up with a poorly timed bright idea, he prompted our heavenly Father to remind the man of what the whole Christian life is all about when God overshadowed them with the Spirit-filled cloud and spoke the final word: 

“This is my beloved Son. Listen to Him.” (Mark 9:7)

That is where all our meditations, Scripture readings, and prayer-stained struggles ultimately lead us if we persevere and do not lose heart.

© Kurt Mähler

The Transfiguration of Our Lord by Georgi & Mariya Chimevi, Bulgaria . Note Peter’s attempt at inserting a bright idea for leveraging the occasion! The others allowed the moment to leverage them—quite literally. They were flipped by what they saw and could not unsee it. All things could become possible. All things could become new. Plenty to meditate on.

Endnotes

  1. For brevity’s sake, I do not labor in this essay over definitions of mind, heart, spirit, and soul. Suffice it to say I am discussing what takes place inside your body until it gives life to the essence of who you are: your spirit and that faculty the ancients called the nous, a word Apostles Paul and John employ in their writings which is often translated as “mind” or “understanding.” It is the part of you that “thinks about what you think about.” See Romans 7:23 & 12:2, 1 Cor 14:14-19 (on speaking in tongues as something the nous cannot participate in), Ephesians 4:17-23, 2 Thessalonians 2:2, and Revelation 17:9. ↩︎
  2. If you suspect this who meditation thing is just too woo-woo or prone to deception for a follower of Christ to practice, begin with meditating on Psalm 119, for at one level the whole long psalm—a double-nested acrostic poem in the Hebrew—is a meditation on the topic of meditation! The psalm is like “base” in a game of chase; no one can tag you there. ↩︎
  3. See the definition in the Blue Letter Bible. In modern Hebrew, the word for meditation includes the meaning of a conversation. ↩︎
Jacob Wrestles with the Angel by Gustav Doré, 1855

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