For most of my life I thought meditation belonged to Buddhists and Hindus. I pictured a cushion, a closed door, and trying to empty my head. So when I learned that Catholics had meditated for centuries, I assumed it was the same practice with a crucifix hung over it. But it is a completely different act, and the difference decides whether it does anything for you, or whether you are wasting your time.
The Buddhist method asks you to remove thoughts until the mind is quiet. Catholic meditation asks you to fill the mind with one true thing, which is God, and to keep looking for Him until your thoughts move. The first leaves you alone with yourself, and the second puts you in front of Someone.
The fathers saw no gap between meditation and prayer. Meditation is the thinking half of prayer, and prayer is what the thinking turns into once you start speaking to Him.
Meditation is the oldest shape of Catholic prayer. In the twelfth century the Carthusian Guigo II described a ladder of four rungs:
Reading
Meditation
Prayer
Contemplation.
You read a few lines of Scripture… you chew on them until a thought strikes you, then you speak to God about it, and sometimes He gives you a rest in Him that you did not earn.
Tanquerey, whose manual formed generations of seminarians, defines meditation as a silent lifting of mind and heart to God, to honour Him and to grow in virtue. Saint Teresa of Avila called mental prayer ‘a close sharing between friends’, and she meant that you take time often… alone, with the good Lord who loves you.
We notice the void of Catholic mysticism left: Mindfulness, yoga and breathing apps are sold to people who are afraid of silence or want a safe way to sit inside it.
In October 2019 Bishop Alphonsus Cullinan of Waterford and Lismore wrote to his flock1 that there is no true spirituality outside Christianity, and he pointed them to what the Church has always held.
Meditation turns your mind to God… and away from yourself. A quiet mind with nothing in it leaves you in the same space as before. It has no benefit, besides relaxation.
I hope you believe that you will die, and that you will be judged… and that nothing you own will cross the threshold with you.
But I doubt either of us plans a week as if we TRULY believed that. The gap between what your mind holds and what your will does is the working problem of every layman, and the saints give us one cure: look at the truth long enough, and often enough, for the will to move.
The Book Ecclesiasticus says, ‘Remember thy last end, and thou shalt never sin.’2 Meditation is the habit of remembering it on purpose.
The Church never asked a layman to do this on its own. Around the meditation she placed the hours of the Divine Office, and a day built on them has a frame, e.g. Lauds on rising, Prime before work, Sext before lunch, the Rosary in the afternoon, Compline before bed.
The hours are vocal prayer, sung or said from a book (Breviary), and they teach your lips what to say. While the meditation teaches your mind what to look at, and the two feed each other.
Without the hours, meditation drifts into private feeling, and without the meditation, the hours risk becoming words said at speed.
Saint Francis de Sales wrote the Introduction to the Devout Life in 1609 for people with households, offices and courts, and he put meditation near the front of it.
Pope Pius X in Haerent Animo (1908) and Pius XII in Menti Nostrae (1950) pressed daily meditation on priests, and the 1917 Code told bishops to see that their clergy gave a set time each day to mental prayer.
If a priest, whose day already belongs to God, was held to a fixed quarter hour, a father of four has no ground to think he can do it without one.
Few traditional Catholics meditate… extremely few… most do not even know it.
Almost nobody asks it of us now, and in most parishes worldwide nobody have ever spoken on it, nor showed how to do it.
No one has told you what to do in fifteen minutes of meditation. You need to know what you open, what you ask your mind to look at, what you say when it is your turn to speak, and what to do on the morning when you feel nothing at all.
The saints taught a method for each of those…
