Meditation in Christianity

Meditation in Christianity is one of the rare sources that will frankly tell you about the Eastern roots and contacts of much Western culture and religion. If you didn't know that Pythagoras brought East to West, or that Jesus' language, Aramaic, is an Indian language or that Buddhist monasteries were operating in Syria in his time, you certainly won't be bored. But it's not an unbiased survery or from an unbiased source. You can, for example, discard entirely the Reverend Laurence Boudlin's essay Meditation in the Bible as it is the worst sort of forced propaganda, replete with atrocious logic and distortions of the meaning of Biblical quotations with no better evidence than bald assertion - his cause is good but his arguments are uniformly intellectually dishonest, and hamper this project. The other essays are much better, although not always annotated in a fully scholarly way. Still, many sources can be followed up. It's a very worthwhile corrective to the general Western prejudices about our own culture and the isolated genius of that culture; as well as to Religious stereotypes that keep us apart. While short, at well under a hundred pages, it packs a whallop.

In my efforts to put together a presentation on Meditation for a Conference on Therapeutic Touch (in Toronto, Nov./99), I re-discovered my copy of this book (from 1973, labeled "vol.1") and wanted to use it on my Suggested Reading list. Through the internet I discovered it is still available - with a prettier cover. My own copy is well-worn, with underlining on every page. As I reread the book I discovered how much of my current awareness of meditation I had learned from this book. It is remarkably easy to read, The biblical quotations add credibility for Christians new to this concept. The writings by Swami Rama and Pandit Usharbudh Arya are particularly interesting, as they present a view from a different perspective, having been raised, I expect, in a non-Christian environment. The book suits lapsed Christians who may have longed for such an experience within the church, and are delighted to find this information, and it may dispel the concerns of some Christians who have been taught that meditation comes from the devil and is thus to be avoided. I leave it on my desk...and watch the reactions of those who see it - going from mild curiosity to a request "May I borrow this?" Now I can tell them where to buy their own!