Meditation Guide
John Bartunek, LC
Each day
you should reserve some time – 5, 10, or 15
minutes can be a good start – to spend in
quiet, heart-to-heart conversation with Christ...
This meditation guide can be
seen in a easy-to-print .pdf Reader format by clicking HERE
Each day you should reserve some time –
5, 10, or 15 minutes can be a good start
– to spend in quiet, heart-to-heart conversation with Christ. This
is called Christian meditation. The goal of this kind of
prayer is to deepen your personal relationship with Christ, praising
God and receiving his grace, and to identify yourself more
and more with the purpose of your life: to live
in communion with God through the fulfillment of his will.
As you develop the habit of this prayer, you will
find ways to personalize the method. To begin, however, and
in order to overcome the distractions and dryness common to
those starting off on a more demanding life of prayer,
the following structure has shown to be of great utility.
Be sure to choose a time and place
conducive to the silence and attention required; most spiritual masters
recommend that we do our meditation early in the day,
before the thousand cares of this busy world tangle us
up in their knots. They also recommend that we do
it at the same time every day, and in the
same place, somewhere quiet, where we know that interruptions and
distractions will be limited. More important than the time and
place, however, is the commitment to make meditation part of
your daily spiritual fare, no matter how busy you get
or little you feel like praying.
Your meditation can
be divided into 4 steps – the four “C”s: Concentrate,
Consider, Converse, Commit. Concentrate
This simply means focusing your
attention on God, on his presence, on your relationship with
him. You renew your faith, your love, your hope in
him. You ask him for the particular grace you are
seeking in this time together with him. You recall that
he created you and is interested in you – so
much so that he sent his Son to save you
and established the Church to guide you to your eternal
home. This first step of your prayer means conCENTRrating on
your true CENTER: your identity as a creature, a beloved
child of God in need of his grace.
Consider In
the second step of your meditation you take a passage
from Scripture, or from a spiritual book, or the Catechism,
of the writings of a saint, or even a sacred
image or a beautiful natural landscape (you work out what
kind of material is best for you through experimentation and
the guidance of a spiritual director) and you read it
over. You reflect on what it means, what it tells
you about God and his ways and his plans, and
what it means for you personally, in your particular situation
and state in life. In this stage you ponder in
your mind and heart some truth or aspect of God’s
revelation, you apply it to your life and make it
your own. Sometimes asking questions can help your consideration: what
is the meaning of the passage? What are its key
words? What is going on here? How would I express
it in my own words?
Converse Here is the core
of the meditation: a heart-to-heart conversation with Christ about the
passage you have been considering and the insights that the
Holy Spirit has been giving you. This intimate, personal exchange
is what separates Christian meditation from other merely psychological exercises
that don’t move beyond concentration. Here is the mark of
true prayer, where you respond to the Word of God
with words of your own, expressing your admiration, your gratitude,
your love, your confusion, your need – whatever the consideration
stirred up in your soul. You also give him time
and room to speak to you. He often chooses to
do this not with words or even ideas, but by
moving your will, by directly touching your heart. (Try not
to get hung up on hearing him explicitly every day,
but you should be able to look back over several
days or weeks and recognize his action in your prayer
life.) As you converse, in the silent depths of your
heart you open yourself to God, offering your life and
inviting him once again to come and show you the
way to a living communion with him. All the other
steps of the meditation are directed to this step, so
if you only need a brief moment of concentration and
consideration in order to enter into heartfelt conversation with the
One who loves you, don’t dawdle on steps one and
two. Normally, however, we need to gather our attention in
order to be able to hear and respond to the
Word of God, and steps one and two help us
to do that.
Commit Finish your prayer by letting it
affect your life: commit yourself to do something concrete today
as a result of the time you spent with our
Lord, whatever you think the Lord is asking of you
or whatever you think would please him. Whether it means
making an extra visit to a chapel to spend more
time with him, or asking someone to forgive yesterday’s temperamental
outburst, or visiting someone who is in the hospital, or
calling that person who needs a call – something concrete,
measurable, real; something about which you can say at the
end of the day: yes, I did that, or no,
I didn’t. This insures that our prayer life doesn’t become
a mere psychological sedative or an exercise of vanity. As
you offer this commitment to the Lord, thank him for
his presence and the graces he has given you during
this time of prayer, ask pardon for your distractions (especially
if you invited them or gave in to them out
of laziness or lack of faith), and finish by entrusting
the fruits of your prayer to the Blessed Virgin Mary
through reciting a Hail Mary.
End with the sign
of the cross, and then go forth to glorify God
by fulfilling his will out of faith, hope, and love.
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