Lent with Anthony Bloom: Reading #6

On Meditation, Creative Living, and the Shallow Depths

This year’s daily Lent postings for my subscribers will taken from a short anthology of writings on prayer taken from the corpus of Metropolitan Anthony Bloom. Without a paid subscription, only the first portion of the post will be available.

If you find this edifying, please consider (if you haven’t already) becoming a paid subscriber. Your support goes directly to supporting the ministry of Akenside Institute for English Spirituality, a project I started 12 years ago to help to rebuild the Anglican tradition.

---

THE PURPOSE OF MEDITATION

The prpose of meditation is not to achieve an academic exercise in thinking; it is not meant to be a purely intellectural performance, nor a beautiful piece of thinking without further consequences; it is meant to be a piece of straight thinking under God’s guidance and Godwards, and should lead us to draw conclusions about how to live. It is important to realize from the outset that a meditation has been useful when, as a result, it enables us to live more precisely and more concretely in accordance with the Gospel

Whatever we take—a verse, a commandment, an event in the lift of Christ—we must first of all assess its objective content. This is extremely important because the purpose of meditation is not to built up a fantastic structure but to understand a truth.

The truth is there; it is God’s truth, and meditation is meant to be a bridge between our lack of understanding and the truth revealed. It is a way in which we can educate our intelligence, and gradually learn to have “the mind of Christ,” as Saint Paul says in 1 Corinthians 2.16.