I was listening to an old sober booze-hound friend the other night sharing about his meditation journey. “Find your quiet place,” said he, “then you’ll be able to walk gently through the storm.”
So what might this quiet place look like? The answer to that is it can take many forms. I know people who meditate while running, for example. Now that’s not my schtick, but it is an entirely legitimate way of connecting with the living God. If you are running through the forest, along the river or indeed through the maddening crowd in the city, it all counts as sacred space.
Getting fully plugged into our intrinsic spiritual selves.
Other folks opt for a more traditional quiet place, to steal away for a while, to walk a gentle mile, with the God who’s never ever missing. There is something mysterious and inherent within the often-ancient walls of places where people have connected with God for multiple generations. It’s as if such practice, whether it is in a mosque, cathedral, or temple, somehow lingers in the very fabric of the architecture. It’s not much the structure—though that helps—it’s the palpable spiritual feeling one encounters within them.
The living God is as close as your next breath.
The living God is not absent out in the heavens somewhere. She’s in the here and now, comrades, and never more so than in the greatest temple of them all, the one within every one of us (Eph 2:22; 3:17). It is this, above all, that needs to be nurtured in this often-crazy life that we are all stumbling through together. Meditation, in whatever form it takes, is an active way of doing this vital spiritual cultivation. It’s all about connecting with that which is already innate in our deepest selves.
I have written previously about the “imago dei” (made in the image of God). But there is another biblical imperative to be considered here. The second Creation story in the Book of Genesis says that God breathed the breath of life into humanity and thus created human beings (Gen 2:7). It is entirely consistent with everything else that unfolds in the Bible to suggest that this breath of life, this life-giving Spirit, is the core of who we are and what we can become. The living God is as close as your next breath—breathe, and you are in the Spirit space. It’s no accident that many meditation methods focus on your breathing! There is connection to be found here, a deep connection, with the life-giving sacred breath that makes it all possible from the get-go.
Meditation has enjoyed a remarkable uptake in the Western world in recent decades, and it takes many forms. The meditation journey is about getting fully plugged into our intrinsic spiritual selves. It matters not, whether it’s out in the mighty open air, or if, like me, it’s alone in a little bedroom.
Nothing is more productive for walking gently through the storm than wasting time with the living Divine. Let me offer one suggestion that has helped this old misfit mystic who has been giving meditation a red-hot go for two decades: When you find your quiet place stick to it, there are no quick fixes in the meditation game, it’s a practice thing that takes time to yield results. But the results do come, and when they do, they are life changing!