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> Having been raised Catholic and now a practitioner of meditation for many years my experience is that meditation is nothing like prayer nor does prayer confer the same benefits as meditation. I Having been raised Catholic, and still being Catholic, having been taught various meditative practices outside the Church and seen some of those practices taught within the Church (and broader Christian community) as means of prayer (both explicitly, by name, as the meditative technique and other times simply teaching the same technique without reference to meditation), I would have to say that Christian prayer overlaps with meditation. There are forms of prayer that are not meditative, and I have no doubt that even for similar techniques simply the presence or absence of religious loading in the intent makes a difference (in what direction differing between individuals) in practical effect for many people, but they certainly are not categorically disjoint domains. OTOH, I don't think the suggestion upthread of reading and reflecting on the Bible as an alternative to meditation for the same purpose is a particularly good one,especially for those not already Christian. Reading and reflecting on the Bible—or the Quran, Tao Te Ching, etc., can certainly have value, even for non-Christians (-Muslims, -Taoists). But generally that will be distinct from the value derived from meditative techniques, unless the "reflection" itself uses those techniques. And even then, the use of the religious source material as the basis is more likely to be distracting than helpful in the meditative sense for those not already at least positively inclined to the religious content. |