A major criticism I have with contemporary attempt to reconstruct a viable and revitalised Christian meditation tradition is the widespread failure to re-evaluate the appropriateness of Neo-Platonic baggage from the Middle Ages and other cultural imports we’ve accumulated over the ages.
I applaud the revisiting of history, to look for fragments of useful techniques in the writings of our Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant predecessors, but really, where is the deep theological reflection in all this activity? I don’t see much, just a lot of romanticism going on. Its high time Christian meditators spent some energy moving beyond methodology to a more robust theology of meditation. Yes, theological reflection has to flow out of experience, and not out of abstraction, but I don’t see much flowing at all yet. Just a cherry-picking of archaic techniques.
I challenge Protestants in particular, since their meditation tradition is even more anaemic than the rest. It’s fine for emerging church leaders to host an alternative labyrinth worship service occasionally, or take up lectio divina for personal devotion, but have you forgotten your Bibles? You who claim to be so strong in this area! Where are your reflections on what the Bible actually says about meditation. Have you even looked? Don’t just ape others, bring your own tradition to bear on casting the meditation tradition forward.
But I won’t let the Catholics go unchallenged either. Can’t you offer something more than the two options of joining a monastery or a John Main group? The problem of the first option should be readily apparent for the lay person. The problem with the second is, while I am again open to looking at eastern techniques, importing an Aramaic translation of “Come Lord” into a Hindu mantra technique does not automatically make it Christian. Focus and attitude is all important, and I see a lot of pluralistic wishy-washiness in what you’re doing.
The reality is, there is not much in the way of a viable Christian Meditation tradition today. All we have are fragments of the past, a few monks and a few lay experimentors. So we need to begin again, to dig deep. Yes, cast our nets wide and see what we can find of interest in our past. Yes, see what unpaid bills of the church that new religious movements may be bringing to our attention. But lets exercise discernment and insight too. Let’s see if we can begin to trade up our tradition into something with more Spiritual vitality. Why not meditate on it?
Curious Christian 
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