Stress!!

Today’s Times, Weekend section, proclaims that in “Anxious Britain” 70% of us are stressed, 55% have been depressed, 20% have had therapy and 31 million antidepressant drugs are dispensed every year. Inevitably these days, meditation is one of the recommended strategies for dealing with this onslaught. Earlier this week I read somewhere of the ‘commodification’ of meditation and it is apparent that self help gurus can make a handsome living, especially in the USA.

So, from the religious viewpoint, what are we to make of the current popularity of meditative techniques? Surely, we must welcome anything which might help people to develop a new way of being-in-the-world? They certainly don’t find much help in contemporary Christianity; perhaps the churches are rediscovering too late and too slowly, their ancient tradition of meditation and contemplative prayer.

There are pitfalls (for everone including religious people) when one uses meditation merely as a ‘technique’ to cope with stress or to enhance one’s life prospects. Jesus warned of these dangers when he is reported to have said,

“Not every one who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father.”

It’s not that Christians should be tempted to claim exclusive rights to meditation. We should welcome any signs that people are discovering what it might mean to be truly present in the world from the depths of their being. But as Jesus also said.

”Beware of false prophets .... you will know them by their fruits.”

So is there an added ingredient to Christian meditation? Well, compared with self help meditation there might be. It is already present in the Buddhist mindfulness approach since Buddhism regards the self as an illusion anyway. For Jesus the self was something to be 'denied' and the modern recovery of the Christian contemplative tradtition comes close to Buddhism in asserting that the self to which we are so attached is a 'paste up' job which is also pretty illusory. Illusory it may be but the ego - my picture of myself - will defend the illusion even if it is pasted up out of a random selection of memories, attitudes and roles which we play. Maybe most of our stress comes from our dogged attempts to preserve the ego we have so painstakingly constructed since childhood. As someone has said, 'Our anxiety comes mainly from our search for tranquility'.

The Christian added ingredient is 'kenosis' - the New Testament Greek for self-emptying - letting go of any idea we have about who we are until we find the truth deep within us. With no ego to defend stress is taken care of.