Inspirational Meditation: Spiritual Listening continues:
Step 2: Meditation
Once you have found a phrase or a passage in the Scriptures that speaks to you in a personal way, the next step is that you "chew” on it. Think of a cow quietly chewing its cud as a symbol of pondering the Word of God.
In other words--take the phrase or passage and think deeply about it, over and over.
An example you can follow is of the Virgin Mary “pondering in her heart” what she saw and heard of Christ (Luke 2:19).
Thinking about the cow image or Mary are reminders that to be effective at meditation, you must take in the word-- that is,
memorize it
--while gently repeating it to yourself, allowing it to interact with your thoughts, your hopes, your memories, your desires.
Through this meditation step, you are allowing God's word to become His word for you--a word that touches you and affects you at your deepest levels.
Step 3: Prayer
The third step in holy listening is prayer--prayer understood both as dialogue with God-- that is, as loving
conversation with the One who has invited you into His embrace--how nice!
Plus, the prayer step also serves as a devotion--
--your prayer as an offering to God of parts of yourself--those areas you may wrongly believed God doesn't want. However, God wants and cares about all of you!
In this devotion-prayer you want to allow the word that you have taken in--
--and on which you are pondering, to touch and change your deepest, inner self.
God invites us in holy listening to hold up our most difficult and pain-filled experiences to Him....
...and to gently recite over them the healing word or phrase He has given us in our listening and meditation.
In this devotion-prayer, we allow our real selves to be touched and changed by the word of God.
And stay tuned--Another installment on Spiritual Listening, coming soon!
Return to Inspirational Meditation, Part 1
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