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Meditation
Meditation … prayers of reflection
Catholics believe that the Bible is the living Word of God. To hear the
message, we must read and reflect on it. Meditation uses the mind and
the heart to help us hear the word of the Lord. It engages the faculties
of thinking and imagination (our minds), the love we have for God (our
hearts), and also the resolutions we make to live better Christian lives
(our “hands and feet”).
St. Ignatius’s approach to mediating on the Scriptures uses ones
senses and imagination to immerse oneself through a guided experience
of prayer. The practice of Imaginative Contemplation Ignatius called “Application of the Senses,” encourages a person to immerse themselves in a Gospel scene and to imagine them as a character in the passage.
In imaginative contemplation we are invited to pray over a gospel scene by moving with our imagination and senses directly into an event and reliving it as if it were our own experience. What do we see? Imagine the smells, the voices - what do we hear? This immersion allows the gospel event to “spring to life” and involve us as participants.
When we encounter Jesus this way, we receive an intimate, felt-knowledge of him as a vibrant person and the gospel events with which we are familiar take on a new meaning for our lives today.
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