How Should We Think About Meditation and Mindfulness?

Robbed of Focus

Our culture is very attuned right now to questions of mindfulness and meditation. You see that language and the practices to which they refer all over the place. It’s understandable that we would be interested in those things because if there’s one thing our cultural moment is good at, it’s distracting us with all sorts of things—from short video clips to our phone beeping at us. It’s the pace of life and the rate of change. We live in a world that is always trying to pull us away from whatever it is we might be focusing on in order to focus on the immediate, the now, the pressing.

In a context like that, a lot of people, Christian and non-Christian, have felt how that constant distraction is actually robbing us of some real good things and some necessary things. And so people are trying to recover and fight for that. A lot of that fight takes the shape of, Hey, let’s look into meditation and mindfulness practices, etc.

As Christians, I think there’s a lot that we can see in that movement that’s good and helpful. I think of the Lord Jesus and how he withdraws from the crowds and goes to a quiet, desolate place to be alone with his Father in prayer. Clearly, a lot of the things that the Bible calls us to, like the blessed man or blessed woman of Psalm 1 whose delight is in the law of the Lord and meditates upon it day and night, if you’re going to be that person and if you’re going to do those things, you cannot be constantly distracted by your smartphone. And so we need to find ways to connect and reorient ourselves around things that matter.

The question is, How do we do that? A lot of the practices that go under the heading of meditation are things that essentially try to manipulate physiology, like postures and breathing techniques, to try to push away all the distractions, clear the mind, and get to a quiet headspace. Whereas the meditation commended in Scripture—in Psalm 1 and picked up by the Reformers and the English Puritans and others—is actually not so much a pushing out and a clearing space, but it’s actually a filling and a focusing.

It’s taking God’s promises as revealed in his Word, calling them to mind, thinking upon them, pondering them, turning them over, and asking, How does this promise, this picture of Christ, this facet of God’s reality intersect with my life and comfort me, challenge me, refresh me, reorient my thinking and my way of engaging with others?

Matthew C. Bingham is the author of A Heart Aflame for God: A Reformed Approach to Spiritual Formation.

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