We often refer to the Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on* Some Aspects of Christian Meditation* – but then skip over that it acknowledges:
That does not mean that genuine practices of meditation which come from the Christian East and from the great non-Christian religions, which prove attractive to the man of today who is divided and disoriented, cannot constitute a suitable means of helping the person who prays to come before God with an interior peace, even in the midst of external pressures.
And yet dangers can be anywhere. The letter begins wiht errors in the early Church (cf. 1 Jn 4:3; 1 Tim 1:3-7 and 4:3-4) and “subsequently, two fundamental deviations came to be identified: Pseudognosticism and Messalianism”
Eastern forms do not have the monopoly on dangers. Any time there is the risk of Christ being subordinate to any method, experience or other goal there is danger.
Danger to believe that out own efforts bring our salvation; danger to believe that our faith eliminates any need for effort on our part.
Danger that we stive to extingish our very self through some immersion in the indeterminate abyss; danger also that we place God within the box of our own favorite limiting images. Danger of ego extinction & danger of ego inflation.
Danger that we make our feelings the sole criteria of spiritual progress; danger that we think we have it all figured out intellectually or have the elite knowledge.
Danger to think we can control God’s action by any technique or prayer.
Danger of believing one is God; danger of failing to acknowledge God in others.
Yes, there are many, many dangers everywhere the human heart can wander. The devil wants us to sin. S/He needs our free will for that.
References have been made to the document
Jesus Christ The Bearer of the Water of Life. It asks a few discerning questions regarding how we view things so that we can make intelligent informed decisions about what we do and why we are doing it.
The following questions may be the easiest key to evaluating some of the central elements of New Age thought and practice from a Christian standpoint. “New Age” refers to the ideas which circulate about God, the human being and the world, the people with whom Christians may have conversations on religious matters, the publicity material for meditation groups, therapies and the like, explicit statements on religion and so on. Some of these questions applied to people and ideas not explicitly labelled New Age would reveal further unnamed or unacknowledged links with the whole New Age atmosphere.
- Is God a being with whom we have a relationship or something to be used or a force to be harnessed?
- Is there just one Jesus Christ, or are there thousands of Christs?
- The human being: is there one universal being or are there many individuals?
- Do we save ourselves or is salvation a free gift from God?
- Do we invent truth or do we embrace it?
- Prayer and meditation: are we talking to ourselves or to God?
- Are we tempted to deny sin or do we accept that there is such a thing?
- Are we encouraged to reject or accept suffering and death?
- Is social commitment something shirked or positively sought after?
- Is our future in the stars or do we help to construct it?
What I mean was dealt with by the CDF:
- With the present diffusion of eastern methods of meditation in the Christian world and in ecclesial communities, we find ourselves faced with a pointed renewal of an attempt, which is not free from dangers and errors, “to fuse Christian meditation with that which is non-Christian.” Proposals in this direction are numerous and radical to a greater or lesser extent. Some use eastern methods solely as a psycho-physical preparation for a truly Christian contemplation; others go further and, using different techniques, try to generate spiritual experiences similar to those described in the writings of certain Catholic mystics.
It would be a mistake to try to generate an experience.
- Some physical exercises automatically produce a feeling of quiet and relaxation, pleasing sensations, perhaps even phenomena of light and of warmth, which resemble spiritual well-being. To take such feelings for the authentic consolations of the Holy Spirit would be a totally erroneous way of conceiving the spiritual life. Giving them a symbolic significance typical of the mystical experience, when the moral condition of the person concerned does not correspond to such an experience, would represent a kind of mental schizophrenia which could also lead to psychic disturbance and, at times, to moral deviations.
And to think an experiences generated was the Holy Spirit.
But we can still benefit by non-Christian practices.
That does not mean that genuine practices of meditation which come from the Christian East and from the great non-Christian religions, which prove attractive to the man of today who is divided and disoriented, cannot constitute a suitable means of helping the person who prays to come before God with an interior peace, even in the midst of external pressures.
ewtn.com/library/curia/cdfmed.htm
