Their reflections, while presenting points in common with eastern non-Christian methods of meditation, avoid the exaggerations and partiality of the latter, which, however, are often recommended to people today who are not sufficiently prepared./
Exactly.
You’ve misinterpreted.
The spiritual authors have adopted those elements which make recollection in prayer easier, at the same time recognizing their relative value: **they are useful if reformulated in accordance with the aim of Christian prayer. **
For example, the Christian fast signifies, above all, an exercise of penitence and sacrifice; but, already for the Fathers, it also had the aim of rendering man
more open to the encounter with God and making a Christian more capable of self-dominion and at the same time more attentive to those in need.
Self-dominion isn’t self-empowerment!
This actually, apart from fasting, does not comment on non-Christian practice.
In prayer it is the whole man who must enter into relation with God, and so his body should also take up the position most suited to recollection. Such a position can in a symbolic way express the prayer itself, depending on cultures and personal sensibilities. In some aspects, Christians are today becoming more conscious of how one’s bodily posture can aid prayer.
Still doesn’t mention Yoga.
- Eastern Christian meditation has valued psychophysical symbolism, often absent in western forms of prayer.
Yes, the operative word being “Christian”!
It can range from a specific bodily posture to the basic life functions, such as breathing or the beating of the heart. The exercise of the “Jesus Prayer,” for example, which adapts itself to the natural rhythm of breathing can, at least for a certain time, be of real help to many people
.
This is not Yoga. It is Christian prayer and meditation. In fact, the breathing is normal.
On the other hand, the eastern masters themselves have also noted that **not everyone is equally suited to making use of this symbolism, since not everybody is able to pass from the material sign to the spiritual **
reality that is being sought.
I still see no comment about Yoga in the positive sense. This is talking about how putting the body into positions can cause issues.
Understood in an inadequate and incorrect way, the symbolism can even become an idol and thus an obstacle to the raising up of the spirit to God.
To live out in one’s prayer the full awareness of one’s body as a symbol is even more difficult: it can degenerate into a cult of the body and can lead surreptitiously to considering all bodily sensations as spiritual experiences.
Like Yoga.
- 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.
Yes, exactly,
RESEMBLE! Satan can appear as an angel of light, remember?!
To take such feelings for the authentic consolations of the Holy Spirit would be a totally erroneous way of conceiving the spiritual life.
Boom shakalaka boom. Exactly, brother Christian.
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.
You don’t exactly aid your viewpoint here. This is the result as have many people blogged complaining about such issues.
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.
This is talking about methods of CHRISTIAN EASTERN PRAYER NOT NON-CHRISTIAN EASTERN PRACTICES!
What the CCC is concerned about is the Christian mantra that is widespread in the West and helps a lot of people. This is just simple sitting if need be and resting in the Lord. They are obviously concerned with ultra-modernists who like those that practice Yoga might make the position the basis of the prayer turning it into a form of cult worship!..
like Yoga.
It should, however, be remembered that habitual union with God, namely that attitude of interior vigilance and appeal to the divine assistance which in the New Testament is called “continuous prayer,” is not necessarily interrupted when one devotes oneself also, according to the will of God, to work and to the care of one’s neighbor. “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God,” the Apostle tells us
(1 Cor 10:31). In fact, genuine prayer, as the great spiritual masters teach, stirs up in the person who prays an ardent charity which moves him to collaborate in the mission of the Church and to serve his brothers for the greater glory of God.
They are saying that mankind, can do this in order to come before God - this is an evangelical pronouncement to show that God can be found in other religions, it is NOT saying that the Christian is to practice Yoga!
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