How to use the meditations
1. Find a quiet place where you will not be disturbed.
2. Read through the whole meditation a few times, then put it down.
3. Sit in a position both comfortable and alert.
4. Allow the meditation 10 minutes or so in your imagination. Do not give up before this time; stay with it.
5. Allow another 10 minutes for recording what happened. Allow events to develop as you record. |
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MEDITATION 48
ABSENCE
When the little boy has been told that his dad is coming to take him out on Saturday, it's very hard when he doesn't turn up. His mum can console him, and invent reasons why it hasn't worked out. But no consolation heals the absence, or answers the aching "Why?"
If disappointment is repeated over a period of time, the pain goes deep and layers of distrust and suspicion towards life thicken, stifling hope and happiness.
Some people experience God in this way – as one full of promises, but failing to deliver. One Christian mystic called such experiences "the dark night of the soul".
And he wasn't joking.
Consider
What's your experience of things working out for you? Do you know anything of "the dark night of the soul"?
Imagine
Imagine you are in a dark place.
Where are you? How do you feel?
You are asking for something. What is it? Can you speak it?
What happens? Is there anyone there to give it to you?
Is this darkness easy to be in; or not a place you want to be?
Does absence become presence? Or does it stay as absence?
More one-minute mysticism |
