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Prayer and the purpose of Christian meditation

Lynne Baab • Tuesday August 8 2023

I’m going to give you a quotation with words deleted in two places. I’ve marked those two places with X and Y. As you read the quotation, think about what you would put in place of X and Y.

“Christian meditation is the filling of the mind for the purpose of X. It is a means of learning by repeated exposure to the same ideas. It involves study, reflection, and rumination. . . . Christian meditation sees understanding as the product of thinking on whatsoever is virtuous (Phil. 4:8). Christian meditation is not an end in itself but is intended to Y.” —Jen...

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Silence and prayer

Lynne Baab • Tuesday August 1 2023

When you think of praying in silence, what comes to mind? Walking in a beautiful park? The dark, quiet hours in the middle of the night? Reading a passage from the Bible and praying in response to what you read? Praying a written prayer like the one at the end of this blog post or a prayer from the Book of Common Prayer or another collection of prayers?

A month ago, when I started pondering the spiritual practices of silence and solitude as they relate to prayer, I saw silence and solitude as practices with a lot of overlap, but I wasn’t...

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Prayer in solitude

Lynne Baab • Tuesday July 25 2023

I learned to pray in communal settings. As a child, the majestic and eloquent prayers I heard in the Episcopal worship services I attended with my family moved me. One of them helped the congregation approach God, and despite the old fashioned language, I loved the words as a child, and only as an adult did I realize the prayer evokes Jesus's interaction with the Syrophoenican woman in Mark 7:24-30: "Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit, that...

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Silence, solitude, and prayer

Lynne Baab • Thursday July 20 2023

I knew I wanted to write a blog post about the Christian myth that the most spiritual form of prayer is prayer in solitude. Throughout much of Jewish and Christian history, many believers have done a lot of their praying with others, and many passages in the Bible show the significance of communal prayer. I wrote an article for Christianity Today about this. And yet Christians also pray alone in many diverse settings, including in the “prayer closet” (literally “storage room”) that Jesus mentions in Matthew 6:6. I wanted to write some thoughts about these equally valuable places for prayer.

I wasn’t sure which language to...

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