Interesting article on spirituality....

YogaMama

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9024914/site/newsweek/

I enjoyed reading this article, and thought some of you may as well. Feel free to post your own thoughts!

Kim

Simonthepilgrim

Do you mean the main article about Christian meditation practice? It is a tradition very dear to my heart and was my road to Buddhism.

Have you come across the work of Father Antony de Mello? His little book, Saddhana, was a great influence on me, and his teaching stories. He was a Jesuit priest, from the Indian subcontinent, and, basing his work on the great spiritual classic by the founder of the Society, Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises, he offers a series of meditation exercises drawn from many traditions.

YogaMama

Yes, I just found the enitre article interesting. Honestly, I had never heard of Christian Meditation Practice. I have not come across Father Antony de Mello's work. I may have to check his book out.

Magwang

Yogamama, here another interesting one.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1098937,00.html

Why are some Christians threatened by Yoga?

YogaMama

Interesting, indeed. My guess is that Christians are threatened by Yoga because of it's Hindu roots. A while back, I was looking at buying a yoga dvd for my daughter, and in reading the reviews of a particular dvd, one lady said "This is an awful video because I am raising my children as Christians and I do not want them chanting the word "Om"." She went on to say that the exercises themselves were great, but she didn't like the dvd because of the phrases the instructor used. I thought that was interesting, because it's not like you are worshipping the devil while doing yoga! I guess a true Christian could answer this question better than I could! I personally do not believe that yoga should be changed in any way. There's so much more to it than just a form of exercise...it does so much for your mind as well.

Simonthepilgrim

I bought the following books within a few months of each other in 1969:

Christian Yoga by Father Dechanet
The Grail Psalter
The Revelations of Divine Love by Dame Julian of Norwich
God Is A New Language by Father Sebastian Moore

And, despite having disposed of most of my library three times since then, I still have them!

YogaMama

So what are those books about, Simon? I can guess that the first one is about "Christian Yoga", but what about the others?

Simonthepilgrim

The Grail Psalter:
This was an attempt to produce a new, poetic, singable yet traditional version of the Psalms. This was the period during which the Jerusalem translation of the Bible. Its Book of Psalms is probably vry accurate but poetic it ain't.

The Revelations of Divine Love by Dame Julian of Norwich
This is a wonderful book. Mother (or Dame, because she was a nun) Julian was one of the extraordinary flowering of mediaeval English mystical writing. We had 'discovered' mysticism some years earlier and had (?pretended to?) read St John of the Cross. At the very least, we had heard sermons and talks on mysticism. And then someone mentioned Mother Julian to me. I bought it, read it and have been in love with it ever since. At the heart of the Revelations, which she received when 'sick almost unto death', is the understanding that love is at the heart of all that is. Her most famous phrase, quoted by Eliot and others, is:

All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.

God Is A New Language by Father Sebastian Moore
This Dominican friar argues for a completely new church, a new reformation. It got him into a great deal of trouble but the Dominicans look after their own and, like some of the Dutch 'hetertics', he was shipped off to a quiet parish and not allowed to publish. He is still writing.

These four books, between them, helped to give shape to my internal search so that, when I began to meet Buddhist practice, it was already familiar. And then, hearing the Dharma taught, and meeting the Dharma in its many forms, was simply an "AHA! So that's it!" moment.