Quotes of the Day
Joanne O'Rourke is not a Buddhist or a Hindu or, for that matter, a frazzled agnostic at a stress-reduction clinic. The 61-year-old New Yorker is a Roman Catholic who supplements her traditional devotional life with silence. "We're always talking and praying and reciting the rosary, and we're never listening," she says. To make up for that, three or four times a week, she sits for 20 minutes quieting her mind. When it insists on wandering—"when it goes off to Lord & Taylor's," as she puts it—she retrieves it by silent repetition of a single word ("Father") that she chose six years ago, when she first took up an exercise called Centering Prayer. O'Rourke doesn't know much about Eastern meditation's surge into the mainstream, but she is part of a related trend: the reintroduction of contemplation in traditional American denominations after a 500-year hiatus.
Meditation might have seemed like a novelty when the Beatles first introduced their fans to the Maharishi, but strikingly similar disciplines have been part of Western culture for centuries. Socrates probably meditated, as did the neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus. A primer for early Christian monks called the Philokalia reads like a relic of the tie-dyed days: "Collect your mind and quietly lead it into the heart by way of breathing." Your mind, the monks promised, will clarify "like a sapphire."
By the 13th century, Franciscan and Dominican monks had introduced a broad public to techniques like Lectio Divina (sacred reading), a triple repetition of a biblical passages interspersed with long pauses for "rumination" and "contemplation." In the 1600s, says University of Toronto professor Brian Stock, the works of St. Theresa of Avila "summed up the whole field at just the moment it was going to disappear."
Why did it vanish? Blame it on the reformation. Martin Luther mistrusted mysticism and preferred a plain reading of scripture to any kind of incantation. The Catholic Church, adapting to the Protestant revolution and trying to centralize power in Rome, curtailed the influence of the monks who were teaching meditative techniques. The introduction of the printing press didn't help either, Stock suggests: in a kind of video-killed-the-radio-star moment, lectio divina could not hold its own against the hot new fad of reading-for-information.
The disappearance left a vacuum. Meditation, says Huston Smith, author of The World's Religions, is an important element of the religious experience—"a unique combination," as he puts it, "of individual observance, spirituality and the promise of direct contact with the deepest component of the human self." Although there are meditative aspects to such mainstream religious practicies as saying the rosary and singing evangelical praise music, the Eastern meditative discipline felt just different enough that when Western believers were exposed to it in the '70s, they flipped back through their traditions to see if they could find a more exact match.
Many could. Jews initially attracted to Buddhism are now reviving Kabbalistic meditative techniques such as the repetition of the four letters denoting God's name. The Jesus Prayer, a Greek Orthodox recital of a verse from Luke's Gospel ("Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me, a sinner"), riding on the breath and sometimes tallied on a 100-knot cord called the Konvoskinion, never really died out, but has attracted a new generation of adherents. The Centering Prayer practiced by O'Rourke was developed in 1975 by a trio of Massachussetts monks. Combining a 14th-century treatise called The Cloud of Unknowing with elements of Eastern technique, it has attracted some 50,000 adherents in several denominations, ranging from the especially pious to church-basement 12-steppers seeking both serenity and a Higher Power.
Not everyone is comfortable with contemplative cross-pollination. Although the Roman Catholic Church's Second Vatican Council encouraged it, a more recent document warned that East/West meditative hybrids "are not free from dangers," and in 1999 a group of Catholic parents sued a New York City school system that brought in a turbaned yogi to introduce meditation. (The parents lost.) Danny Akin, Dean of the Southern Baptist Convention's Southern Seminary, notes that Jesus said "Love the Lord with all your heart and"—Akin stresses—" '... all your mind.' " He warns that exercises downplaying conscious thought "could open you to evil influences," a kind of mental corollary to the Devil's play with idle hands.
And yet even Akin favors meditation so long as it is in The Word rather than on a mantra. "Meditating upon scripture," he enthuses, "you meditate upon the very thought of God." 
- David Van Biema