Meditation is an activity of thought, while prayer is the rejection of every thought. According to the teaching of the eastern Fathers, even pious thoughts and the deepest and loftiest theological considerations, if they occur during prayer, must be considered as a temptation and suppressed; because, as the Fathers say, it is foolish to think about God and forget that you are in his presence. All the spiritual guides of Orthodoxy warn us against replacing this meeting with God by thinking about him.
Prayer is essentially standing face to face with God, consciously striving to remain collected and absolutely still and attentive in his presence, which means standing with an undivided mind, an undivided heart and an undivided will in the presence of the Lord; and that is not easy. Whatever our training may give us, there is always a short cut open at any time: undividedness can be attained by the person for whom the love of God is everything, who has broken all ties, who is completely given to God; then there is no longer personal striving, but the working of the radiant grace of God.
God must always be the focus of our attention for there are many ways in which this collectedness may be falsified; when we pray from a deep concern, we have a sense that our whole being has become one prayer and we imagine that we have been in a state of deep, real prayerful collectedness, but this is not true, because the focus of attention was not God; it was the object of our prayer. When we are emotionally involved, no alien thought intrudes, because we are completely concerned with what we are praying about; it is only when we tum to pray for some other person or need that our attention is suddenly dispersed, which means that it was not the thought of God, not the sense of his presence that was the cause of this concentration, but our human concern. It does not mean that human concern is of no importance, but it means that the thought of a friend can do more than the thought of God, which is a serious point.
One of the reasons why we find it so difficult to be attentive is that the act of faith which we make in affirming: ‘God is here,’ carries too little weight for us. We are intellectually aware that God is here, but not aware of it physically in a way that would collect and focus all our energies, thoughts, emotions and will, making us nothing but attention. If we prepare for prayer by a process of imagination: ‘The Lord Christ is here, that is what he looks like, this is what I know about him, this is what he means to me …’, the richer the image, the less real the presence, because it is an idol that is built which obscures the real presence. We can derive some help from it for a sort of emotional concentration, but it is not God’s presence, the real, objective presence of God.
The early Fathers and the whole Orthodox tradition teach us that we must concentrate, by an effort of will, on the words of the prayer we pronounce. We must pronounce the words attentively, matter-of-factly, without trying to create any sort of emotional state, and we must leave it to God to arouse whatever response we are capable of.
~Archbishop Anthony Bloom, Living Prayer
