Christian Meditation and Mindfulness

Someone sitting still with their eyes closed for fifteen minutes could be doing either. The external practices are similar enough that the question comes up constantly, usually in one of two unhelpful forms: that they are basically the same thing, or that one of them is spiritually dangerous.

Neither is quite right. The differences are real and worth being precise about.

What each one is

Mindfulness, in its common contemporary form, trains non-judgmental attention to present experience. You attend to the breath, or to bodily sensation, and when the mind wanders you notice and return without commentary. Its roots are Buddhist — it is a component of a much larger religious system — but the form most Westerners meet has been deliberately secularised, principally through Jon Kabat-Zinn's clinical work from the late 1970s.

Christian meditation fills the mind with a particular content — a passage of Scripture, an attribute of God, an event in the life of Christ — and stays with it. The Hebrew word in Psalm 1 means something like muttering or chewing. It is not attention-training in general; it is attention directed at a specific object, and addressed to a person.

Where they genuinely differ

Content. Mindfulness is largely content-neutral: whatever arises is observed. Christian meditation is content-specific and chosen in advance. This is the deepest difference, and most of the others follow from it.

Direction. Christian meditation is relational — it is a form of prayer, and prayer has an addressee. Mindfulness as commonly taught is not addressed to anyone.

What the thoughts are for. In mindfulness, a wandering thought is noticed and released without judgment. In Christian meditation, a wandering thought may be material — the thing that surfaced when you sat still may be exactly what needs confessing or praying about. The Examen is built around precisely that.

The goal. Mindfulness aims at a quality of attention, and, in clinical settings, at reduced reactivity and distress. Christian meditation aims at knowing and being conformed to God. Wellbeing may follow; it is not the target, and the tradition is explicit that sometimes the practice will make you feel worse before it does anything else.

What they share

Being clear about the differences should not make us pretend there is no overlap.

Both require sitting still, which is harder than it sounds and rarer than it was. Both work by returning attention to something after it has wandered, over and over. Both treat the wandering as ordinary rather than as failure.

And Christianity has its own long apophatic tradition — the Cloud of Unknowing, the Jesus Prayer, Carmelite contemplative prayer — which looks considerably more like sitting in silence than like thinking about a verse. The final movement of Lectio Divina, contemplatio, is exactly that: no words, no requests. Christians who object to silence in prayer on principle are objecting to a good deal of their own tradition.

How Christians have answered the question

There is a genuine range, and it is worth representing honestly rather than pretending the matter is settled.

Some regard the techniques as usable. Breath, posture and returning attention are held to be human rather than religious — ways of sitting still that any tradition may use for its own ends. On this view a Christian may use a breathing exercise to settle before prayer without adopting anything Buddhist, in the same way as using a chair.

Some regard them as inseparable from their origins. On this view the practices were developed inside a particular account of the self and of suffering, and importing them imports something of that account, whatever the label on the app. The Vatican's 1989 letter Orationis formas takes a version of this position — not prohibition, but a caution against treating techniques as spiritually neutral and against mistaking psychological calm for union with God.

Some distinguish sharply between clinical and spiritual use. Mindfulness-based therapy for anxiety is medicine; mindfulness as a spiritual path is a rival account of what the spiritual life is. This distinction does a lot of practical work, and is where many thoughtful Christians land.

The practical question for most people is narrower than the theoretical one: if you want to pray, pray. The Christian tradition has a very large repertoire of contemplative practice of its own, and reaching for it first is the straightforward course.

If you want the Christian version

• Lectio Divina — slow reading ending in silence. The closest thing to a contemplative sitting with a scriptural spine.
• Scripture meditation — one verse, repeated, ten minutes.
• The Jesus Prayer — Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner, repeated in time with the breath. The Eastern Orthodox practice, and the closest Christian analogue to a mantra. It is in the prayer book.
• The Examen — fifteen minutes reviewing the day, with close attention to feeling.

Common questions

Is mindfulness compatible with Christianity?

Christians differ, and the disagreement is genuine. Some hold that attention techniques are neutral tools usable by any tradition; others hold that practices carry their origins with them and that mindfulness assumes a view of the self that Christianity does not share. Many distinguish between clinical use for anxiety, which they accept as medicine, and mindfulness as a spiritual path, which they do not. The Vatican's 1989 letter Orationis formas cautions against treating technique as spiritually neutral without forbidding it outright.

What is the main difference between Christian meditation and mindfulness?

Content and direction. Christian meditation fills the mind with a specific object — a passage of Scripture, an event in the life of Christ — and is addressed to God as prayer. Mindfulness as commonly taught observes whatever is present without a chosen content and is not addressed to anyone.

Does the Bible tell us to meditate?

Repeatedly, and always with an object. "His delight is in the law of the Lord; and in his law doth he meditate day and night" (Psalm 1:2). Joshua is told the book of the law shall not depart out of his mouth. Psalm 119 returns to it more than a dozen times. In every case the meditation is on something given, not on the contents of one's own mind.

Is emptying the mind unbiblical?

Christian contemplative prayer does involve setting aside words and images — the Cloud of Unknowing and the Carmelite tradition are explicit about it — so blanket objections to silence sit awkwardly with the tradition's own history. The distinction the tradition draws is between silence before God, which is relational, and emptiness as an end in itself, which is not. The final movement of Lectio Divina is silence, and it is silence with someone.