MEDITATION.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 108, 8 May 1937, Page 2 (Supplement)

MEDITATION.

THOUGHTS FOR OTHERS. (By S.) Wc do not, in these days, hear much of a word that was often used by our fathers, and that we como upon time and ajrain in the Bible, more especially in the Bonk of IValms. Jt is that fine old word meditation. And, yet, we all practise what it connotes —we all give ourselves, more or less, to deep and serious thought. It is, indeed, impossible to exist without it. We have to meditate to carry on our business, we have to meditate to do our work, and w-o have to meditate to make onr home a home, and we have to meditate to live. But our tendency is to let our meditation be mostly—too often entirely — taken up with ourselves and our own affairs—our plans, our successes, our failures, our troubles, our enjoyments, our likes and dislikes. The poet had this in his mind when ho described himself as: Hemmed in bj petty thoughts and petty tilings. Intent on toys and trifles all my years, Pleased by life's gauds, pained by its pricks and stings. Swayed by ignoble hopes, ignoble fears: Threading life's tangled maze without life's clue. Busy with means, yet heedless of their end, Ix>st to all sense of what is real and true, Blind to the goal to which all Nature tends. It is thus we all unconsciously tend to become egotists and heedless of the needs and, it may be, rights of others, and blind to spiritual realities.

Now one thing that may be said about it is this. We should save ourselves from developing too much thought about ourselves, and give to our religious consciousness a richer fulness of content, if we cultivated a way of thinking of ordinary affairs as they affect, not only ourselves, but the world in general; in other words, if we got into the way of thinking deeply and seriously of how this or that course we intend to follow will affect others as w«ll as benefit ourselves. It would, in short, be all to the good, both of ourselves and our fellow men and women, if, instead of occupying our mind merely with life as it concerns ourselves—our gains and losses, our griefs and pains, our joys and delights, our sympathies and antipathies—we gave ourselves more to meditation on the common life in a large and generous spirit. It would make us co-partners with God and keep us in a kind of living in which we should feel His companionship. And it is possible, even to those of us who may be finding life, what Thomas Boston used to call, a hard stepdame. It was certainly that to him and to many another of the most unselfish, and most spiritually-minded men and women the world has known.