Here are five things I've learned from Kyle Strobel after listening to a smattering of podcasts with him. Two of my favorites were:

• A breakout session published on the Gospel Coalition Podcast AND
• Gravity Leadership Podcast
  • Wherein the interviewer mentions an article by Kyle's mentor and colleague, John Coe titled, "Resisting the Temptation of Moral Formation."

1. "When you are in the presence of God and your heart condemns you, God is greater than your heart." I John 3
2. Because the Spirit prays our reality to the Father, Strobel says, God hears us "In stereo".
   • Me: "Everything's great here, God...I hope you're doing will. It's all super."
   • Spirit in me: "uuuuggghhh"
3. We come to the father, in Christ, by the Spirit.
4. Contemplation: "Being with God in his temple," setting the mind on things above.
5. Use the method of prayer that the Psalmist does. The Puritans prayed this way and called it soliloquy.
   • Psalm 42, "Why be downcast, O my soul, hope in God..."

According to Kyle Strobel's reading of Jonathan Edwards and Puritan spirituality, there is a vital difference between Contemplation and meditation (31:07 min mark in podcast).

Meditation

A holding of one's attention on scripture and doctrine. "When their mind wandered they would wrestle with themselves, naming the truth." "Being watchful" of your heart.

Contemplation

Here he makes the distinction between "natural" and "supernatural" contemplation.

a) Natural: Set mind and heart on an object of our attention and desire so that we can be one with it. b) Supernatural: Ps 27, Contemplate: "temple with" To be with God in his temple.

Here is what proves most particularly Puritan: Attending to God. If the heart wanders, bring it back to God. Set your mind on things above.

A second type of contemplation grows out of the quiet, solitude habit and into the practice of the presence of God.

There is something in our soul that loathes true attention much more violently than flesh loathes fatigue. That something is much closer to evil than flesh is. That is why, every time we truly give our attention, we destroy some evil in ourselves. If one pays attention with this intention, fifteen minutes of attention is worth a lot of good works.

– Simone Weil

I first heard these bits of C.S. Lewis brought together in a talk by the poet Rev Malcolm Guite. I've often since thought that they help explain the prayer from Psalm 86:11:

Teach me Your way, O Lord, that I will walk in Your truth; bind my heart to fear Your name.

From Surprised by Joy:¹

The two hemispheres of my mind were in the sharpest contrast. On the one side a many-sided sea of poetry and myth; on the other a glib and shallow “rationalism.” Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless.

Reason²
BY C.S. LEWIS³

Set on the soul's acropolis the reason stands
A virgin, arm'd, commercing with celestial light,
And he who sins against her has defiled his own
Virginity: no cleansing makes his garment white;
So clear is reason. But how dark, imagining,
Warm, dark, obscure and infinite, daughter of Night:
Dark is her brow, the beauty of her eyes with sleep
Is loaded and her pains are long, and her delight.
Tempt not Athene. Wound not in her fertile pains
Demeter, nor rebel against her mother-right.
Oh who will reconcile in me both maid and mother,
Who make in me a concord of the depth and height?
Who make imagination's dim exploring touch
Ever report the same as intellectual sight?
Then could I truly say, and not deceive,
Then wholly say, that I B E L I E V E.

My anxiety shortens my breath. The fundamental instinct of respiration thwarted by fear, worry, too much time just in my head. I've learned, through the trauma of a couple panic attacks and a steady breathing practice—in thru the nose, out thru the mouth—that breathing consists in waiting (thanks for humoring the personal example).

It might sound weird that I'm relearning how to breath as an adult. Mindfulness, meditation, contemplation, prayer-all forms of attentive breath train one to wait. I use the personal and fundamental example of patient breathing to claim that to wait is to be human. Our journey through time waits for an end.

Here's Nick Cave on the theme:

The idea of lyrics ‘not coming’ is basically a category error. What we are talking about is not a period of ‘not coming’ but a period of ‘not arriving’. The lyrics are always coming. They are always pending. They are always on their way toward us. But often they must journey a great distance and over vast stretches of time to get there. They advance through the rugged terrains of lived experience, battling to arrive at the end of our pen. In time, they emerge, leaping free of the unknown — from memory or, more thrillingly, from the predictive part of our minds that exists on the far side of the lived moment. It has been a long and arduous journey, and our waiting much anguished.

This morning a listened to a podcast discussion on the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar that sadly seems to be inactive. Despite truncated production, the one episode that was published gave an invigorating introduction to Balthasar’s book Christian Meditation. From which, the hosts highlight VB’s theology of meditation, IN Christ. I have two takeaway thoughts and one takeaway prayer:

1. Thomas Torrance’s The Mediation of Chirst might make a great reading companion to VB’s Chirstian Meditation for their mutual, high christology. Torrance holds a reformed catholic view of the atonement that leaves much to mystery, while staying firmly trinitarian in upholding the hypostatic union. Jesus the Christ is cosmically inclusive by way of his exclusice mediation on the cross. In a similar way, VB maintains the particular mediation by the person of Christ, in prayer. By Christ’s mediation, one does not empty the mind in order to incite God to come near. Rather, Jesus prays for us as the incited action of God, particularly when he came near in space and time to pray for us in death (Lord, Jesus, pray for me now and in the hour of my death). “Why am I forsaken,” can only be prayed by Christ on his cross.

   VB and Torrance might hug or, at least shake hands, in saying: even now, the risen, slain-Lamb is behind the veil, praying to his father, in the love of the Spirit, for his people.

2. Prayer is inviting one’s soul into the presence of Chirst and finding one’s home in the triune God. AND Prayer is kneeling, at the trough of our sin, sadness, misery, and self-love, in/with Christ, long enough to find satisfaction in a father already running to meet us—coming to our senses…in the words of George Herbert, “Something understood.”

Our Father, in whom we surrender our perceived control, your self-revelation is heavy with value. Please bring your crowned king to rule, here and now, like it is there and always, in heaven. Give us grace enough for our next breath and decision, in remembrance of you. Please wash us with the clensing blood of your son, Jesus, as we wash others with the water of your word. Don’t steer us into the songs of the Sirens but sail us away from the rocks into the open sea of your love. Because we journey, fight, and serve your purpose, by your strength, and for your praise. Amen