Meditation (August 2007)

All meditation is about making connections. Introvert meditation – a journey inward – is meant to remind us of a connection already made that we have forgotten – namely that God is within us…spirituality is meant to be a peace based on justice which often must be carved out from society that so reluctantly and begrudgingly allows its birth… There is another kind of meditation called Extrovert meditation. It is centering by way of creating. As a potter concentrating and communing with the clay, or a musician with notes, scales and sounds, or a dancer with body and body movement and space, or a poet with words, or a lover with one’s beloved, or a baker with dough. Such acts of utter communion are communions based on activity and birthing. They are centering processes and they are creative. They are creativity as a meditation form. Mary Richards, who has written a class work on this form of meditation called Centering, describes the reality of it… The bodiliness of extrovert meditation is holy, as holy as incarnation itself. ‘Incarnation, bodying forth. It is not our whole concern? The bodying forth of our sense of life?… That is what form is: the bodying forth. The bodying forth of the living vessel in the shapes of clay.’ There can be no true incarnational spirituality without extrovert meditation.

Fox, Matthew. The Case for Extrovert Meditation. Spirituality Today, June 1978 p. 164-177. Fox, Matthew. A Spirituality Named Compassion, Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions International 1979, p 132.