I notice; I wonder; this reminds me - meditative thinking in action
It's tough to articulate what meditative thinking looks like in practice. This tool from nature journaling is a great start!
Christian meditation requires a different kind of thinking than the kinds that get most of us through our day. It’s tough to articulate this without sounding woo-woo. The difference between taipa (maximizing the consumption-per-second ratio of an object) and tarrying (clearing your schedule to hang out with it) is one way to help conceptualize it. Nick Carr’s distinction between skimming over a subject and scuba diving into it is another. Meditative thinking involves time and it involves depth. Okay.
But what does that look like when it comes to me sitting down with a text of Scripture? What do I actually do?
The other day, my wife told me about a set of mental prompts from John Muir Laws, who teaches nature journaling (among other things). We use his book in our homeschooling; and he lays out the prompts in this video. They’re an excellent tool, not just for nature journaling, but for how to think in the mode of meditation.
You should watch it to hear him explain and apply his method; but here are the high points as they relate to us. I’m going to apply each one using Psalm 16:11 –
You make known to me the path of life; in your presence is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.
“I notice”
The first prompt is to notice: to pay attention to every detail I can of a passage. Laws recommends saying your observations out loud if you’re nature journaling. When you’re meditating on Scripture, you might jot your observations down instead.
As he says, this isn’t a time for filtering or analyzing; it’s just trying to see as much as possible going on. Writing / saying what we notice helps us see something, note it, and then look for more.
In our passage, here are some things I notice:
David says “you” not “he” – this is a prayer to God, not a statement about him
God has shown him something
Specifically, God has shown him the path of life
David says that there is fullness of joy in God’s presence
He uses “your right hand” to talk about being close to God
There are “pleasures forevermore” at God’s right hand
What do you notice? If you can, grab something to write / type with and note your observations.
“I wonder”
The second prompt is to wonder: to ask questions about the subject. I really like this, because wonder is an expansive, open-ended form of learning. The OIA method of Bible study (Observation-Interpretation-Application) starts like the Muir Laws one, but we can often treat “interpretation” as “finding the answer that solves the text.” It’s a closed-ended form of learning. That’s not necessarily bad; but it doesn’t lead us into meditative thinking.
Just like noticing means writing down as many observations as I can, wondering means asking as many questions as I can of what I’m looking at. We shouldn’t start by trying to answer them yet; just ask.
Here’s a version of some of Laws’ question prompts adapted to our subject. These aren’t an exhaustive list; they’re starters in case you get stuck.
Who, what, when, where, why, how?
Why does the text say that?
How does that work?
Do I see any patterns?
Taking these to Psalm 16:11, we might wonder:
How does God make known to David the path of life?
What is the path of life?
What does it mean to be in God’s presence?
What does fullness of joy feel like?
Why would he say “at your right hand”?
What kinds of pleasures might he mean?
As Laws says in his video, it’s only after we spend a few minutes posing questions to spark wonder that we should begin seeing if we can answer them.
And before that, it’s good to start with this third prompt:
“This reminds me of”
This is another great one, because it encourages open-ended thinking about the biblical text and about our lives. Connecting what we see to other pieces of knowledge that we have helps us remember what we’re looking at. And it can lead us not just to answers to the questions we’ve posed above, but insights about the text and about ourselves that we might not read in someone else’s analysis or comments.
For example, in our verse:
“the path of life” reminds me of Jesus saying, “I am the way, the truth, and the life”
“fullness of joy” reminds me of Ephesians 3, where Paul prays that they “may be filled with all the fullness of God”
There are several other places where people experience the presence of God – Isaiah 6, Exodus 19, Acts 2
“at the right hand of” is in several places in the Bible – Jesus is at the right hand of God; his disciples fight over sitting at his right hand
Some of these connections lead us to insights or answers. Some lead us to more questions – I wonder why David thinks God’s presence is joyful, when Isaiah’s first response is fear? But posing these questions, making connections, and letting those lead us to new observations is an open-ended loop of learning that involves the kind of thinking we do in meditation.