It's All in the Roots
Meditation on Scripture, step 2
The second step in meditating on Scripture is growing roots into the Word. The image comes from Psalm 1:
Blessed is the man … [whose] delight is in the law of the Lord,
and on his law he meditates day and night.
He is like a tree
planted by streams of water.
The psalm uses the metaphor of a rooted tree to describe the outcome of meditation – being firmly grounded in a source of life – but we can push the metaphor further, to talk about the practice of meditation too. [more?]
For a visual of what root growth looks like, check out this time-lapse video of a bean plant. The first 30-40 seconds focus on the root section, and you can see it continuing in the split-screen afterward.
There are a number of ways in which root growth teaches us about meditating on Scripture.
Roots are both “active” and “passive”
You can see the active side in the video. The roots push their way into the soil, seeming very much alive in the way they work themselves through it. Around the 0:20 mark, new roots start growing laterally out of the radicle (the taproot): first a few, then over a dozen. This is obviously a creature with a will to live.
But roots are “passive” in the way they absorb nutrients from the soil. Unlike animals that wander around consuming food, once roots are grown, they feed by opening themselves up to what is in the soil. They receive what’s there to be received.
In the same way, meditation has both an active and a passive dimension. It’s active in that we push our minds into the Scriptures through inquiring, imagining, reflecting, or other mental activities designed to digest the words we read. Reading cross-references, singing a hymn inspired by a psalm, or reflecting on how my life could be changed by a promise of God are mental activities that put more of me in contact with the Word.
And meditation is passive in that my goal is not to generate spiritual nutrients from my own activity, but to open myself to hear and receive what’s there in the Scriptures. I don’t have to hunt for or engineer insights, motivation, or wisdom; I just receive what God has given into my soul. The life is in the Word to be taken.
Roots sustain and stabilize
A plant’s roots are a vital source of life: they need many roots into the soil to absorb the (relatively) massive amount of water and nutrients to grow and bear fruit. I’ve read that plants in mediocre soil can carry on living; but to bear fruit requires an abundance of water and nutrients coming in through the roots as well as the leaves.
And more than sustenance, a plant’s roots also give it stability. It would take almost no effort to pluck up that bean plant in the first seconds of the video; it would be much harder to uproot it at the end. We can imagine how much more difficult would it be to uproot an oak tree that’s been growing and putting out roots for decades! Roots give a plant strength.
In the same way, meditating on Scripture fosters both spiritual vitality and spiritual stability. We draw life from the Word, because it has been spoken by the Holy Spirit (2 Timothy 3:16), and the Spirit makes it living and active in our lives when we read it today (Hebrews 4:12). Taking in and being re-created by the Word is a primary way we grow in Christianity.
And, whether we use David’s metaphor of a desert (Psalm 1:4) or Paul’s metaphor of a tempestuous sea (Ephesians 2:14), meditation is a key to intellectual and spiritual stability. I’m old enough to have seen a few intellectual fads “take the world by storm,” as it were: they came in with the sense that the future has arrived, and then died or were swept away. Chesterton, reflecting on a larger scale, writes:
At least five times, therefore, with the Arian and the Albigensian, with the Humanist sceptic, after Voltaire and after Darwin, the Faith has to all appearance gone to the dogs. In each of these five cases it was the dog that died.
As inevitable as intellectual fads may seem – the nationalism of our grandparents, our postmodernism, the secular wokeism ascendant today – what’s more inevitable is that they will end, and God’s Spirit will continue growing his kingdom through His Word. Keeping our roots in it will keep us grounded and growing, whether our climate is like a greenhouse or the Gobi.
Roots abide and multiply
At the end of the video (look around 2:30), the bean plant has put probably multiple feet worth of roots into the soil; but the radicle, the original taproot, remains and is still a source of life and strength for the plant. You can see root fibers all through the soil, branching from the branches, crisscrossing one another, all increasing the bean’s ability to draw life from the ground. Roots have given rise to more roots.
Our minds don’t work exactly like this – if only! – but meditation makes it more likely that we’ll remember what we read. We may remember explicitly, in the sense of memorizing a verse, or what we read may just become part of “the leaf-mold of the mind … all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps,” in Tolkien’s memorable words. The roots we grow in meditation may remain longer than we think.
And just as plant roots give rise to more roots, meditating enables us to glean more from the Word as we grow. I’m able to learn more from the Word now because of what I’ve learned in the past, just like someone who’s been running for years can run much farther than I can. There are plenty of ways I fall far short of the Word, but by God’s grace, I’ve grown, there are many ways I’m quicker to repent and pursue what’s right than I used to be. The more I give myself to learning, loving, and living the Word - especially to living it - the more capacity I’ll have to learn, love, and live the Word in the future.