Beware: Meditation can be used for both good and evil

This week we are continuing with book six (“Of The Exercises Of Holy Love In Prayer.”) from Saint Francis’ Treatise on the Love of God. Be sure to watch the video “Affective Love Practiced in Meditation” to help deepen your reflection and give you a new way to embrace his timeless wisdom. (If you’d prefer to read St. Francis’ original text, this week’s video covers Chapter 1-6 of Book VI, starting with “A Description Of Mystical Theology, Which Is No Other Thing Than Prayer.”)

Of Meditation – The First Degree Of Prayer Or Mystical Theology

In the first Psalm, the man is said to be blessed: Whose will is in the way of the Lord, and who in his law shall meditate day and night. But in the second Psalm: Why did the Gentiles rage, and the people meditate vain things?

Meditation therefore is made as well for evil as for good. Yet whereas in the holy Scripture, the word meditation is ordinarily applied to the attention which we have to divine things to stir us up to love them, it has, as one might say, been canonized by the common consent of theologians, like the name, angel, and, zeal; as on the contrary the words, craft (dol), and, demons have been stigmatized: so that now when we say, meditation, we mean that which is holy, and that by which we begin mystical theology.

Every meditation is a thought, but every thought is not meditation. For we have thoughts to which our mind is carried without any design or aim, by way of simple musing, as we see common flies flying from from one flower to another, without drawing anything from them. And be this kind of thought as attentive as it may, it can never bear the name of meditation, but should simply be called thought.

Sometimes we consider a thing attentively to learn its causes, its effects, its qualities, and this thought is named study; in which the mind acts as locusts do, which promiscuously fly upon flowers and leaves, to eat them and nourish themselves therewith. But when we think of divine things, not to learn, but to make ourselves love them, this is called meditating, and this exercise, Meditation; in which our spirit, not as a fly for simple amusement, nor as a locust to eat and be filled, but as a sacred bee, moves over the flowers of holy mysteries, to extract from them the honey of divine love…

… [C]ontemplation is no other thing than a loving, simple and permanent attention of the spirit to divine things; which you may easily understand by comparing meditation with it.

Little bees are called nymphs or schadons until they make honey, and then they are called bees: so prayer is named Meditation until it has produced the honey of devotion, and then it is converted into Contemplation. For as the bees fly through their meadows, settling here and there and gathering honey, which having heaped together, they work in it for the pleasure they take in its sweetness, so we meditate to gather the love of God, but having gathered it we contemplate God, and are attentive to his goodness, by reason of the sweetness which love makes us find in it. The desire we have to obtain divine love makes us meditate, but love obtained makes us contemplate; for by love we find so agreeable a sweetness in the thing beloved, that we can never satiate our spirits in seeing and considering it.