Passage Meditation in a Christian Context

In the early 2000s, I was introduced to Easwaran by Father Henri Nouwen in his book Life of the Beloved. In it he described the importance of passage meditation and the direction of my life ultimately shifted. Instantly, I scoured the internet, dove into the free excerpts from Passage Meditation on bmcm.org, and implemented the practice into my daily life. Once I had finished reading through Passage Meditation, I went to my local bookstore and found Original Goodness. It’s been a domino effect from one book to the next through Easwaran’s writings since then.

As a Christian and pastor, Easwaran’s eight-point program has shed a whole new light into my faith and personal practice. Passage meditation especially has brought me a new understanding and sensitivity to Christ, who “is all and is in all” (Colossians 3.11). I’ve often humorously reflected with other pastors,that it took a Hindu Mystic to show me the beauty of Jesus and my own faith.

By memorizing passages and prayers, repeating them slowly and internally without analyzing them, I continuously feel my entire mind, and therefore life, become transformed and redirected. It brought me a literal understanding of Saint Paul’s instruction in the book of Romans, “Be transformed by the entire renewal of your mind, by its new ideals and its new attitude.” Growing up in church, I had known these things were a part of Christianity, but I had never been given practices to help cultivate them within myself. It was (and still is) an internal revolution!

Easwaran often teaches about consciousness being a powerful stream. When left unattended, it moves about recklessly; eventually, grooves are conditioned for the stream to flow more easily and quickly. He made psychological realities so easy to understand. When focusing on a prayer or passage in Easwaran’s method of meditation, I felt the oppositional current of my mind’s stream of consciousness. Discovering this was such an incredibly exposing encounter with myself!

Thankfully, Easwaran assures, “We are not our minds.” We are free to objectify our minds rather than be objectified by them. So, I took to the practice even more ardently. He’s taught me to look at my mind as a giant stone that is being shaped and sculpted by every thought. What do I want the final image to be? Love. “God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him,” Easwaran writes in Original Goodness, quoting the First Book of John.

Jesus often said, “Those who have ears, let them hear.” He also said, “Consider carefully how you listen.” Without the aid of Easwaran’s gentleness, I can’t imagine having understood Jesus’ words with such clarity. My ears were full of currents made up of fear, anxiety, insecurity, and bitterness. These currents would whisk away the words of Jesus and Scriptures until they ended up far and away from where they were intended to land. Passage meditation affords me the space, stillness, sensitivity, and attention to see those currents and apply the needed effort to redirect them toward what Jesus defined as the purpose of his life, that we may have “life and life more abundantly.”