Christian meditation as a contributing factor to the experience of relationship with God

Today’s historical, geopolitical, social, socioeconomic, psychological context of human life as well as the challenges provoked by diverse crisis cause tension, insecurity, and fear. In various religions people aspire to experience the unity with the One whom they believe to be superior, who brings them certainty, feelings of peace and security. Meditation is a common practice in all religions. It is a method that helps those who are looking to experience the relationship with God (in Christianity) and those who are trying to reach the merging with the universe (in Buddhism) or with a deity (in Hinduism) to get closer to this experience (in Christianity) or it is at least an attempt to do so (in Buddhism and Hinduism). The unity with God is the key for today’s Christians that teaches how to exist in a terrifying battlefield of the information wars. The phenomenon of meditation is a manifestation of human activity, creativity, therefore as a research object it belongs to human being and can be studied scientifically. In the following study, the phenomenon of Christian meditation is analysed more deeply, it is presented from the perspective of the experience of relationship with God. The work reveals, on a theoretical level, that the origins, the content, and the aim of Christian meditation, i.e. the Christocentric prayer, contain two necessary factors: the pursuit of the personal relationship with God, the Father, and the focus on Jesus Christ. This meditation is the meeting of the Word of God and a human soul: it is a moment when through the meditation a person makes the Word of God his or her own. The preconditions of the experience of relationship with God in the Christian meditation are as presented below. From the Biblical perspective: the fact that a human being is created in the image and likeness of God and that a Christian is ‘a new creation’ in Christ, therefore Christ is an integral inner force of every Christian. The empirical preconditions of the experience of relationship with God in the Christian meditation: spiritual sensations are described by using the notions of physical sensations; spiritual experiences are linked to the changes of neural connections in the human brain. Finally, the study presents guidelines for the experience of personal unity with Jesus Christ in the meditation practices of Carmelite in the Catholic Churches and in the meditation of the Evangelical Churches: the place of the event is human soul, its foundation is the experience of Jesus Christ in one’s interiority, the prayer is a conversation with Him. The keywords of Carmelite meditation are to listen and to love. The main aspects of the meditation in Evangelical Churches are the mind’s renewal by the Word of God, opening in this way one’s heart to the Holy Spirit, and living the reality of the Word of God