Reading through “The Diary of a Russian Priest” this morning, I came upon this advice he gave to a young person:

There are two ways of reading the Gospels:

1. To read very little at a time — a verse or two — then to read them over again, reflecting on them all day long, considering them as words of Christ addressed to you personally.

2. When you know the Gospels well, to read large portions of them (one Evangelist at a time, or all four together), in order to grasp the sequence of events and the general spirit. If you have a weak memory, this is a great help: indeed, it is even essential.

And then as sometimes happens, a second reading seemed to coincide with the first as if I had planned it that way. I was still considering the idea of reading one Biblical verse over and over when I picked up Metropolitan Anthony Bloom’s “Living Prayer” and noted that the next section was about meditation and contemplation:

The purpose of meditation is not to achieve an academic exercise in thinking; it is not meant to be a purely intellectual performance, not a beautiful piece of thinking without further consequences; it is meant to be a piece of straight thinking under God’s guidance and Godwards, and should lead us to draw conclusions about how to live. ..

Whatever we take, a verse, a commandment, an event in the life of Christ, we must first of all assess its real obective content. This is extremely important because the purpose of meditation is not to build up a fantastic structure but to understand truth….

There are things which we cannot be understand except within the teaching of the Church; scripture must be understood with the mind of the Church, the mind of Christ, because the Church has not changed. In its inner experience it continues to live the same life as it lived in the first century, and words spoken by Paul, Peter, Basil or others within the Church have kept their meaning. So, after a preliminary understanding in our own contemporary language, we must turn to what the Church means by the words. Only then can we ascertain the meaning of the given text and have a right to start thinking and to draw conclusions. …

And finally, he ends the passage with saying the kind of meditation that is possible for someone who will do the work required to be what the Fathers call “an attentive person”:

The spiritual writers of the past and of the present day will all tell us: take a text, ponder on it hour after hour, day after day, until you have exhausted all your possibilities, intellectual and emotional, and thanks to attentive reading and re-reading of this text, you have come to a new attitude. Quite often meditation consists in nothing but examining the text, turning over these words of God addressed to us, so as to become completely familiar with them, so imbued with them that gradually we and these words become completely one. In this process, even if we think that we have not found any particular intellectual richness, we have changed.

I just thought those were some interesting thoughts and good advice. I pass them along for what they’re worth.