How can meditation restore our sense of wonder and help us forge communities and meaningful relationships? Is there any difference between meditation and prayer? What is the role of contemplative practices in a technologically advanced society?

Fr Laurence Freeman, Benedictine monk and director of the World Community for Christian Meditation, joins us today to discuss some important insights from his spiritual search and meditation practice. Together with Scott Snibbe, he explores the potential of meditation to nurture and heal communities and relationships, to re-awaken our sense of wonder and help us journey from our minds to our hearts.

“The idea that humans have failed and need to improve themselves using biotechnologies, or the fear to be taken over by AI, are disturbing ideas, and they are deeply undermining of human dignity and human wonder. Meditation has the great capacity to re-humanise us and restore our sense of wonder.“

“We need to remember the primacy of the human, and this means a partnership between contemplative scientists and scientifically respectful spiritual teachers and seekers; and it’s a partnership which will be mutually beneficial and at the heart of it there’s this extraordinary capacity for a contemplative practice seriously faithfully practiced to re-humanise us and to help us to love and revere the humanity in each other.”

“Everything that I call ‘my prayer’ has to be surrendered, together with everything else that I call mine, as the ego gets gradually laid aside. What’s left is ‘the’ prayer, or the Spirit, which is God as communion of love, dynamism of creativity and transcendence… Meditation is our way into that prayer, by making the journey from the mind to the heart.”