Choosing the word that we say is very important, because we stay with the same word all the way through the meditation and from day to day. I recommend that we meditate twice a day, morning and evening. It may take you a little time to get into that, but with practice you will find why meditating twice a day is such a gift, why it transforms your life. You’ll have to learn that from your own experience, but meditating with others is a very good way of learning it. So choosing the word. You could take the name ‘Jesus’ or the word ‘Abba’, two sacred prayer words of the early church. The word I would recommend is another very sacred word in the early church. It’s in Aramaic, the language that Jesus himself spoke. It’s the word ‘maranatha’. It means ‘Come Lord’. St Paul ends the First Letter to the Corinthians with it, and he keeps it in Aramaic even though he was writing in Greek of course. He kept it in Aramaic because it must already have been a sacred word in that form. It was a sort of a visiting card among the early Christians.
(Christian Life in the Light of Christian Meditation 1: Discipleship by Laurence Freeman OSB )
