In Times of Anxiety by John Main OSB, Meditatio Series 2009
When you begin to meditate, you have to have some motivation. You have to have some objective to get you going, to start you on the road. To achieve that state of harmony, of peace (which in many of the sacred scriptures in both the Eastern and Western traditions are described as the state of blessedness, of glory, of salvation, or of life, the sense of being fully alive) if you want a motivation, that would be as good a motivation as any. But once you start to meditate on a daily regular basis in your life, you will begin to realize that meditation operates by its own dynamic. It is not just like any other activity in your life. You don’t approach it in the way: If I meditate so many times then I will get this return, x level of peacefulness; if I am particularly faithful then I will get to x plus one, or whatever.
Once you start to meditate you realize that you come to it without demands, without looking for any pay-off. We meditate simply because this is the only way that we can find that will lead God. And in the Christian vision of meditation, the whole purpose of meditation is simply to be open to the presence of God in our own hearts. People often ask, ‘Why should I meditate? Why do you meditate?’ I think part of the answer is that in the experience of meditation we come to know ourselves as true, as real, not ourselves as acting a role, not ourselves fulfilling other people’s expectations of us, but the experience of being who we are. Meditation is important for us because each of us has to learn to be true, to be faithful to the truth of our own being.
St Augustine — Confessions, Book X
“What is there in me that could be hidden from thee, Lord, to whose eyes the abysses of man’s conscience are naked, even if I were unwilling to confess it to thee? In doing so I would only hide thee from myself, not myself from thee. I would therefore confess what I know about myself; I will also confess what I do not know about myself.”
