During breakfast, my daughter asked, “Daddy, why is the water auntie’s house different than the water at our house?”

“It comes from a different source,” I told her. 

Sources matter. This is especially true when it comes to prayer and who we rely on for inspiration, guidance, and salvation. There are many different sources, but they don’t all promise the same end product. 

As the saying goes, “Your mileage may vary.” 

For many years, partly in rebellion against my Christian upbringing and partly out of a genuine curiosity, I was deeply attracted to the religions of the East, particularly Buddhism. I took classes, attended workshops, read books, listened to talks, and visited monasteries. I even married a woman from a predominantly Buddhist country. 

Buddhism was attractive to me because it offered something I didn’t think Christianity did. It offered a method by which to practice. Christianity had prayer, Scripture, and church, but Buddhism had meditation and the promises of meditation were what really drew me into the religion, and it worked for a while. 

Then one day, I had a crisis, a spiritual crisis. A series of events and personal choices threw my life completely out of balance and I started to experience anxiety attacks, severe depression, and what felt like the beginning of a nervous breakdown. 

Among other things, I tried to recenter myself by returning to my Buddhist books, lectures, and meditation, but something was missing. It felt like I was hitting my head on a spiritual ceiling and I just couldn’t break through. I was almost there, but not quite and I couldn’t figure out why. 

In hindsight, I can now see that God was allowing me to struggle so that I would learn a lesson only pain was going to teach me. In my desperation, I cried out to God for help. I prayed for guidance and wisdom, and, as divine providence would have it, I stumbled upon a book called The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind – A New Perspective on Christ and His Message by Cynthia Bourgeault (2008). 

Upon reading The Wisdom Jesus, I discovered what was missing from my practice and that was God. Bourgeault’s book not only helped me bridge the gap between Buddhism and the teachings of Jesus, but it also reminded me of who I was and am, and that is a Christian. This book clarified why Buddhism no longer spoke to my heart as it once did. Buddhism had not changed. I had. 

This realization restarted my journey in Christ and reignited the fire in my heart for the Lord. Through Bourgeault’s work, I was introduced to Thomas Keating and through Keating I was introduced to centering prayer. In centering prayer, I found a method for meditating which, instead of focusing on me and my attempts at enlightenment, focused on God and inviting him into my heart to do his work. 

Both meditation and centering prayer are similar in many ways and they both promise transformative results. The difference between meditation and centering prayer, however, is the source of those results. In meditation, the results come from the practice itself and these results can be amazing and life-changing. The results from centering prayer, however, come from God. 

Simply by changing the focus of my practicing an tapping into a different source, by tapping into God, my whole life changed. I stopped having anxiety attacks, my depression subsided, and my relationships started to balance out. I firmly believe that is because God was doing for me what I couldn’t do for myself. 

None of this is to criticize Buddhism or to put down meditation as a practice. On the contrary, both Buddhism and meditation helped me out immensely as far as they could go, but for whatever reason, I needed to go deeper and I needed God’s help to get there. I needed to tap into a different source than Buddhism or meditation had to offer. I needed to tap into God and I needed to go through Jesus to do so. 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox.