Dan Harris’ new book, 10% Happier, was discussed to start the 3rd week of the group meditation sessions at the church. Harris is an ABC news anchor, who at one time was considered the ‘religion reporter.’
In the church group were people with differing experiences with meditation. So I thought they’d be interested in this book that covers how he became interested in meditation after he had an anxiety attack during a news broadcast. His book reported on scientific research on meditators, including MRI scans that demonstrated how meditation can essentially rewire the brain. Among the studies of different types of meditation was a description of the Buddhist “metta meditation,” which is very similar to what I outline in my book.
When we got into a discussion of how I came to the outline and conclusions in my book, I realized there was a problem with merely giving conclusions throughout my book. I hadn’t explained enough about how I wrote the book after many years of research, meditation, and inter-religious study to reach those conclusions. I talked about the years of research I did about that weird old Greek word, ‘agape.’ And if we think it’s a weird word today, what I discovered is that the Greeks 2,000 years ago thought it was just as weird a word back then. 'Agape' was not a commonly used word. In fact, when the Christians started using it, the only place most people would have heard the word was from a few Jewish-Christians, who had found it in the Greek translation of the Torah (the 1st 5 books of the Bible).
My research was really helped when the 1 Corinthians volume of the Anchor Yale Bible was finally published in 2008. (The Anchor Bible is this amazing undertaking of re-translation that takes you through the Bible verse by verse, giving extensive scholarly notes explaining how each verse is retranslated.) So I was excited to see what was done with that very difficult 13th chapt., where ‘agape’ is usually mistranslated as ‘love.’ Well, the Anchor Bible has 17 pages of notes about 1 Cor. 13. These notes point out how rare a word ‘agape’ is. But the conclusion is that no matter what agape meant, “agape remains the supreme quality of Christian existence.” [p. 490] When I read that I thought, ‘Oh, that’s why I’ve spent all these years researching about agape — it’s the “supreme quality of Christian existence.”’
Also we discussed a page I had given them containing excerpts from Martin Luther King’s sermon on loving enemies (from his book The Strength to Love). He made the important point, “When Jesus bids us to love our enemies, he is speaking neither of ‘eros’ nor ‘philia’; he is speaking of ‘agape.’” [p. 44] When he mentioned ‘eros’ and ‘philia’ he was referring to the Greek words that mean almost everything most Americans mean by the word ‘love.’ And of this agape for our enemies, Dr. King says it’s “far from being the pious injunction of a Utopian dreamer,” but is “an absolute necessity for our survival,” and is “the key to the solution of the problem of our world.” And of course, Dr. King went on to prove how it could be put into action when he mobilized masses of people and changed history.
So in looking back I hope our discussions were helpful for giving added meaning to our meditation.
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