Meditation and meaning beyond the bee

Beyond noticing the moment, Jane Williams sees another dimension to meditation, giving a different kind of account of what is going on.

Jane Williams

Jane Williams is the McDonald Professor in Christian Theology at St Mellitus College.

A bee rests on a human hand sipping a liquid.

'The daily life of a bee'.

Photo by Fabian Kleiser on Unsplash.

There is an increasing recognition of the power of meditation as a practice that promotes well-being. It is even being suggested as a tool, alongside others, for managing anxiety, depression and the other mental health related symptoms of our time.

Meditation doesn’t have to have a religious dimension to it, although it is a practice that has been found in all religious traditions, including Christianity, for centuries. The ‘techniques’ of meditation are very similar, whether used by someone who is religious or not. Meditation, at its most basic, requires us to attend to our body, hearing and calming our heart beat and our breathing, noticing the areas of tension and even pain in our body, finding a posture that can be maintained with comfort but without sloppiness for a period of time.

The daily life of the bee

It also requires us to notice the moment we are in: to hear the regular sounds around us, to see the way in which light falls through the window, or from a candle flame, to see the fly or the bee, getting on with daily life. Deliberately, we do not try to control these things, or allow our busy minds to tell stories about them, or try to rearrange them in any way: we simply give them our attention.

Although this sounds easy it is surprisingly hard, to begin with. It makes us realise how inattentive we usually are, how hard we find it to be still, how little our minds are accustomed to concentration, more used to veering wildly from one topic to another. Meditation helps us to notice this, not by asking us to do the impossible, and force our minds to emptiness, but by gently, firmly, taking each thought as it flits across our brain, and putting it down again, returning our attention to breathing, to space, to the moment we are in.

As we continue the practice, we will probably notice patterns in our distracting thoughts, habits of worry, or self-obsession or annoyance or fantasy; we will begin to notice the depth of the channel these kinds of thoughts have dug in us, but also begin to be able to redirect the channels, and put new ones in place, channels of attention, peacefulness, gentleness to ourselves and the world.

A different dimension

We don’t need any religious explanation to see why such practices ‘work’ for us, who are complex and interdependent beings, who can never separate out mind, body, spirit; meditation teaches us how to attend to our wholeness. But as a Christian theologian, I can’t help seeing another dimension to meditation, which might give a different kind of account of what is going on when we meditate.

As a Christian, I know myself to be a ‘creature’, a being made by God, not by accident, not to fulfil some lack in God, not to perform any tasks that God needed done, but simply because God’s overflowing love and creativity calls into being a universe and gives it freedom, agency and creativity of its own. God creates what is genuinely not God, and God loves what is created. That means that the complex interaction of all the processes, mental and physical, that make us human beings are gift, and meditation focuses us on this giftedness, it asks us to trust ourselves and our world as, at the deepest level, beneficent, meaning well to us. However much the world may have the power to damage us, and we to damage ourselves and each other, that is not its first and most basic effect: as we meditate, simply attending to the moment, we are blessed.

Christian mediation also assumes that as in meditation we attend to the moment, we are also being attended to. We are not just learning to see and hear where we are, but also learning that we are seen and heard. In our crowded lives and over-busy minds, God is still present and attentive, but there are so many distractions and barriers that prevent us from noticing and receiving the loving, patient, healing attention of God. Meditation as the ‘practice of the presence of God’, might help us see why it is such a powerful habit, because it opens in us a space to receive ourselves again from the one who made us in love, the one who came to live a human life to fill our created reality with the generosity of the Creator, the one who prays in us, endlessly, wordlessly, joyfully, that we are beloved, known, invited and set free.

Snippet

Change

Community

Fun & play

17 October 2025

3 min read

How London’s little festivals opened the door to my community

Helping an elderly Elvis to his gig gave me a glimpse into a new way of city living

Thomas Sharpe

Thomas is a writer exploring the intersection of faith, politics, and social justice.

An elderly Elvis impersonator sits on a stage wearing a gold suit.

Dave Elvis.

Finding community in the middle of a city is a strange experience. I have lived in London for six years, in six different flats, and have rarely known the names of any of my neighbours. The starkness of my experience is made all the more glaring when I visit my parents. They live in a small town, close to the countryside. They know all of their neighbours, even the new ones. There are WhatsApp groups where people request eggs or leaf blowers or an extra garden chair from one another.

My parents’ town has two things that London doesn’t: an acceptance that neighbours should depend on one another, and enough physical space for meaningful interactions to take place.

Where I live, we are self-sufficient. The idea of asking a neighbour for anything is uncomfortable. I discovered this a few months ago when I went to ask a neighbour if I could borrow a can opener, seriously fighting the urge to walk to the shops and purchase a new one as I knocked on her door.

In London, we have no space. Rather than seeing my neighbour over the fence in our back gardens, I see her on the stairwell. We’re both already moving to other places, so a nod is all that is exchanged.

But over the summer, I attended two community festivals. And there, I saw a glimpse of something different; the fruits of a circumstance where people depended on one another and finally had some space.

Back in July, my wife and I went to the Cally Festival on the Caledonian Road. We were both heavily overdressed, having just come from a wedding. From Pentonville prison to the Marathon Ethiopian restaurant, the road smelt of Jamaican food and locally baked goods. We were surrounded by stalls on every side, the gravel beneath us overtaken by a dance floor and children’s chalk drawings. Our ears rang with the words of a local poet, which jarringly transitioned to a local rap artist as we strolled along the road. Here, in the middle of our city, there was finally enough space for community.

We were at the festival because a local celebrity wanted to sing. Dave was an Elvis impersonator who had lived on the Bemerton estate for many years. He and his flat had aged together, and he was now wheelchair bound without lift access. This would be his first outing since Christmas. Someone from our church had asked if we could come and help carry him down the stairs. The Cally Festival was forcing us to depend on one another.

I was captivated by the festival, and the way it transformed a small part of the city. So, the very next weekend, I ventured a few streets west to Somerstown Festival. Just a hundred meters off the Euston Road, I experienced the very same phenomenon. A closed road, lined with smells, stalls, and sounds, with enough space for community. A group of people actively serving one another with a level of dependence that was creating community before my eyes. I looked left, and a young man was lifting a table onto the pavement for an elderly stall owner. I looked right, and a Catholic nun was handing out inspirational quotes about the environment.

Community festivals can’t happen every day and cities will always lack space, but the two I visited taught me something significant about building community within my concrete home. Our neighbourhoods require opportunities to serve one another. Whilst I'm unlikely to need a leaf blower or garden chairs in my London flat, I may need a can opener or support at a community event. Small confessions of need like that could represent the mustard seed of deeper urban communities.

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