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

Mental Health

15 October 2025

3 min read

When the seasons shift, so do we

Autumn brings beauty and melancholy in equal measure

Rachael Newham

Rachael is an author and theology of mental health specialist.

A man walks a dog along a misty city park path.

Ekaterina Novitskaya on Unsplash.

In my house, the arrival of Autumn heralds two distinct emotions. My husband feels gloom settle upon him as the days draw in and a chill begins to sharpen the morning air, whilst I’m cheerfully pointing out the curling leaves beginning to change colour and admiring the beauty of an early-evening sunset.

For me, there is something enchanting about autumn that feels even more of a ‘new year’ than January, but for my husband, it’s just a sign that winter is close and the summer holidays are a distant dream.

Ten years in, we’ve learned how to tread lightly through the seasonal changes which provoke such contradicting emotions in us. I know the dark mornings aren’t easy for him, and he appreciates that heat makes me grumpy.

And we aren’t alone in our strong feelings about the seasons changing. We all have preferences, but for some, the beginning of a new season may trigger illness, such as in the case of seasonal affective disorder (which, whilst most commonly suffered during the winter months, can affect people in the summer months instead).

Ultimately, each season brings its own unique joys and sorrows, enjoyed by some and endured by others, but what’s important is that we accept these differences and find a way to connect through the changes.

It’s something we see in the way the church journeys through the year, too. Sometimes called the liturgical year, as the seasons change, there is a focus on a different part of the story of scripture.

Autumn is when harvest is celebrated, when we offer our thankfulness for the natural world and how it provides for every living thing.

Whether meteorological or theological, following the rhythm of the seasons gives us the opportunity not just to celebrate together, but to learn how to suffer well and grieve together.

In the church year, the times of celebration, like Christmas and Easter, are preceded by times of reflection and lament. Advent is characterised by the people of God waiting for the light of the world to break through the darkness, whilst Lent offers the chance to seek forgiveness and grieve over all that is wrong with the world and within us. These seasons trace the story of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection - sometimes resonating with our own life seasons and at others contrasting painfully.

In the Bible, there’s a book called Ecclesiastes, written by an unknown person referred to as Quohelet or ‘teacher’ and it talks about there being “a season for everything under the sun”, they assert that ‘There is … a time to be born and a time to die … a time to weep and a time to laugh.’

It’s a reminder as we trace the seasons, that there is space in human life and faith for all of our emotions. We see it in the variety of emotions expressed not only in books like the Psalms, but in Jesus’ own life.

And the ability to come together and mark these seasons before God, even when they differ from what we’re experiencing personally, is one that draws us together. It reminds us that through all the maelstrom of emotions and changes life brings that there is a drumbeat through every season: We are loved by God and out of that, we love one another.

The changing of the seasons can evoke a multitude of memories and emotions, but if we let it, it can also act as a call to come together and be led by love. We can learn to do as the apostle Paul instructed the early Roman church to do: “Rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn.”

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