Meditation - The Whole Point, James Finley

God loves... all that is lost and broken in everyone who lives.  So, too, [through the practice of meditation] you begin to realize that you are falling in love with each and every person in the world.  As you go on in this love for others, you fail in it again and again.  This is no obstacle so long as your failure to be compassionate toward others is realized [as in the practice of meditation] as just the latest opportunity to renew your compassion toward yourself and others.  What matters is that you have come to see a certain look of pain in the world's eyes.  You know that look well, for [as you have seen in meditation] that look has been in your own eyes as well.  It is the look of sadness and confusion in not realizing how loved and lovable one is in the midst of difficulties and shortcomings.  You begin to appreciate that every time you compassionately engage with another person, your reason for being in this world is honored and expressed.  For the world is the arena in which suffering continues to arise in the absence of love, and happiness continues to arise in the presence of love.
    
Meditation allows us to see the world through eyes of compassion.  This compassionate vision of the world impels us to live in ways in which our words and behavior toward others embody compassion.  Compassion forms the essential bond between seeking God in meditation and all forms of social justice.  For the more we are transformed in compassion, the more we are impelled to act with compassion toward others.
 
~ James Finley, Christian Meditation, pp 285-286
 
TRY AND TELL  ~ POST EXPERIENCES AND COMMENTS BELOW
Choose to be present in the immediacy of the present moment by simply relaxing into being right where you are, just as you are.  Settle into the intimate, felt sense of your bodily stillness.  Settle into being aware of your breathing and whatever degree of fatigue or wakefulness you may be feeling in your body at the moment.  Be aware of whatever sadness, inner peace, or other emotion may be present.  Be aware of the light and the temperature in the room.  In short, simply be present, just as you are, in the moment, just as it is.  Cling to nothing.  Reject nothing.  Rest in this moment, in which there is nowhere to go, nothing to achieve, nothing to prove, nothing to tend to except being simply present.  
    
You may discover yourself slipping away from the present-moment attentiveness into your customary round of thoughts, memories, and concerns.  This is ego consciousness reinstating its accustomed position as our primary way of being in the present moment.  The strategy of self-transformation at work in meditation is not to fight with the ego's efforts to reinstate its domain.  The strategy is rather that of sitting in a circle of simple presence that continues expanding outward to include any and all aspects of ego that may arise within it... without judging, without evaluating, without clinging to or rejecting the way we simply are.  
    
As we renew our present-moment attentiveness again and again, we can be reassured that we are renewing our awareness of the divine mystery that is manifesting itself in and as each thought that arises, endures, and passes away within us.  
    
POST EXPERIENCES AND COMMENTS BELOW
MEDITATION, JAMES FINLEY:  CHURCH OF RECONCILIATION