John Main

"The important aim in Christian meditation is to allow God's mysterious and silent presence within us to become more and more not only a reality but the reality which gives meaning, shape and purpose to everything we do, everything we are." John Main.

Last night at St. Johns, Waterloo Lent course on contemplative prayer we heard the story of two monks walking along a riverside. The younger one keeps asking the other questions about the nature of the river: how long is it? how much water flows past every hour? what kind of wildlife does it support? how wide is it when it reaches the sea? Finally in exasperation the older monk pushes his companion into the water, waits a few minutes, then hauls him out and says, "Well now you know what the river is like!" Liz Watson, our storyteller, had come to push us into the river but first she gave us some guidelines on how to survive in the water; guidelines worked out by John Main whose life of contemplative prayer has given rise to a stream of meditation known as The World Community For Christian Meditation. As with Jill Benet last week, the guidelines are simple (though subtly different from Jill's):

Sit still and upright with eyes lightly closed, relaxed but alert. Silently begin to say a single word (a prayer word or mantra). The word 'Maranatha' is recommnded, recited as four syllables of equal length. Listen to it as you say it, gently and continuously. Try not to think or imagine anything, spiritual or otherwise. If thoughts and images come these are distractions during the time of meditation, so keep returning to simply saying the word. Meditate each morning and evening for between twenty and thirty minutes.

As Liz said, it is for each of us to discover what method of meditation best suits our temperament. The important thing is to find one and stay with it; to jump in to the river and find out what it is like.
Afterwards one member of the group reported that she found it quite possible to 'multitask' mentally while saying the prayer word. She could happily think about things which are labelled 'distractions' while saying the prayer word. Result - no experience of real silence. Perhaps this is not so unusual and it may be why some folk find that combining meditation with yoga is helpful (actually, yoga is meditation). We are creatures of the earth and spirituality is never an escape from that fundamental fact. Remaining anchored in the body is often a help with 'distractions'. I'll return to this in a later blog. I will also pick up another member's concern that maybe she is trying too hard.
Meanwhile, by request here is the prayer I use to end each session of our course:

O thou eternal Wisdom
whom we partly know and partly do not know,
in whom we live and move and have our being,
our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.
Grant that we may be still and know the truth of eternal presence,
and in that stillness and that presence may know the love and peace
which pass all understanding.

The uncomfortable gap.

Back in the 1960s someone published a series of amusing sayings on postcards called ‘Potshots’. One read, ‘If things don’t improve soon I shall have to ask you to stop helping me.’ It occurs to me that the media are trying to help by giving us an unrelenting diet of bad news. They are saying, “This is not how things should be and if we keep on reminding you how bad they are someone, somewhere will do something to make them better.”
The fact is that lots of people, including politicians, are doing things to try and make life better but generally speaking they don’t get reported by news media. Or if they are reported it’s usually because someone thinks that it’s not enough or that the wrong tactics are being used. In some respects, of course, for many millions of people, life does get better. Even in my lifetime it has got infinitely better for me and for many people like me. But there’s always a gap between the way things are and the way we would like them to be.

We are dominated by the ‘doing mind’, left hemispherical thinking. Therefore we rarely begin by accepting what is the case about our present situation (either internal or external). We perpetually begin with the famous response, ‘If I were you I wouldn’t start from here.’ The gap between here where we are and there where we want to be is intolerable. We assume that rational thought will get us there and fast. But sometimes it’s a question of ‘don’t just do something, stand there!’ In fact it’s nearly always the right way to start tackling a problem. And it’s certainly the right way to start if the problem cannot be solved immediately or by me personally. The rush to judgement, condemnation, recrimination has become a pandemic more serious than swine flu. A little more stillness, being instead of doing, acceptance of what is now the case, of where we are, of where I am in this present moment would produce dramatic results for all the suffering about which we are constantly reminded.

Viruses

Here I am sitting in a Cafe Nero opposite St. Clement Danes church in The Strand where the bells are ringing for Sunday morning worship. I've just come from a service in St. John's Waterloo where the words were an interruption of the profound silence and stillness within me. "God does not know how to be absent", says Martin Laird so there's nothing out there to pray to. There's only the silent presence deep within. Here in these depths I am one with all that is. But the priest at St. John's has a cold and there I was worrying about catching it from him. If God does not know how to be absent, if this spacious, silent stillness is the universe becoming conscious of itself what about viruses, cancers? Sebastian, in Petru Dimitriu's novel, 'Incognito' discovers 'God' while being tortured in a Romanian Communist prison cell. "They went on beating me, but I learned to pray while the screams issued mechanically from my ill-used body - wordless prayers to a universe that could be a person, a being, a multitude or something utterly strange, who could say? We say 'thou' to it, as though to man or animal, but this is because of our own imperfection: we may no less say 'Thou' to the forest or the sea."
Earlier I was 'visited' (I can think of no better word) by an embarrasing memory which is now 13 years old. I felt embarrased all over again. It is like a mental virus, one which never goes away but lies buried in my brain to be activated at random intervals (rather like herpes). Some of these mental viruses are much more active; resentment for example, or censoriusness which are easily activated by some immediate event. And yet, underneath it all is 'God', this silence and stillness which is not disturbed by these viruses. Sometimes the viruses take me over and I get 'ill', dysfunctional. Quite often, these days, I am able to stay in touch with the still centre but it has to be a wordless experience. If I think about it I lose it. As a 3rd century Christian contemplative said, if I think I am praying then I am not praying.