After studying theology at Oxford, Dr Sarah Bachelard left the church. But then she encountered Christian meditation, which she says took her out of her head and into her heart. She went on to become an Anglican priest, and in 2012 began a new church in Canberra – Benedictus Contemplative Church, which incorporates silent meditation into its services. She spoke to Roland Ashby about her spiritual journey and her latest book ‘A Contemplative Christianity for Our Time’. You can watch the full interview here: https://youtu.be/nXqK3KU8Lzk or read an edited transcript below.
RA: In the preface of ‘A Contemplative Christianity for Our Time’ you say there was a time in your spiritual journey when you “struggled to sustain any sense of faith”.
SB: The idea of faith was something I was always drawn to. I didn’t grow up in a strongly religious family, but my mum took us to church and I was immediately drawn to it. I guess I had that sense of yearning for the depth dimension of life, and felt that there was something there, but I also struggled to feel like I was on the inside of it. There was a sense in which I was trying really hard to believe what I thought I was supposed to believe, and that that would somehow make a difference, but I couldn’t get on the inside of it. That’s how I would characterise my struggle with faith - the struggle to make it living as opposed to just some stuff you said.
RA: So what changed?
SB: Well I guess really what changed was contemplative practice, being introduced to that. In my attempt to try to get myself faith, I’d gone off to study theology at Oxford and one of my teachers was Rowan Williams. I saw immediately there was something going on with him that felt qualitatively different to what I’d experienced in other teachers and in churches generally. But I still didn’t feel as if I could get a living access to that for myself and so I left the church and thought that I wouldn’t go back. But then I went into a period of crisis that took me out of my head and forced me into my heart - a broken heart - and that kind of vulnerable space that I’d avoided.
In that process, I learnt about a practice of silent meditation, first through the Buddhists, Thich Nhat Hanh and Pema Chodron. It gave me a way of actually dwelling with my own vulnerability in a very new way and then, as that happened, sometimes words of scripture would come back to me and I’d have the thought, ‘oh, I wonder if that means that?’ or ‘I wonder if that’s what that is trying to get at?’ So it was as though the contemplative practice began to open up some of the meaning of the tradition from the inside, as opposed to me, with my rational intelligence, trying to make sense of it from the outside. It was the beginning of a sense that the way to access faith wasn’t through my critical intelligence in the first instance, but through the heart.
RA: When did you first encounter Christian meditation?
SB: What gradually was starting to grow was a desire to integrate my understanding of the particular faith tradition of Christianity with an understanding of the practice of meditation. And then a friend mentioned to me that Rowan Williams had been giving the John Main Seminar for the World Community for Christian Meditation (in 2001) that was being played on Radio National. That was my first introduction to the WCCM and I was really excited about it, because I could see that I could potentially integrate my meditation practice into my re-entry into the Christian tradition.
RA: Meditation within the Christian tradition has been revived in recent decades by Benedictine monks John Main, Laurence Freeman, who formed the World Community for Christian Meditation, and Thomas Keating, who began the Centering Prayer Movement. Could you say something about what they teach as meditation practice, and what they understand meditation to be in Christian terms.
SB: In Christian terms they share a theological understanding of it which is that meditation is a way of prayer, it’s an embodied practice for doing what Jesus teaches us to do, which is to leave self behind, but not in the sense of self-repression or suppression or self-flagellation. It’s about handing over the whole of the self trustingly to God, and you do that by handing over your thoughts, your agenda, your plans, anxieties, and ultimately, John Main says, your self-consciousness itself, the thought of the ‘I’; and you let go of all that by silently repeating a single word, the mantra.
Theologically speaking what’s happening is that we are handing ourselves over wholly, in each meditation, into the presence and the love of God, and that this is what begins to transform us.
Thomas Keating, who used the term Centering Prayer to describe meditation, does have a slightly different emphasis on how to use the mantra. In John Main and Laurence Freeman’s teaching you say the word continually, from the beginning to the end of the meditation, and gradually the word will lead you into complete silence, but you don’t choose when that happens. You say the word humbly and unselfconsciously, and the moment of contemplation, which is the moment of complete silence, is a gift.
My understanding of the Centering Prayer method is that you use the mantra to enter into a kenotic space, that space where you’re handing over the self. It’s then okay to stop saying the mantra and to dwell in that space of being handed over, but when you realise that you’ve begun to think or you’re becoming distracted or inattentive, you use the word again to bring you back into that space. So they’re very similar and they’re not in competition, but they do have this different emphasis.
RA: What, for you, is so important about a distinctively Christian form of meditation and what part do you see Christ playing in it?
SB: I find it hard to just give some cut-and-dried answer to that question. But I can best express it in this way. One of the understandings that Christian meditation has is that when we meditate we are giving ourselves to God, we are encountering something as we yield ourselves, as we come to that place of poverty. And so there is that sense that we are met, that in Christian meditation it’s not just that I’m letting go my thoughts and doing nothing else. I’m letting go my thoughts and I’m thereby enabled to receive what is being given all the time, and is coming towards me - a love which is self-giving and is giving itself to us.
And the more I’ve gone on the more it’s felt to me that that is connected to Jesus; and the more I find myself loving Jesus. In the past I always felt a bit embarrassed by that language because it seemed a bit make-believe or it seemed in danger of being sentimental. It’s barely at the level of articulation, but there is a sense of meeting a love and of loving that love back, and that that is Christ.
RA: You say that at the heart of the vocation of a Christian contemplative is the offering of a gift to the world. As you acknowledge in the book, we’re living in a time of great crisis. Dark forces are at work in the world. I don’t think that’s over-stating it. Our civil discourse is deeply polarised and fragmented; there’s wide and deep social and economic inequality; and climate change poses such a grave existential threat that it’s by no means certain that the human race and many other species will survive. So, bearing that in mind, how do you see Christian meditation as a gift to the world?
SB: Einstein said something to the effect that a problem is never going to be solved by the level of consciousness at which the problem arose. And I do deeply sense that all the issues that you just raised arise from a fundamental misalignment in the way we see ourselves, the way we see each other, and the way we see our place in the world. It seems to me as though all of those things are symptoms of our, in a sense, having got to the end game of a way of being in and seeing the world.
That way of being in and seeing the world has generated certain benefits, but we’re also reaching not only the limits of what they can bring us, but also really discovering the cost. The gift of this tradition, this practice, is that we’re no longer seduced by the illusion that has structured so much of our way of life. We yearn for a truer and more faithful responsivity to the way things are.
RA: You quote the philosopher Charles Taylor in the book who believes the crisis facing Christianity has been caused, not so much by secularism, but what he calls “self-sufficing humanism”.
SB: The difference, I believe, between someone who is seeking to live a life of faith and the self-sufficing humanist is that self-sufficing humanism terminates in the self. It can have wonderful values and commitments but there remains this question about what your life opens into. Does it open into a kind of infinite mystery, what John Main talks about as an ever-expanding love, or does it sort of terminate in the projects of the self? And does it leave open space for grace, for possibilities that are beyond us simply to engineer or plan for?
RA: There’s another aspect of the crisis for Christianity you also touch on, because you say that many Christians feel there is a missing link in their churches.
SB: I think the missing link is to do with where we started, which is this capacity to get on the inside of the life of faith and the mystery. I think there’s been a tendency in the way that faith is taught to focus on what we believe, what we think we need to say and think about God, as opposed to practices which enable us to be opened to the reality of it, to actually practice letting go of self at a radical level as opposed to just trying to be a good person.
At Benedictus the access to that kind of livingness has been through contemplative practice. I’m not saying it has to be that way. Other people enter into that through other practices and experiences. But since it had been significant for me, that was part of the reason for wanting to offer a worshipping community that had the practice of meditation at the heart of it, and that when we gather we meditate as part of the church service so we didn’t just talk about transformation, and we didn’t just talk about what we believed, but we actually spent some time laying aside all of those thoughts and words and simply opening ourselves to the encounter, and trusting.
Quite a lot of worship can feel like we are desperately trying to manufacture something, trying to kind of make something happen or make people have an experience, whereas I think at the heart of contemplative practice is that it’s already there, this is the reality, all we need to do is to shut up and become more present to it.
RA: And finally, how do you understand the term ‘contemplation’ in relation to meditation.
SB: Laurence Freeman says that contemplation ultimately is a space of being radically present to the presence of God. It’s that space of availability and silence and mystery, and we can’t manufacture getting ourselves there or having that unfold within and around us. Meditation is a practice which disposes us for that gift. Author Martin Laird says the skilful sailor doesn’t make the wind blow to make the boat go, but the skilful sailor has to know how to do certain things in order to harness the wind when it does blow. Meditation doesn’t make contemplation happen, but it disposes us to be receptive.
A Contemplative Practice for Our Time is published by Medio Media.
Watch the full interview here: https://youtu.be/nXqK3KU8Lzk
For more information about Benedictus Contemplative Church see: https://benedictus.com.au/
For more information about the World Community for Christian Meditation see: https://wccm.org/
For information about the WCCM in Australia see: https://wccmaustralia.org.au/
For information about the Centering Prayer Movement see: https://contemplativeoutreach.org/