At Easter we celebrate Resurrection and liberation from the fear of death – something we can experience through meditation by transcending the constant cycle of the death and rebirth of our thoughts, and abiding in what is eternal, says Benedictine monk Fr Laurence Freeman. He is also Director of the World Community for Christian Meditation (WCCM) and author of many books on meditation including Jesus the Teacher Within (Continuum, 2001), Light Within (Canterbury Press Norwich 2008) and First Sight – the Experience of Faith (Continuum 2011). This interview with Roland Ashby, which first appeared in 2002*, is reproduced here to mark WCCM’s 30th anniversary, which occurs this year.
RA: You said recently that “meditation puts us in touch with the reality of love which is at the core of our being … It is a return to our source.” What is meditation and how do you practise it?
LF: Meditation is essentially the awakening of the deepest consciousness of the human being. It is a movement from the head to the heart, from thought to presence, from theory to reality, from imagination to reality. Meditation is a universal spiritual practice, a spiritual path, a spiritual discipline. You find it in all the great religious traditions.
One of the misconceptions about meditation is that it is not Christian, that it has just been imported from the East. This misconception is based upon ignorance of the Christian contemplative and mystical tradition, and has damaged Christianity immensely.
Another misconception is that meditation is dangerous. People often in the fundamentalist wing will say that if you open yourself up the devil will come in. Whereas in fact it seems to me the opposite is true – the dark forces will come out through the purifying of meditation. Also the activist prejudice or bias of western Christianity often dismisses meditation and the contemplative life as being selfish, that we should be out there doing good works. The problem here is that if we do our good works, if we put all our eggs in the Martha basket and lack Mary, then our good works very quickly become taken over by the ego, or become works that burn us out and create our own stress.
Meditation is a form of prayer. Most of us were trained just to think of prayer in terms of ritual and mental prayer, so to understand meditation as prayer we have to understand the contemplative dimension of the prayer of the heart, and that the essential prayer of the Christian is the prayer of Jesus. We are entering into his prayer, and go with him, through him and in him to the Father, and in a sense we have to leave our prayer behind in order to enter fully into his prayer.
I meditate in a way that I learnt from Fr John Main, the founder of the World Community for Christian Meditation, who himself recovered this as a tradition from the desert fathers and mothers and the early Christian monks. It is a way of meditation that brings you into silence, stillness and simplicity. The obstacle to these states of prayer is the distractedness of the mind.
So when I sit to meditate what I do is take a word or a short phrase, a mantra, which means sacred word or phrase, and then I repeat the word in faith and in love continuously during the time I am in meditation, letting go any thoughts, distractions, thoughts of the past, thoughts of the future, daydreams, all the jumble and the jangle of the mind.
You don’t try to repress that or blank it out by force, which you can’t do anyway. But what you can do is to let go of it and that brings you pretty quickly I think into an experience of poverty of spirit, a letting go, which is what poverty means, and it is by returning to the faithful repetition of your word during the meditation continuously that you enter into that poverty of spirit. And the mind begins to calm gradually with regular practice. We recommend people to meditate every day, and even twice a day morning and evening for about half an hour.
To integrate that time of meditation into other forms of prayer is a quite natural thing to do. With regular practice you find the mantra moves from the head to the heart and then more and more richly opens up the prayer to the Spirit, the reality of Christ within us.
The mantra we recommend is ‘maranatha’, (Aramaic for ‘come Lord’) but it is not the only word that you can take. You could take the name Jesus, for example, or the word Abba. The important thing is that you stay with the same word, and then that allows the word to become rooted in your heart, in the same tradition that you find in the Jesus’ prayer in the Orthodox Church (‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.’)
I have found through meditation there are experiences of great grace, although one can’t meditate regularly in the sense that you are demanding that or anticipating it. I would say in the time that I have been meditating I have become more at peace with myself and less fearful. Perhaps I also have a clearer sense of the difference between illusion and reality, and am more aware that love is the great and supreme reality that casts out fear and is actually the force that exists within every person.
Meditation constantly surprises and reminds me really that the core of the human person is good, and you can trust that goodness – if you can trust your own goodness you can trust other people’s goodness.
So I would say that the spiritual growth I have felt in meditation has been felt by the fruits of the Spirit. In Galatians 5 St Paul talks about love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness and self control. In maybe surprising or subtle ways you suddenly notice that you have become more loving, you are more joyful in simple things, you are more patient in a traffic jam or with an annoying person, that you are more tolerant.
But when you notice those fruits of the Spirit in yourself I don’t think you pat yourself on the back and become more complacent. I think you experience a certain wonder at the change that has taken place in you, and that you are becoming more truly your own good self and who you really are. And that always makes me realise, whether in myself or in others that I know, that this is the life of God expanding within my human nature and slowly, gradually transforming me into itself.
RA: You have said that “the core of Christian faith is freedom and liberation from the deep rooted fear of death.” How does meditation assist you in that liberation?
LF: When we meditate we taste the impermanence of life, that things are passing away very rapidly every second, and they are being reborn every second. So one tastes that experience of death and rebirth continually in meditation as you let go of the thoughts and desires and fears and fantasies, plans and memories that pass through the mind, and you see the impermanence of the mind, and by letting go of that you move into an experience of what is abiding, what is still, what is always present.
So I think meditation takes away your fear of death by giving you a little glimpse or taste of the Resurrection. Resurrection is something that transcends the cycle of death and rebirth, and that is what we celebrate at Easter, and is the heart of the Christian faith. I believe in meditation we experience in a very personal and in a sense ordinary way the reality of that great doctrine and mystery.
And it is a very good preparation for death. I was with someone a few weeks ago who had been in meditation for many years and he approached death without fear – it didn’t frighten him any more than going to the dentist. He was a good man who had discovered, I think, through deep prayer and a good life exactly how human beings ought to face death, which is with grief and sadness in one sense of having to let go of what one knows and what one loves, but also with deep confidence and hope and joy.
RA: You have said that “meditation is an experience of loving and being loved.” How does it help us to forgive others when they hurt us, or even when they sometimes abuse us – physically, emotionally or sexually?
LF: Forgiveness is often misunderstood. When Jesus says forgive your enemies and forgive those who have hurt you, It doesn’t mean that we excuse or deny or ignore the hurts or the injustice that may have been done. I think forgiveness begins with a recognition of the pain, anger, outrage, or sense of degradation or injustice that you have suffered, and the tremendous harm that has been done. I think forgiveness begins with facing those feelings and freeing yourself from them.
The next step then, I think, is to go to a place in yourself that is deeper than the wound you have received and not to get caught in the pain or the anger or the destructive emotions that often arise, very understandingly, from suffering injustice. It is only then, I believe, that you can reconnect to the person or the source of the pain you have suffered, and that reconnection is vital for the restoration of justice. In other words, if justice is to be done, then relationships have to be restored and the truth has to be told, and ultimately it has to be confessed. But that may take a lot of time, and people often say I can’t forgive because the other person hasn’t apologised, hasn’t admitted what they have done.
But forgiveness can begin, even while the other person may still be struggling to deal with their side of the injustice which they may have perpetrated. So forgiveness has to begin with you, with someone, and I actually think the mystery of it is that when it begins with you, you then become an agent of reconciliation and of justice in the whole relationship.
It may be a long process before justice and peace have been restored, but unless it begins with you dealing with the pain and the negative feelings that have been created in you, then justice can never be done and peace can never be restored.
RA: In Jesus the Teacher Within you write, “There is no way to the true self except the narrow way of renouncing all the false selves of the ego system.” Is this another way of saying we must repent of our sins if we are to enter the kingdom of heaven?
LF: Yes it is. When Jesus began his public ministry he said, “The time has come. The kingdom of heaven is near at hand. Repent and believe the good news.” And that’s really his mission statement, a summary of his message. There is an urgency about it – the time has come. There’s the revelation of the kingdom of heaven, this experience of the presence of God is at hand, is within us, is upon us, is among us. And then that word repent. This means we have to make a response in faith to that reality before it can become fully present to us. And repentance does not mean, as I think Christians often assume, that we become sin-centred and guilt-ridden. There is nothing about being guilty I don’t think in the teaching of Jesus. It is about liberation from the bonds of illusion and sin.
So repentance I think simply means quite clearly and humbly and honestly recognising your faults, and where you have been mastered by illusion, and admitting that and recognising it and then moving on. And moving on then is the last item in that teaching of Jesus – “believe the good news” – which doesn’t just mean dogmatically signing up to a creed, it means putting into practice the good news that the kingdom of heaven is at hand, that the time has come.
So repentance I think is a turning of the mind away from the past patterns of failure and sin, and the hopeful turning towards our true nature.
The Greek word for sin is hamartia which means ‘to miss the mark’. If you are shooting an arrow at the target and you miss the target what do you do? You don’t go up and stick the arrow in yourself to punish yourself. Sin contains its own punishment according to St Augustine. So we don’t need to punish ourselves or punish others for sin, the consequences of that are enough anyway.
What we do need to do is to say “I have missed the target, I have made a mistake, I shouldn’t have said that or done that, I’ve fallen back into that same old pattern”, whatever it may be. Then you go back and try again. You may get a little closer to the target, occasionally you may even hit the bull’s eye, but we realise that this is a combination of grace and effort when you hit the target, not just your own personal skill. This for me makes sense of the Christian tradition of understanding sin seen in St Paul: “Where sin is, grace abounds all the more.” There is no fear of sin, there is no dark, guilt-ridden soul projection. There is even a meaning in sin. It doesn’t mean we should try to sin or enjoy sinning, but it means that we can see that good comes out of it, that grace works through it.
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*This interview first appeared in the May 2002 edition of The Melbourne Anglican, and was later published in A faith to live by – What an intelligent, compassionate and authentic 21st century Christian faith looks like (Volume 1) edited by Roland Ashby. (Published by Morning Star Publishing and Darton Longman and Todd). In addition to this interview with Laurence Freeman, it features interviews with 24 other spiritual leaders of our time, including Archbishop Rowan Williams, Fr Richard Rohr, Sir John Polkinghorne, Sr Joan Chittister, Fr Michael Casey, Michael Leunig, Sr Helen Prejean, Brian McClaren, Esther de Waal and Professor John Lennox.
For more information about the World Community for Christian Meditation see:
Roland Ashby facilitates on online meditation group on Wednesdays at 12 midday (Australian Eastern Daylight Time). For more information email: editor@thelivingwater.com.au