Meditation opens the human heart as naturally as sunlight gives rise to the unfolding of a flower. So believed Benedictine monk John Main, whose life and teaching inspired the formation of the World Community for Christian Meditation (WCCM) in 1991. Long-time meditator, educator and author Dr Noel Keating* here expounds John Main’s teaching through reflecting on the prayer he wrote for meditators to pray before meditating.
Heavenly Father, Open our hearts to the silent Presence of the Spirit of your Son. Lead us into that mysterious Silence where Your Love is revealed to all who call.
Every time members of the WCCM sit down to meditate we recite this beautiful prayer that John Main wrote to precede meditation. I love this prayer for its utter simplicity and also its deep profundity. I think it can be said to contain the essence of John Main’s teaching on Christian Meditation.
It is important to acknowledge at the outset that the prayer is centred on the Trinity. It appeals to God to reveal to us the Spirit of God’s Son who dwells within each one of us. John Main believed that when we entered the silence of meditation we entered the flow of love between the Father and Son and he described that flow AS the Spirit. Hence, it is essentially a Trinitarian prayer.
Let’s begin then with the opening words ‘Heavenly Father’. These two words remind us from the outset that our intention in meditation is to be still in the presence of God, recognising that we are children of God and are called into personal relationship with God, who is our father and mother.
Intention, then, is a distinguishing and important feature of meditation. For example, intention differentiates meditation as a faith-based practice from the secular practice of mindfulness. What makes Christian meditation distinctive is that it is Christ-centred; it recognises the deep connectivity between the human spirit and the Holy Spirit. Christian meditation is understood as a form of pure prayer, as silent, imageless, wordless prayer. As such, it is an activity of the heart rather than the mind.
And that is why the second phrase asks God to ‘Open our hearts’, not ‘open our minds’. Instead, by striving without effort to cease all mental activity, we believe our hearts will be opened. So we know that, whatever we experience in meditation, will be heart-felt rather than mind-based. Christian meditation moves us beyond rational thinking. It is not irrational but trans-rational, beyond the rational. It is a movement beyond mental activity ABOUT one’s relationship with the Divine, to a communion WITH the Divine, which Christians believe is mediated through Christ.
In recent years I have listened to many children describe their experience of meditation and its fruits. Alex, a twelve-year-old Canadian girl, captured this understanding that meditation is a prayer of the heart when she said to her teacher ‘When I hear the chimes at the start of meditation, I imagine it is God ringing my doorbell and I open my heart to let Him in.’ John Main liked to say that meditation opens the human heart as naturally as sunlight gives rise to the unfolding of a flower. And, as the heart unfolds, we discover a new depth of silence behind the noise of our distracting thoughts and preoccupations.
We are all familiar with the pun which reminds us that meditation is not what you think; instead, it is about letting go of thought and allowing our hearts to be opened. So while it is our intention, it is God’s work. In the deep silence of meditation we leave ourselves open and vulnerable to a graced encounter which happens at a level of consciousness deeper than ordinary self-consciousness. So, because it is experienced in the heart rather than the mind, we will not be able to recall the experience after meditation. We will, of course, remember all the distracting thoughts we experienced, but not what happened in between those waves of self-conscious thought. Yet the heart knows something profoundly mysterious has taken place.
Asking for our hearts to be opened also calls us to be open to being changed by our meditation and to recognise that so often we are closed and wilful because of our conditioning and because of our desire for power, prestige and possessions. As John Main wrote: “The all-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 in our lives; to let it become that reality which gives meaning, shape and purpose to everything we do, to everything we are.”
As that happens, as meditation changes our relationship with our thoughts, we begin to get a deeper sense of who we truly are at the deepest level of our being. That new perspective changes how we see all of reality and hence our relationship with ourselves, with the Divine, with others and all of creation. And so we can say that meditation changes our way of seeing and being in the world.
As we recite the John Main prayer today we say ‘Open OUR Hearts’ and ‘Lead US into that mysterious silence ..’ but when it was first written and recorded by John Main himself, it said ‘Open MY heart’ and ‘Lead ME into that mysterious silence …’ I’m not sure when it changed but I think it was a necessary change because it reminds us that God is father and mother to all people, all races, all genders, all colours, all nationalities; that we are ALL children of God. Meditation deepens our sense of inter-connectedness and reminds us, as Vietnamese Zen Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh would say, that we ‘inter-are’. Using the preposition ‘our’ also reminds us that meditation is not undertaken for our own personal benefit, but for the benefit of all of humanity and all of creation.
And we are not asking that our hearts be opened merely for the time of our meditation but we wish them to remain open to God’s presence always – every hour of every day of our lives. That is how meditation slowly but surely transforms us over time – we become closer to achieving that awareness for more and more of our lives as our conditioning loses its hold on us. It heightens our awareness of the true-self – who we are in God and who God is in us and ever so gradually we find we are beginning to live life more and more from that perspective.
And what is it we ask that our hearts be opened to? We ask that our hearts be open to the silent Presence of the Spirit. We are not seeking a talking presence or a mental experience but a silent presence. My granddaughter is five years old now and I can’t tell you how many times over the those years that she has sat on my lap, alert but resting, both of us gazing out at the garden and watching the birds feeding in the early morning light. On many of those occasions, not a word was spoken but there was deep communion between us. Love is a universal language that can be understood in silence – even by children, perhaps especially by children. Love can be experience without being expressed in words. Indeed, the true language of love is silence. Meditation teaches us that silence is not so much the absence of sound, as the absence of the egoic self. Letting go of our thoughts and preoccupations makes room for something else; it allows love to grow in the space created by letting go. Ultimately, letting go in meditation is not about absence, but developing an awareness of presence, real presence.
Meditation is about being open to the mysterious presence of Love in our hearts, a mysterious presence that awakens us to a new kind of knowledge – to experiential knowledge, otherwise known as the wisdom of the heart. Meditation validates this kind of knowing and opens a portal to our innate spirituality, to the spirit within – it awakens and then deepens our desire to discover who we are in God and who God is in us.
As we meditate together, having left our masks, as it were, at the door, we experience that are all equal in the silent presence of the meditation space. We leave our cleverness, our foolishness, our diverse gifts and our various shortcomings – we leave them all outside the door as we move into our inner room which we discover over time is in reality a communal space that we share with one another. In meditation, we discover that the silent presence our opening prayer speaks of is a presence that is rooted in us and that we are rooted in it. In fact, it is who we really are.
In the next phrase of the John Main prayer, the silent presence we have been speaking about, is clarified as ‘the Spirit of your Son’. We are asking that our hearts be open to the Presence of the Spirit of Christ who dwells within us. We ask this in a spirit of willing vulnerability: we accept that we cannot bring anything other than ourselves to the inner room; that the rest is up to God. That is why the prayer asks that God lead us into that mysterious silence.
Our prayer then is one of effortless intention. We leave ourselves open to whatever may happen in the silence of contemplation but we understand we cannot make anything happen through our own efforts. Nonetheless, we trust that in the stillness and silence of meditation we will be led into a graced encounter with Silence.
Part II of this reflection will be published on Living Water next week. The two-part article is a partial summary of a series of ten talks on the John Main prayer written by Dr Keating and which can be accessed by clicking here.
*Dr Keating has spent forty years in the education sector in Ireland, as a teacher, principal and education officer. He is author of ‘Meditation with Children – A Resource for Teachers and Parents’ (Medio Media) and voluntary coordinator of the Meditation with Children Project, which involves over 40,000 children, who meditate several times each week on a whole-school basis, across more than 200 primary schools throughout Ireland. He can be contacted at mnkeating@gmail.com
For more information about John Main, how to meditate and the WCCM see: https://www.thelivingwater.com.au/christian-meditation
Dr Keating’s article is a slightly edited version of a talk given at Benedict’s Well on 27September 2021. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MduhVebOB8&t=43s
Benedict’s Well is an outreach of the Benedictine Oblates of the WCCM. The weekly event (Mondays) consists of a period of meditation followed by an inspirational talk. See: http://oblates.wccm.org/v2019/news-from-the-oblate-community/events/benedicts-well-6/