Attuning to the power of love at the centre of our being
The most important thing to know in life is that God is, that God is love, and that meditation can be a direct and powerful way to know this. So believed Benedictine monk Fr John Main.
Roland Ashby pays tribute to a man who, Bede Griffiths said, “opened the way to the direct experience of God… within the Christian tradition”.
Both meditation on Scripture and meditation using a prayer word or mantra have played a key role in sustaining and nurturing my faith as a Christian. Notwithstanding the importance of meditating on Scripture, in this article I want to focus on meditation using a prayer word or mantra. In this regard, I am profoundly grateful to several Benedictine monks who have rediscovered and revitalised this form of meditation as an authentic part of the Christian tradition. Chief among these for me is Fr John Main (1926-1982), an Irish Benedictine who in the 1970s formed what was to become the World Community for Christian Meditation - an international ecumenical organisation with thousands of affiliated groups in over 100 countries.
Meditation taught Main that “the really important thing to know in life is that God is and God is love”, and that “there is no way to the truth or the spirit that is not the way of love”.
He adopted the use of a mantra as his method of meditation – something he was introduced to by a Hindu Swami, when he was working as a diplomat in Malaya. When he later became a Benedictine monk, he discovered that Christianity had its own tradition of meditation using a mantra. A mantra is a prayer word or phrase which is repeated continuously.
For Main, to meditate using the mantra was to leave the self, the ego, behind. To do this, he believed it was necessary, apart from the mantra, to leave words, images and ideas behind.
For him, this is what Jesus meant when he said we must lose our life in order to gain it. He believed the saying of the mantra enabled us to leave self behind so that we could also experience the fullness of life Jesus mentioned in John 10:10: “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full”.
For Main, such fullness was fullness of being, and fullness of being means becoming conscious of life, ‘our being’, as the pure gift of a creator whose love for us is overflowing and infinite. This, for him, was the source of our true selves and the basis of all reality. Fullness of being means becoming conscious of the power of love as the ground of our being, the great life-source and energy-source which is in us and surrounds us.
This is the energy or life-force which was most perfectly incarnated in Jesus, and is now available and present to us in the Spirit of Christ at the deep centre of our being.
We lose our connectedness to it, this life-force, this Spirit of Christ, when we allow other signals to jam it. During the war, before he became a monk, Main was in the Royal Signals and the Counter Intelligence Service. His job was to tune into German radio signals before the Germans set up other signals to make it difficult to locate the original signal. He used quartz crystals to do this. The mantra, he says, is like the quartz crystals, enabling us to tune into just the right frequency.
But there are other signals in the way, which make it difficult to do this. These are our desires, fantasies, memories, all our mental distractions, all the jumble and jangle of the world.
All of this is illusion – it is all passing away. What we need to do is to tune into what is abiding and eternal.
We can do this, Main says, by lovingly, faithfully, gently and silently repeating our mantra throughout the period of meditation, and by simultaneously letting go of our attachment to the concerns, thoughts, anxieties, regrets, imaginings and desires of the self, the ego.
Through meditating using a mantra, we experience a first death, a dying to the ego.
He believed that this way of meditation was also a legitimate part of the Christian contemplative tradition.
For Main, the mantra was the means by which we connect with the Holy Spirit. He drew extensively on the writings of St Paul to support the claim that “our faith is a living faith precisely because the living Spirit of God dwells within us”.
He cites several passages of St Paul to support this claim, including Rom. 5:1-5, “God’s love has flooded our inmost heart through the Holy Spirit he has given us”. This is evidence, Main says, of Paul’s “great conviction… that the central reality of our Christian faith is the sending of the Spirit of Jesus”.
The purpose of the mantra and meditation is to strip away everything which stands in the way of our discovering this “mysterious and silent presence” and recognising it as the reality which gives meaning and purpose to our lives.
By awakening to the Holy Spirit dwelling within us, we become aware of “the communion within God Himself in which we are called to share”.
In John Cassian’s Conferences, written around the turn of the Fifth Century, he read of the practice of using a single short phrase to achieve the stillness necessary for prayer:
“The mind thus casts out and represses the rich and ample matter of all thoughts and restricts itself to the poverty of a single verse.”
Main’s teaching also seems to owe much to the apophatic or negative theology tradition, in which the Fifth Century writings of Dionysius the Areopagite appear to be a formative influence. In particular, the Areopagite’s essay Mystical Theology is foundational. Here it is written that the closer the soul moves to God, the more “we plunge into that darkness which is beyond intellect” and we “find ourselves… speechless and unknowing”.
But it is not until the 14th Century that the tradition is properly developed, most notably with Meister Eckhart in Germany, and the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing in England. Later, in the 16th Century the tradition is further enriched by the Spanish mystic St John of the Cross.
Main points repeatedly to The Cloud of Unknowing in support of his views on the mantra. The anonymous author gives strong support to the idea of a mantra. “We must pray then with all the intensity of our being in its height and depth and length and breadth”, he says, “And not with many words but in a little word”.
Also affirmed is the need to turn away from ideas, images and memories. God, the author says, cannot be known by thought, only by love. Thoughts must be covered with a “cloud of forgetting”, whilst love for God must step “bravely and joyfully beyond [this cloud] and reach out to the darkness above… the Cloud of Unknowing”.
This is also the process that St John of the Cross outlined in The Ascent of Mount Carmel.
The detachment and purpose of the mantra, with its letting go of ideas and images, is encapsulated in a passage in which he says the memory is to be emptied, “in the hope that God will fill it… As often as distinct ideas, forms, and images occur to [those meditating], they should immediately, without resting in them, turn to God with loving affection, in emptiness of everything rememberable”.
Detachment, the way of the mantra, is the way “to come to possess all” by desiring “possession in nothing”.
This may be a costly, and even painful process, as John of the Cross was to expound further in the continuation of Mt Carmel, The Dark Night of the Soul, but it is a “movement towards fulfilment, not emptiness, towards beauty and life, not annihilation”.
I try to practise meditation each day by silently and continuously repeating the word ‘Maranatha’, a word John Main recommended (other suggestions included ‘Jesus’ and ‘Abba’). (See below). Maranatha is Aramaic, the language of Jesus, and an ancient Christian prayer meaning ‘Come, Lord’.
During the time of meditation (usually between 20-30 minutes) I often experience a deep sense of peace. Stress and anxieties dissolve. Anger, hurt and resentment dissipate. Guilt or regret assume less importance.
There is a sense of being held by God, and of God’s infinite love and grace, a feeling which “casts out all fear”. This loss of fear includes a lessening of the fear about mortality and death. For Benedictine monk Fr Laurence Freeman, John Main’s protégé and Director of the World Community for Christian Meditation, the experience of the impermanence of life in meditation using the mantra is an experience of the cycle of death and rebirth as thoughts are experienced “passing away very rapidly every second… and being reborn every second”.
But this cycle gives way to an experience “of what is abiding, what is still, what is always present”. And this, for him, is a taste of the Resurrection. “Resurrection”, Freeman says, “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”.
During meditation, the mind’s normal preoccupations, which control and dominate much of my thought, are exposed for what they mostly are – the projections of my ego. Once this awareness of the ego dawns, it is usually much easier to let go of thoughts and images, and focus gently and peacefully on the mantra. Eventually this focus can, for some, become effortless.
Once during meditation I experienced a level of consciousness which seems outside the normal experience of time and space: a sense of being suspended in time and space, and a sense that time and space have no importance. There was a feeling of perfect serenity and stillness, which seemed to be both in and around me.
I believe that such moments may have some resemblance to what is being described in TS Eliot’s Four Quartets, where “At the still point of the turning world… There the dance is/ But neither arrest nor movement”.
The sense of serenity and stillness can persist for some time after a meditation. Sounds heard during meditation, particularly bird song, frequently have a timeless or dream-like quality to them. I have also experienced a heightened sense of light and the beauty of things around me, particularly in the natural world, immediately following a meditation.
However, I realise that for the Christian these things on their own do not provide sufficient proof that this is an experience of the divine. Jesus said “By their fruit you will know them” (Matt. 7:16), and this is the test of authenticity which must be applied.
There are two kinds of fruit – the fruit of compassion and justice for the poor and marginalised, and the fruit of the Spirit, described by St Paul in Galatians 5: 22-23 as “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control”.
Although of course I am not the best judge, I do feel that some of these qualities have been more evident in my life – even though I am often painfully aware of their absence. And indeed, this awareness may be one of the fruits of meditation.
(From Heroes of the Faith – 55 men and women whose lives proclaimed Christ and inspired the faith of others. Edited by Roland Ashby. Published by Garratt Publishing.)
Meditation using a prayer word or mantra
A prayer word or mantra that many meditators find they have been able to adopt is the Aramaic word Maranatha (It means ‘Come, Lord’, and is used in the New Testatment. Aramaic was also the language used by Jesus). It is said as four equal syllables: Ma-ra-na-tha. Others prefer the affectionate Aramaic word Jesus used in addressing his heavenly father, Abba, or the Jesus Prayer used by the Eastern Orthodox and many Western contemplatives (‘Lord Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner’) or a variation of it such as ‘Jesus have mercy’ or simply ‘Jesus’. Others prefer a single syllable word, such as love, or another word of their choosing which has significance for them.
Alternatively you may wish to use a word or phrase from your Scripture reading.
Whichever word or short phrase you choose, repeat this silently throughout the period of meditation. Listen to it with your full attention and be fully present to it. Affirm it as a sign of your joyful invitation to the Spirit of Christ to be with you and within you. Whenever you are distracted by thoughts or images, even spiritual ones, simply and gently return to saying the word or phrase with your complete attention. Do not attempt to rate your ‘success’. There is no success or failure here. Simply try to be faithful to saying the word or phrase with love and attention and forget all else.
The anonymous author of the 14th Century mystical classic The Cloud of Unknowing says that God cannot be known by thought, only by love. Words can be powerful signs of God’s love, but they are signs. Paradoxically, by repeating the one word or phrase, you go beyond words to the Spirit dwelling within, the Source, the I Am, the spring of living water, your True Self.
Useful resources
Websites
The World Community for Christian Meditation
See: https://www.wccm.org/
You can subscribe to Laurence Freeman’s daily meditations, Daily Wisdom, and his weekly teachings, here.
The World Community for Christian Meditation – Australia
See: https://wccmaustralia.org.au/
Contemplative Outreach, promoting the teachings of Thomas Keating
See: https://contemplativeoutreach.org/
A website which aims to offer inspiration for both personal and global actions of hope.
https://www.handbookofhope.com/
Also recommended are the following daily meditations
by Richard Rohr and Matthew Fox:
https://cac.org/category/daily-meditations/
https://dailymeditationswithmatthewfox.org/about-matthew-fox/
Books
Published by Meditatio.
Light Within by Laurence Freeman
Radical Simplicity by John Main
Meditation and Addiction and Meditation and Mental Health, by Jim Green
Experiencing God in a Time of Crisis, by Sarah Bachelard
Published by Canterbury Press (Norwich Books)
Jesus the Teacher Within by Laurence Freeman
Monastery Without Walls by John Main
Moment of Christ by John Main
Published by Medio Media
Silence and Stillness in Every Season
– Daily readings from books by John Main edited by Paul Harris
Christian Meditation Your Daily Practice by Laurence Freeman
A Simple Way by Laurence Freeman
Good Work, by Laurence Freeman
Our Hearts Burned Within Us: Reading the New Testament With John Main
– Gregory Ryan (ed.)
Dancing With Your Shadow by Kim Nataraja