Christian Meditation

Deep Spring Centre for Christian Meditation

Tap into a deep spring of love, joy and peace within;
a ‘living water’, Jesus said, with which we will never thirst

Meditation in the Christian tradition is offered on Wednesdays at 5.30pm in the Church Hall, St Peter’s Eastern Hill, 15 Gisborne Street, East Melbourne. The Deep Spring Centre for Christian Meditation at St Peter’s has been established by the World Community for Christian Meditation (WCCM) in Victoria, and is facilitated by long-time meditator Roland Ashby.
See his articles below.

Deep Spring Centre’s online community meets on Tuesdays at 7.30pm (via Zoom).
For more information email Roland Ashby at: editor@thelivingwater.com.au

Online Lectio Divina

Lectio Divina (literally divine or sacred reading) is an ancient Benedictine practice of reading and praying the Scriptures and other sacred texts by listening with the “ear of the heart” for the gentle stirrings of the Spirit, and for a life-giving or life-transforming word God is offering us for our life today.

An online group meets on Mondays at 2pm (AEST). For more information email the facilitator, Roland Ashby, at editor@thelivingwater.com.au

Abbess Christine Valters Paintner, author of Lectio Divina – The Sacred Art, describes Lectio Divina as “being present to each moment in a heart-centred way. When we pray Lectio we see sacred text as God’s living words being spoken to our hearts in the moment. The practice allows us to encounter God in an active and intimate way. The invitation of Lectio Divina, therefore, is to cultivate a heart-centred intimacy with the sacred texts ... Lectio asks us to listen, savour and respond – not simply understand their meaning.”

Lectio Divina, writes John Stewart*, was first established in the 6th century by Saint Benedict and was then formalised as a four-step process by the Carthusian monk Guigo II during the 12th century.

The approach of Lectio Divina is the expectation that the Living God can be encountered in the living words of Scripture [and other sacred texts]. When the text is approached prayerfully it is done so in the expectation that these are God’s words meant for here and now. The whole process is done in a spirit of lingering, mulling, savouring – allowing the words to sink down deep and waiting on God to move, to speak.

The four simple steps are:

Lectio. Take some time to quieten down. Read the passage slowly, attentively, gently listening to hear a word or phrase that is God’s word for you today.
Meditatio. Once you have found a word or phrase in the passage that speaks to you in a personal way, take it in and ‘ruminate’ on it. Gently repeat it to yourself, allowing it to interact with your thoughts, hopes, memories, desires.
Oratio. This is prayer understood as dialogue with God, a loving conversation with the One who has invited us into his presence. It is also consecration, prayer as the offering to God of parts of ourselves that we have not previously believed God wants. We allow our real selves to be touched and changed by the word of God.
Contemplatio. Maintain silence in order to catch any new insights. Simply rest in the presence of the One who has used his word as a means of inviting us to accept his transforming embrace. This is wordless, quiet rest in the presence of the One who loves us.

*John Stewart is the founder of the Living Well Centre for Christian Spirituality, Melbourne. This is an extract from his essay on St Benedict in Heroes of the Faith – 55 men and women whose lives have proclaimed Christ and inspired the faith of others, Edited by Roland Ashby. Published by Garratt.

For more information about Lectio Divina, see:
https://www.anglicancommunion.org/media/253799/1-What-is-Lectio-Divina.pdf

Tapping into a deep spring of love within

By Roland Ashby

In the Parable of the Prodigal Son, (Luke 15: 11-32), Jesus portrays God as pure, undiluted, unconditional love. Meditation is a way to find this God, this love, within.

When we tap into this deep spring of love, joy and peace, this ‘living water’, as Jesus called it, at the centre of our being in meditation, our hearts are broken open and we see with new eyes of compassion and understanding. We are filled with a desire to serve others, and to seek justice, healing and well being for all, and for the earth. This is the Christ mind, or Christ consciousness.

Mantra meditation

The Deep Spring Centre, which is run by the World Community for Christian Meditation in Victoria, offers mantra meditation.

Mantra meditation is not new to the Christian tradition. In the latter half of the 20th century Irish Benedictine monk John Main discovered that it was indeed a long-established tradition in the Church, going back to one of the Desert Fathers, St John Cassian, in the fourth century, who advocated the repetition of a short phrase, or mantra, when praying. His teaching had a formative influence on St Benedict and the foundation of Western monasticism.

John Main’s life and teachings led to the setting up of the World Community for Christian Meditation (WCCM).

Bede Griffiths OSB said of John Main’s teaching: “I do not know of any better method of meditation leading to the experience of the love of God in Christ than that of John Main.”

Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has also said that, “John Main effectively put the desert tradition of prayer to work in our own day. The World Community for Christian Meditation which continues his mission is for me, as for many throughout the world, a taste of what a committedly contemplative church might look and feel like.”

We are living in dark times. Division, hate, violence, rampant consumerism and greed, scandal, corruption, abuse of power, populist and divisive leaders, and the effects of global warming are part of our daily diet of news.

The need for contemplative wisdom and consciousness is urgent. Without a change in consciousness, the future for humanity, and the whole of creation, looks bleak.

The Deep Spring Centre believes a change to a more contemplative consciousness can offer a more hopeful future. This consciousness has at its core what theologian and Anglican Solitary Maggie Ross calls “Deep Mind”, which in Christian terms is an encounter with the Holy Spirit. This is the fount of love, grace, wisdom, care for others and all of creation, forgiveness and healing, unity and reconciliation, and life-giving creativity.

Getting in touch with this Deep Mind is what 20th Century mystic and trappist monk Thomas Merton called returning to the Source, which is reminiscent of the Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15: 11-32). What joy there is when we return to the Father, the Source, who is ever-watchful for our return, waiting with eager longing to run to us, and embrace us with infinite love and compassion.

Merton says that as we are made in God’s image, love is the reason for our existence, because God is love. And therefore, he says, “if we do anything or say anything or know anything that is not purely for the love of God, it cannot give us peace, or rest, or fulfilment or joy”.

This is an echo of St Augustine, who said our hearts are restless until they rest in God.

And how are we to return to the Source, how are to find this love of God? We must, Merton says, “enter the sanctuary where it is hidden, which is the mystery of God”.

Returning to the Source was the key motivator for the Desert Fathers and Mothers, the Abbas and Ammas of the 3-5th Centuries, in seeking the solitude and silence of the desert. These early Christian contemplatives were dismayed by both the decadence of the time and also Emperor Constantine’s embrace of Christianity as the Roman State’s official religion, with the inevitable compromise and corruption of the Gospel’s radical message and way of life this entailed.

This desire to return to the Source, and the primacy of love, is beautifully encapsulated in the following story: “Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, ‘Abba, as far as I can I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace and as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do? Then the old man stood up and stretched his hands towards heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, ‘If you will, you can become all flame.’”

In this and other sayings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, what we find, Merton says, is a “repeated insistence of the primacy of love over everything else in the spiritual life... Love in fact is the spiritual life, and without it all the other exercises of the spirit, however lofty, are emptied of content and become mere illusions.”

The 20th century theologian Karl Rahner famously said that the future Christian will either be a mystic or not exist. Of course it depends on what he meant by mystic, but his understanding of the term might well have resonated with the definition offered by Maggie Ross: a mystic is someone who lives the ordinary through transfigured perception.

In my experience the profoundest way to transfigured perception has been through silent contemplation: particularly through meditation using a mantra.

In my 20 years as a meditator, I have found meditation to be life-giving and life-changing, a deep spring of love, joy and peace, in which I have both found that I am loved and forgiven, and can also find the power to love and forgive others. Meditation has also expanded my capacity for compassion, and filled me with a desire to be a compassionate activist, indeed contemplative activist, in the world.

John Main’s genius was to open up the mystery of the inner sanctuary, through his discovery and revitalising of a tradition of mantra meditation within our own Christian tradition, and by showing us the way to the Source through a simple daily discipline of attuning to the power of love at the centre of our being.

For more information about the World Community for Christian Meditation see:
https://wccmaustralia.org.au/
https://wccm.org/

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 – in the sense of transcending our ego consciousness, with its grounding in the more superficial layers of our being. We leave this ego consciousness behind in order to access our spiritual consciousness, our openness to God’s Spirit at the centre or in the depths of our being. To do this, Main 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, which means leaving behind or transcending the limitations of the ordinary way we experience ourselves and all that is around us. In this way we are able to 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.

Therefore this “leaving behind” is not intended as an abandonment of the self, but a healing, a growth, and a coming into the wholeness of the self through the experience of our union with God’s Spirit, that already exists within us.

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 disordered desires, false beliefs, patterns of behaviour that no longer serve us, all our mental distractions, all the jumble and jangle of the world. These often hinder rather than promote the free flow of the life of God in and through us.

All this needs healing, and restoring to wholeness. What we need to do is tune into what is true, 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 surrendering the concerns, thoughts, anxieties, regrets and other painful feelings, as well as unhealthy and destructive imaginings and desires, to the gentle, loving, healing presence of the Spirit of Christ.

Through meditating using a mantra, we experience a first death, a dying to all that is preventing us from being attuned to the love of God within and around us.

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.

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”.

Moreover, the author says, God 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, I become aware of the mind’s normal preoccupations, which control and dominate much of my thought. Once this awareness dawns, it is usually much easier to let go of thoughts and images during the meditation, 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.

(This is a revised version of an article which appears in 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