Universal Christianity

One of the dilemmas for Christianity today is how to communicate the gospel in a non-competitive way in the context of other faiths. . . .For the exclusivist Christian, of course, this is nonsensical. But perhaps. . . .the Spirit is trying to teach us something. Perhaps Christianity is learning that if it is truly universal it must recognize itself in all forms of human spiritual experience [. . . .] We are today in need of a new way of religious dialogue, of tolerance, mutual reverence, and way of learning from each other that those before us could never have imagined.

Yet the rightness of such a way is attested by the fact that it is so compatible with the personality and example of Jesus. He rejected no-one, tolerated all and saw the mystery of God in all people and in nature. He ate with those he should have despised. He spoke with those he should have avoided. He was as open to others as he was to God.

In Jesus, time and eternity intersect. . . and the intersection happens in human poverty of spirit. . . Poverty is not only the absence of things, but the awareness of our need for others, for God. Human neediness is universal. The richest and the most powerful, like the poorest and most marginalized, are all equally in need. Need is simply the strong feeling that arises in response to the fact of our interdependence. We are not separate from each other or from God. Wisdom is the recognition of that fact, and compassion is the practice of it.

In meditation, we dive to a level of reality deeper than that of our surface, ego-driven minds where so often we are caught in the net of illusion. Untangling from that net is the daily work of meditation and it is the new pattern of the practice of the presence of God: in ordinary life, in all nature and in all people.

An excerpt from Laurence Freeman, “Dearest Friends,” WCCM International Newsletter, Winter, 1996.

After the Election

The immediate post-election comments by the President, the President-elect and the defeated candidate were more gracious and civilised than anything during the campaign over the past eighteen months. This campaign reflected such an obscene breakdown of civility that it was hard to believe it was happening. It seemed surreal – worse and more frightening than the hypocrisy and evasiveness we have sadly come to associate with much of the political class. It has done lasting damage to a civilised approach to politics anywhere, even in a world where we see ethnic cleansing, the bombing of hospitals, the uncontested invasion of sovereign states, the callous closing of borders to refugees.

The US election highlighted what is happening politically in many other places: the polarising of global and national identities. Nationalism is a mounting force that rejects the challenges of the newborn sense of global citizenship. As history shows, nationalism begins with the euphoria of false hope and ends in mutual destruction.

Is there a contemplative response to this? There is. But it is not sectarian or ideological. The contemplative response is conscious of the common ground. It builds communities of faith in this ground among people of widely different beliefs.

This collective vision of the human community can only happen politically in the most civilised societies.  But it happens between friends and groups of friends who quietly restore an uncivilised society to humane values. Their experience of the truthfulness of silence helps them trust each other with their differences. Those differences can be respected without violence or divisiveness.

Societies lacking the root system of such contemplative networks, nourished by silence, must face an erosion of civilised values because contemplation is the foundation of civilisation.

I recently spent time in Venezuela, a society in severe distress. But I was inspired to see that our community there is even more deeply and compassionately committed to the practice and teaching of meditation, particularly to the young. It is also creating civilised forums for open dialogue. They prove that a contemplative response to crisis does really exist. The World Community is privileged to have such members.

I feel sure that the WCCM USA will respond in the same way to their post-election situation where such deep divisions and turbulence have been exposed. You will be an example to others of the real American dream, which is the greatness you show in resolving difference.

I am not preaching to you but reminding you of what, as contemplatives in the world, you know already. As a fellow-meditator I know you do not see meditation merely as a refuge. We see it rather as a way of facing the painful facts of our world with faith, hope and love, thereby making the world more civilised - simply by the way you live and tell the truth. We are never more truthful than in the silence of meditation which affects all our ways of communication and action.

This involves curbing our feelings of triumph or defeat with the emotional perspective that meditation brings. It involves trying to see reality through the eyes of others even when their view seems to contradict ours, the essence of redemptive dialogue. It brings hope where there is fear. Good, not cruel, humour where there is hatred.  Truth where there is dissimulation.

It involves loving our enemies even when we feel like humiliating or deleting them, patronising them, giving them false signs of peace, taking revenge for their past deeds or punishing them. We turn the other cheek at first interiorly, not as an excuse not to fight for truth but to ensure that, when we do fight for it, we do so without violence or hatred.

To love means to pay attention. If our meditation only makes us mindful but doesn’t enable us to pay other-centred, loving attention to those we would prefer to ignore, what does meditation mean? It is wondrous how naturally our actions towards others are regulated simply by paying attention to them. Such attention begins as pure prayer, which dismantles the thick filters of prejudice and caricature that obscure the real identity of others.

What can contemplatives, who are defined firstly by their commitment to being, actually do? They can meditate and be more than ever faithful to balancing each day on the twin pillars of silence, stillness and radical simplicity. They can meditate together in weekly groups and begin new groups especially where the wounds of division are most open.

You can also plan to come next August to the John Main Seminar in Houston where a world authority on the Christian mystical tradition will be leading us into a deeper relationship with one of our most precious sources of wisdom in a chaotic world. We need to know in what a powerful tradition we meditate.

This is our contemplative approach. Although it is not a political force, it does help to dissolve the violence of political polemics at root. I can also assure you – and it is reassuring I think to know this when we so often despair of our leaders - that in our community, and beyond, there are eminent leaders who build their lives on daily meditation. They are not power-hungry individuals but genuinely driven to use their influence and talents to make a more humane  and civilised world.

Leaders or led, in a contemplative community all are equal because all see each other in the greater oneness. We all need each other and we need to share our needs. This is the meaning of the new global consciousness. We all give support to each other especially to those who are least supported. We all walk on the common ground that, to the eyes of faith, is the consciousness where I see you in myself and myself in you.

Never before in America or elsewhere, have we needed this contemplative mind more urgently. It is not in the end about politics and elections. But it  will define the kind of politics that shape the world we make for ourselves and leave to our children.

Laurence Freeman OSB

Christ at the Center

We will never find peace in the midst of our worries and problems by thinking our way through them. Thought is a false labyrinth that always returns us to the same confused starting point. Prayer is the true labyrinth that takes us deeper than thought and leads us to the peace that “passes all understanding.” Letting go of our anxieties is our greatest difficulty, which testifies to the negative resilience of the ego. Yet it is so simple. We have only to grasp the true nature of meditation: not that we are trying to think of nothing, but that we are not thinking. [. . . .]

In many ancient labyrinths it was a monster that was found at the center, a thing of fear and a threat to life. The Christian labyrinths positioned Christ at the center of all the twists and turns of life. In Christ we find not fear but the dissolving of fear in the final and primal certainty of love. Meditation is the work of love and it is by love, not by thought, that God ultimately is known: the knowledge that saves is the knowledge of love. This is why John Main describes our human experience of love as the best way to understand why we meditate and how meditation takes us into reality.

As in any relationship we pass through stages. At each stage of growth there will always be a crisis, another leap of faith. We all pass through cycles: enthusiasm, struggle with discipline, dryness, despair, temporary enlightenments. But as fellow pilgrims, we can always remind each other from within the labyrinth that the center is our true home. And we remember that the flashes of joy, the temporary awakenings are emanations of the love that is the nature of reality. . .

Laurence Freeman OSB, “Letter One,” WEB OF SILENCE (London: Darton, Longman, Todd, 1996).

In the face of tragedy...

Meditation sharpens our sense of how many unnatural forces are at work today. The alienation from our own spiritual—boundless and compassionate—nature can only be corrected by learning again what our true nature is. [. . . .] [B]y finding our true nature, with our consciousness mirroring and partaking of the divine consciousness, we experience both peace and liberty. The peace arises from the certain knowledge that our very nature is rooted in God and is as real as God. It is the all-empowering peace of belonging to what we know will never reject or disown us, the self-confidence of love. Liberty springs from . . . knowing that what we belong to belongs to us. Rootedness allows expansion, just as St Benedict’s vow of stability permits continuous transformation.

In the face of our contemporary crises we need to ask why we meditate. We ask it not to undermine our commitment but to refine and deepen it. We are not in pursuit of interesting experiences. Meditation is not information technology. It is about knowledge that redeems, pure consciousness. . . .This redemptive and recreative knowledge is the wisdom our age lacks. We can recognize it and discriminate between it and its counterfeits because it neither claims nor parades any possessive pronoun. No one claims it as their own. . . .It is the consciousness of the Holy Spirit and therefore it is the womb of all truly loving action.

In the face of the most disheartening tragedy it is as close to us as we are to our true selves.


From Laurence Freeman OSB, “Letter Four” in THE WEB OF SILENCE (London: DLT, 1996), pp. 42-43.