Journey to the Heart

“The commitment this journey calls from us . . .requires faith, perhaps a certain recklessness to begin. But once we have begun, it is the nature of God, the nature of love to sweep us along, teaching us by experience that our commitment is to reality, that our discipline is the springboard to freedom. The fear that the journey is “away from” rather than “towards” is only disproved by experience. This is a journey where ultimately only experience counts. The words or writings of others can add only a little light to the wholly actual, wholly present and wholly personal reality that lives in your heart and in my heart. Miraculously we can enter this experience together and discover communion just where communication seemed to break down…..And the journey to our own heart is a journey into every heart.” From John Main OSB, “Preparing for Birth,” THE PRESENT CHRIST.

The Language of the Spirit

“To learn to meditate, you have to learn to be silent, and not to be afraid of silence. [. . . .] [W]e don’t have to create silence. The silence is there, within you. What we have to do is to enter into it, to become silent, to become the silence. The challenge of meditation is to allow ourselves to become silent enough to allow this interior silence to emerge. Silence is the language of the spirit. The language of the spirit is love. And the purpose of meditation is to be in the presence of love, the love that, as Jesus tells us, casts out all fear.” From John Main OSB, “The Way of Silence” in The hunger for depth and meaning: Learning to meditate with John Main (Singapore: Medio Media, 2007)

The Work of Love

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