Christmas Presence

“Christmas is a feast that can open the hearts of all of us to the presence of Christ. It puts before us the great qualities of innocence and hope that we need if we are to awaken to his light, and it fills us with confidence because it tells us that the old age has ended. The new age, indeed the new creation, has begun and our point of departure for finding it everywhere is finding it a reality in our heart.” -- Fr John Main OSB

Radiating Joy

“The only way to deal with the complexity of human relations is to learn simply to love. We learn that love is the unifying force in every human relationship whether it is a relationship with those closest to us, or those who have hurt us . . .or the way we relate to humanity at large, to the down-and-out in the street or to the suffering we see daily in the media We learn that it is the same love that relates us to all of those. The only way to deal with the complexity of human relations is the simplicity of love. In love we do not judge, we do not compete; we accept, we revere, and we learn compassion. In learning to love others we release the inner joy of being that radiates outwards through us, touching others through our relationships. This is why communities, families, and marriages do not exist solely for the perfection of the people in those. . .relationships. They exist also to radiate love. . . .beyond themselves, radiating joy, that simplicity of love beyond themselves, to touch all those who come into contact with it.” From Laurence Freeman OSB, “Forgiveness and Compassion,” ASPECTS OF LOVE (London: Arthur James, 1997), pp. 72-74.

Liberation....

“Meditation is the work that harmonizes the usually discordant dimensions of consciousness. It reconciles contradictions and opposites. All traditions agree that its fruits are preferable to their opposites. These fruits need little definition or defense: compassion and wisdom, generosity and tolerance, forgiveness and kindness, gentleness and peace, joy and creativity. By liberating these qualities, meditation advances human goodness and wholeness." From Laurence Freeman OSB. “Meditation,” in JESUS THE TEACHER WITHIN (London: Continuum, 20000, p. 197-98.

Inner Peace

“Inner peace is hard to find at times of conflict and fear. We find it difficult to sit still when mind and feeling are in turmoil. It is easy to give up meditation at such times when it is most needed. So it helps to see that our meditation is not for ourselves alone. If it were, we are no more than religious consumers. The meaning of contemplation is found in its fruits, especially the love and service of others. When we have inner peace we go out to others in compassion. Lacking it all our out-going is subject to the ego's desire, anger and competitiveness. God is the love that casts out fear in our neighbor because, when we have truly met that love within ourselves, we can never do our neighbor harm." From Laurence Freeman OSB. "Dearest Friends," WCCM International Newsletter, Winter 2000.

Peace, Wisdom, Vistue

Inner peace is hard to find at times of conflict and fear. We find it difficult to sit still when mind and feeling are in turmoil. It is easy to give up meditation at such times when it is most needed. So it helps to see that our meditation is not for ourselves alone. If it were, we are no more than religious consumers. The meaning of contemplation is found in its fruits, especially the love and service of others. When we have inner peace we go out to others in compassion. Lacking it all our out-going is subject to the ego's desire, anger and competitiveness. God is the love that casts out fear in our neighbor because, when we have truly met that love within ourselves, we can never do our neighbor harm. 

Peace is not achieved by rooting out and destroying evil. When we become aware of our vices - anger, pride, greed, lust - the attempt to destroy them easily degenerates into self-hatred . . . Better than destroying your faults is to work patiently to implant virtue--a slower and less dramatic work but far more effective. [. . . .] The first step in implanting virtue that will eventually overpower the vices is to establish the foundational virtue of deep prayer. Through the silent rhythm of prayer, wisdom slowly penetrates our mind and our world. It is the universal power that brings good out of evil. As the book of Wisdom says, 'the hope for the salvation of the world lies in the greatest number of wise people.' The wise know the distinction between self-knowledge and self-fixation, between detachment and hardness of heart, between correction and cruelty. There are no rules for wisdom. Rules are never universal. But virtue is.

An excerpt from Laurence Freeman OSB. "Dearest Friends," WCCM International

Newsletter, Winter 2001.

Reality

In this wonderful process of coming into the full light of Reality, of falling away from illusion, a great silence emerges from the centre. We feel ourselves engulfed in the eternal silence of God. We are no longer talking to God or worse, talking to ourselves. We are learning to be –to be with God, to be in God. [. . . .] -- From John Main OSB, “The Christian Crisis,” THE PRESENT CHRIST (New York: Crossroad, 1991), pp. 74-76.

The Full Light of Reality

Yes, you can meditate in an airport.

[T]o become spiritual we have to learn to leave behind our official religious selves—that is, to leave behind the Pharisee that lurks inside all of us—because, as Jesus has told us, we have to leave behind our whole self. All images of ourselves coming as they do out of the fevered brain of the ego, have to be renounced and transcended if we are to become one with ourselves, with God, with our brethren—that is, to become truly human, truly real, truly humble. Our images of God must similarly fall away.  We must not be idol-worshippers. Curiously, what we find is that they fall away as our images of self fall away, which suggests what. . .we always guessed anyway, that our images of God were really images of ourselves.

In this wonderful process of coming into the full light of Reality, of falling away from illusion, a great silence emerges from the centre.  We feel ourselves engulfed in the eternal silence of God.  We are no longer talking to God or worse, talking to ourselves.  We are learning to be – to be with God, to be in God. [. . . .]

On the spiritual journey it takes more energy to be still than to run. [M]ost people spend so much of their waking hours rushing from one thing to another that they are afraid of stillness and of silence. A certain existential panic can overtake us when we first face the stillness. But if we can find the courage to face this silence, we enter into the peace that is beyond all understanding.

No doubt it is easier to learn this in a balanced and stable society. In a turbulent and confused world there are so many more deceptive voices, so many calls for our attention.. [. . . .] But what we must learn is that the power for the pilgrimage is in fact inexhaustibly present.

From John Main OSB, “The Christian Crisis,” THE PRESENT CHRIST (New York: Crossroad, 1991), pp. 74-76.

"The Day of Christ"

The new kind of life made possible by the Resurrection does not rely upon the forensic evidence of the empty tomb or the circumstantial evidence of the apparitions. The evidence is found in daily living . . . . Like love, faith in the Resurrection has its own reasonableness and quality of being, a heightened degree of wholeness that is caught rather than taught. Experiences, even Resurrection appearances, come and go. They become memories. We, however, know the Resurrection, in what the early disciples called the “Day of Christ.” It is the present moment illuminated with faith’s ability to see the invisible, to recognize the obvious. As Simone Weil wrote, ‘He comes to us hidden and salvation consists in our recognizing him.’ From Laurence Freeman OSB, Jesus the Teacher Within (New York: Continuum, 2000), pp. 62-63.

Death and Resurrection

St Benedict told his monks, “Always keep death before your eyes.” We don’t talk much about death in the modern world. But what the whole Christian tradition tells us is that if we would become wise we must learn the lesson that we have here “no abiding city.” [We must hear] what the wise of ages past and present say to us: to have life in focus we must have death in [focus. . .].  Talking about death is hard for the worldly to understand. Indeed the principal fantasy of much worldliness operates out of completely the opposite point of view: not the wisdom of our own mortality but the pure fantasy that we are immortal, beyond physical weakness.

But the wisdom of the tradition St Benedict represents is that awareness of our physical weakness enables us to see our own spiritual fragility too. There is a profound awareness in all of us, so profound indeed that it is often buried for much of the time, that we must make contact with the fullness of life and the source of life. We must make contact with the power of God and somehow, open our own fragile “earthen vessels” to the eternal love of God, the love that cannot be quenched. [. . . ]

Every time we sit down to meditation we enter the axis of death and resurrection. We do so because in our meditation we go beyond our own life and the limitations of our life into the mystery of God. We discover, each of us from our own experience, that the mystery of God is the mystery of love, infinite love—love that casts our all fear.

The Kingdom

“The Kingdom is already established. Faith and obedience teach us to realize it. And we accept the practicalities of the work of realization. We learn to be silent and to love silence. When we meditate we don’t look for messages or signs, or phenomena. Each of us must learn to be humble, patient and faithful. Discipline teaches us to be still, and by stillness we learn to empty our heart of everything that is not God, for God requires all the room that our heart has to offer.” From John Main OSB, “Growing Point,” THE HEART OF CREATION.

Life's Purpose

“The ultimate meaning of God does not arise from what society says we are—that would be to “prefer human approval to the approval of God,” as Jesus put it. [. . . .] Each of us . . . must discover the fundamental truth about ourselves. Rooted in God, we must be open to the love that redeems us from illusion and shallowness. We must live out of that personal infinite holiness which we have as a temple of the Holy Spirit. Discovering that the same Spirit that created the universe dwells in our hearts, and in silence is loving to all, is the purpose of every life.” From John Main OSB, “Integrity,” WORD MADE FLESH (Norwich: Canterbury, 2009), pp. 55-56.

Shalom!

“In St John's gospel, the Resurrection and the sending of the Spirit are seen as a single event. On the evening of Easter Day Jesus came and stood among the disciples while they were huddled fearfully in a locked room. His first word to them was shalom. The rich Hebrew word for peace invoked the blessing of the harmony of all orders of being. Shalom flows directly from the Divine harmony which is the Spirit. To receive it is to share in that peace beyond all understanding. Jesus then breathed on them and said, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’” From Laurence Freeman OSB, "Spirit," Jesus the Teacher Within.

Truly Human

“[T]o become spiritual we have to learn to leave behind our official religious selves—that is, to leave behind the Pharisee that lurks inside all of us—because, as Jesus has told us, we have to leave behind our whole self. All images of ourselves coming as they do out of the fevered calculating brain of the ego, have to be renounced and transcended if we are to become one with ourselves, with God, with one another—that is, if we are to become truly real, truly humble, truly human.” From John Main OSB, “The Christian Crisis,” THE PRESENT CHRIST (New York: Crossroad, 1991), pp. 74-76.

Imageless Vision

“It would be easier, we think, to turn away from [self-consciousness and] introspection if we knew what we were turning towards. If only we had a fixed object to look at. If only God could be represented by an image. But the true God can never be an image.  Images of God are gods. To make an image of God is merely to end up looking at a refurbished image of ourselves. To be truly interior, to open the eye of the heart, means to be living within the imageless vision that is faith, and that is the vision that permits us to “see God” in all things.” From Laurence Freeman OSB, “The Power of Attention,” THE SELFLESS SELF (Norwich: Canterbury, 2008), pp. 31-35. Everyone is welcome. Information: 732-681-6238 | GJRyan@wccm.org | www.WCCM.org | WCCM-CentralNJ.blogspot.com

Death and Resurrection

“Meditation is a way of power because it is the way to understand our own mortality. It is the way to get our own death into focus. It can do so because it is the way beyond our own mortality. It is the way beyond our own death to the resurrection, to a new and eternal life, the life that arises from our union with God.” From John Main OSB, “Death and Resurrection,” MOMENT OF CHRIST (New York: Continuum, 1998), pp. 68-6. -- Come and join us on any Monday night. Info on this page.

Creative Presence

 “I could use all the words in our vocabulary to tell you about the eternal silence of God that dwells within our innermost being, the silence of pure creation. I could say how important that silence is because in it you hear your own name spoken clearly and unmistakably for the first time. You come to know who you are. Yet all these words would fail to convey the experience itself -- an experience of unself-conscious liberty in the creative presence of God.” From John Main OSB, “All You Have to Do is Begin,” WORD MADE FLESH (Norwich: Canterbury, 2009), pp. 52-54.

Sacrifice

“[T]he challenge for us is not to reject the world nor to reject ourselves. The challenge is to learn to sacrifice. To sacrifice we offer something to God, and in the Jewish law it is the whole thing that was offered. It was called a holocaust. Nothing was kept back. Everything was given to God. That is what our meditation does to our life.” From John Main OSB, “The Accuracy of Sacrifice,” MOMENT OF CHRIST (New York: Continuum, 1998). -- Feel free to join us Monday evening.

Being yourself...

To know ourselves, to understand ourselves and to . . .get ourselves and our problems in perspective, we simply must make contact with our spirit. All self-understanding arises from understanding ourselves as spiritual beings, and it is only contact with the universal Holy Spirit that can give us the depth and the breadth to understand. . .The way to this is not difficult. It is very simple. But it does require serious commitment. . .

The way of meditation is very simple. All each of us has to do is to be as still as possible in body and in spirit. . . .Learning to meditate is learning to let go of your thoughts, ideas and imagination and to rest in the depths of your own being. Always remember that. Don’t think, don’t use any words other than your own word, don’t imagine anything. Just sound, say the word in the depths of your spirit and listen to it. Concentrate upon it with all your attention.

Why is this so powerful? Basically, because it gives us the space that our spirit needs to breathe. It gives each of us the space to be ourselves. When you are meditating you don’t need to apologize for yourself and you don’t need to justify yourself. All you need to do is to be yourself, to accept from the hands of God the gift of your own being.  And in that acceptance of yourself and your creation, you come into harmony with the Creator, . . .the Spirit of God.

An excerpt from John Main OSB, “Space to Be,” MOMENT OF CHRIST (New York: Continuum, 1998), pp. 92-93.

We meet Monday evenings from 7:00 to7:45. Please join us.

Two Words....

“Meditating, we let go of the desire to control, to possess, to dominate. We seek instead only to be who we are and being the person we are, we are open to the God who is. It is as a result of that openness that we are filled with wonder and with the power and energy of God, which is the power to be and the energy to be in love. [And] when we are in love it is impossible to be bored.” From John Main OSB, “Two Words From the Past,” in THE HEART OF CREATION (New York: Continuum, 1998), pp. 42-44.

Life at the Source

“Meditation is simply a way of coming to that basic healthiness of spirit, to the state wherein our spirit is not assailed and weighed down by trivia or what is merely material; a state wherein, because we are open to ultimate truth and to ultimate love, we are summoned beyond all mere trivia. We are summoned to live life not out of the shallows but to live our lives at the source.” From John Main OSB, “Healthiness of Spirit” in FULLY ALIVE.