God loves us...

God loves us and in creating us, he has placed his presence within us, his Spirit within us. And this is our deepest human identity. It is the mystery of being human, that the Spirit of God is alive and moving in our hearts. But we forget that. We forget it because we become too busy, we become angry or greedy or because our ego takes over. We can forget the presence of God within us. And God has given us meditation. He has given this gift to every human being in order for us to remember, to re-connect, to rediscover every day, every moment, this mystery of what it is to be human, to be a temple of the Holy Spirit. This takes us to the universality of meditation.
Meditating as a Christian, Laurence Freeman OSB 2013 C 

Introductory Session

You're Invited! "Introductory Session"

“Christian Meditation: A Pathway to Peace” — The times we live in present challenges to peace on all fronts: in our personal lives, in our communities, and among nations. St. Rose parishioner Greg Ryan, author and Benedictine oblate, will offer an introduction to the ancient tradition and contemporary practice of Christian meditation, November 10 (10-11:30 a.m.). St. Rose parish center, 603 Seventh Ave., Belmar. Light refreshments. Free-will offering to benefit The World Community for Christian Meditation (www.WCCM-USA.org). Information: 732-681-6238 | GJRyan@optonline.net | WCCM-CentralNJ.blogspot.com

The Light of Christ

“The peculiar power of the light of Christ that it reveals to us reality as it is. Light is a form of energy that makes vision possible; the brighter the light the clearer the vision, the deeper the harmony. What we learn is that Christ is our light. The task of Christian meditation is simply to uncover the brilliance of the light of Christ in our own hearts.” From John Main, “The Way fo Enlightenment,” in Fully Alive (London: Canterbury Press, 2013), p.10.

Total Potential

“When we meditate we are still, body and soul, mind and spirit, entirely open to the presence of God, knowing that presence to be pure love, pure gentleness, pure forgiveness. In that presence we become who we are: creatures created by God, redeemed by the love of Jesus, creatures who are temples of the Holy Spirit.” From John Main, “Total Potential,” in Fully Alive (London: Canterbury Press, 2013), p.14. 

"Meditation"

One of the fruits of meditation is the gift of discernment. Discernment about what the media is doing and saying to us, about when to switch off the screen. By creating the space of solitude through daily practice, meditation protects the dignity of individual privacy. As a result, it also develops the social values of personal liberty and responsible participation in society’s decision making. The passivity and fatalism that media-saturation can create is challenged by meditation, if only because people of wisdom are less easily misled. 

We meditate in this world. Our decision to meditate represents a commitment to participate responsibly even in a world going mad. It trains discernment and limits intolerance. It teaches faithfulness to the community of the true Self thus protecting human dignity. Each time we sit down to meditate we carry our own and the world’s baggage into the work of attention. It is a way of loving the world we are part of and contributing to its well-being. Precisely because it is a way of letting go of ourselves, meditation helps us recognize and share the burden of humanity. 

An excerpt from Laurence Freeman OSB, “Meditation,” in JESUS THE TEACHER WITHIN (London: Continuum, 20000), p.. 210.

Love's Search

Meditation and the constant return to it, every day of your life, is like cutting a pathway through to reality. . . And it is no small thing to enter reality, to become real, to become who we are, because in that experience we are freed from all the images that so constantly plague us. We do not have to be anyone's image of ourselves, but simply the real person we are.

Meditation is practiced in solitude but it is the great way to learn to be in relationship. The reason for this paradox is that, having contacted our own reality, we have the existential confidence to go out to others, to meet them at their real level. And so the solitary element in meditation is mysteriously the true antidote to loneliness. Having contacted our own reality, we are no longer threatened by the otherness of others. We are not always looking for an affirmation of ourselves. We are making love's search, looking for the reality of the other. In the Christian vision of meditation, we find the reality of the great paradox Jesus teaches: If we want to find our lives we have to be prepared to lose them. In meditating, that is exactly what we do. 

An excerpt from John Main OSB, "Straying from the Mantra," THE HEART OF CREATION (New York: Continuum, 1998), pp. 9-10.

Moment of Christ

[M]editation is about living in the moment of Christ. It is not about thinking of Christ as he was or how he will come again but about being with him now and being transformed in his being. This is not a static historical moment, but a flowing, a flowering and an unfolding of the mystery of Being itself. To practice meditation is the only way to learn what meditation means and how its meaning is much more than it may seem to those who want to get something short-term out of it; and much more than those who think that by meditating they are making something happen. By learning to meditate we come to understand how we should say the mantra and the way we say the mantra is very much the way we are, the way we love and the way we love day by day.

We should say the mantra without impatience, without force or any intention of violence. The purpose of the mantra is not to block out thoughts. It is not a jamming device. If thoughts attack us while we are meditating, we turn the other check. In saying the mantra gently, we learn from Him who is gentle and humble of heart. Our lives will, day by day, become the commentary on our prayer. Our prayer will then no longer consist in endlessly commenting on our lives. We will ourselves permanently have become prayer. 

An excerpt from Fr. Laurence Freeman, “Dearest Friends,” January 1997 WCCM International Newsletter

Purity of Heart

Meditation is a wonderful opportunity for all of us. . .because in returning to our origin, to the ground of our being, we return to our innocence. The call to meditation, for the early Fathers of the Church, was a call to purity of heart and that is what innocence is—purity of heart. A vision unclouded by egoism or by desire or by images, a heart simply moved by love. Meditation leads us to pure clarity—clarity of vision, clarity of understanding and clarity of love—a clarity that comes from simplicity. And to meditate requires nothing more than the simple determination to begin and then to continue. [. . . .]” From John Main OSB, “God is the Centre of my Soul,” THE WAY OF UNKNOWING (New York: Crossroad, 1990), pp. 18-20. Information: 732-681-6238 | GJRyan@wccm.org | www.WCCM.org 

Hope

Hope is not a desire for anything. It is not day-dreaming about anything. It is the reverse mode of fantasy. Hope is a fundamental attitude or direction of consciousness. It is an outward turning. To be hopeful is to make the discovery that we are integral parts of something greater than ourselves, and that we are living with the energy of that complete reality. Hope is the outward turning of the self, whatever the difficulty of remaining outward-turning. Despair is the surrender of consciousness to the force of introversion. . . Hope is an absolute, constant and unconditioned virtue. You cannot be hopeful only when things are going well. You need to be hopeful and, in a sense, to choose to be hopeful, however things go, whatever the inclination to sink back into self-consciousness, into the safe enclosure of the ego.

Hope is one of the virtues resulting from deep prayer. It is in deep prayer that we turn from self to God, the God who is "other" than ourselves but to whom we bear a likeness more striking than to our family or any human being. Hope is the aspiration to be totally at home. It is the strongest aspiration of our being. 

From Laurence Freeman OSB, "Hope," THE SELFLESS SELF (New York: Continuum, 2000), pp. 151-154.

Growing in Love

“Meditation is so powerful because it leads us into a [new] order, a tranquility, a peace. This is so because our order of values changes. Instead of being based on self, on the ego, on success, on self-promotion, on all these limiting factors, our values system becomes based on God. We discover in the revelation that takes place in our heart, the revelation when we discover the presence of Jesus there, that God is love. This brings us to the conclusion that unleashes great power—that there is only one thing that matters ultimately, which is that we grow in love. Everything else is secondary. Everything else is consequential.” From John Main OSB, “The Way of Love” in The hunger for depth and meaning, ed. Peter Ng (Singapore: Medio Media, 2007), p.182,183.

Implanting Virtues...

"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. After all, if we cannot love ourselves why bother to love others? Better than destroying your faults is to work patiently to implant the virtues – a slower and less dramatic work but far more effective. And by avoiding the dangers of religious hypocrisy and self-righteousness, the work creates a more pleasant working personality. Hidden in all our faults – our capacity for evil – there are also the seeds of virtues, many virtues. The terrorist may have had the seed of justice in him before his anger and the delusion that he is the instrument of God’s wrath took him over. When we conduct war against ourselves (many of the greatest religious fanatics have been self-denying) we risk huge collateral damage: in the destruction of our own seeds of virtue. Every kind of violence is a crime against humanity because it deprives the world of unknown goodness. 

"The first step in implanting the virtues that will eventually overpower the vices is to establish the foundational virtue of deep and regular prayer. Through this silent rhythm of prayer, wisdom slowly penetrates our mind and our world. Wisdom 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.

Resurrection

Meditation is a way of power because it is the way to understanding 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. The essence of the Christian Gospel is that we are invited to this experience now, today. All of us are invited to death, to die to our own self-importance, our own selfishness, our own limitation. We are invited to die to our own exclusiveness. [ . . . . ]

Every time we sit down to meditate we enter the axis of death and resurrection. We do so because in our meditation we go beyond our own life and all the limitations of our own 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 out all fear. This is our resurrection, our rising to the full liberty that dawns on us once our own life and death and resurrection are in focus. Meditation is the great way of focusing our life on the eternal reality that is God, the eternal reality that is to be found in our own hearts. The discipline of saying the mantra, the discipline of the daily return morning and evening to meditation has this one supreme aim—to focus us totally on Christ with an acuity of vision that sees ourselves, all reality, as it is. Listen to St Paul writing to the Romans: 

No one of us lives, and equally no one of us dies, for himself alone. If we live, we live for the Lord; and if we die, we die for the Lord. Whether, therefore, we live or die, we are the Lord’s. 

[An excerpt from John Main OSB, “Death and Resurrection,” MOMENT OF CHRIST (New York: Continuum, 1998), pp. 68-70.]

The Way of Liberation

“Meditation is a way of breaking through from a world of illusion into the pure light of reality. The great illusion that most of us are caught in is that we are the center of the world and that everything and everyone revolves around us. But in meditation we learn that this is not true. The truth is that God is the center and everyone of us has being from God. [. . . .] Meditation is the great way of liberation. We are liberated from the past. . . and become open to our life in the present moment. . .We learn that we are because God is, [and that] simply being is our greatest gift.” From John Main OSB, “Commitment to Simplicity,” MOMENT OF CHRIST (New York: Continuum, 1998), pp. 26-27.

A Trip to the Desert - Lent 2018

THE SEASON OF LENT : A trip to the desert

Religious festivals especially in the East are so structured as to synchronise Chronological Time with Sacred Time. It is part of the wisdom of ancient traditions that have ensured that the only way human beings can maintain a sense of balance is to allow the train of our lives to run along the twin rails of “Chronos” and “Kairos”.  Religious Festivals are merely stops along the journey. One such stop for the Christian as he / she journeys inward towards a deeper realization of Christ Consciousness is the Season of Lent. Beginning on Ash Wednesday, for many, this is a reluctant journey, often made as a ritual. It symbolically replicates Jesus spending 40 days in the desert before his public ministry. For those who wish to go beyond the ritual to the spiritual, it is an invitation to journey into the desert. 

Our yearning for what we identify as a “God experience" needs to be tested in the silence of the desert. It is not an escape away from the hustle and bustle of scattered activity we are accustomed to. It is a call not to loneliness but to solitude, the cave of the heart into which we go precisely to give all that we do a  meaning and purpose. Without it, we are like the broken spokes of a wheel disconnected from the stillness of the hub at its centre. It is a stillness that embodies the seed of activity so that anything not rooted and grounded in it quickly withers and dies.

The desert offers an opportunity for discernment. It is above all a “learning” experience. One learns not to be taken in by its mirages. The extreme climatic conditions that present themselves have the potential to bring out not only the best in us but also to bring us face to face with the “demons” that afflict us from within. But most of all it brings us face to face with death.  It teaches us in no uncertain terms, however, that death and dying are not exactly co-terminal. Death occurs in chronological time; dying is a process that can only be understood in sacred time. It is this shift in perspective that we are invited to embrace. We are to immerse ourselves into the process of continually dying to self.

Before his public ministry, Jesus spends 40 days in the desert, confronting the “demons” of power, popularity and relevance. These are the three principal areas which manifest the “holes” in our personality, the dark side which we must first accept and then allow to disappear for the illusions which they are.

In one his early comments as he began preaching, Jesus refers to another man of the desert who preceded him – his cousin John the Baptist. He was not a reed shaken in the wind but a reed nevertheless. Reeds are characterized by their hollowness and fragility; their ability to be swayed is determined by their rootedness in the earth or lack of it. Yet the very holes on the surface of the reed enable it to produce the sound of music whenever there is a breath of air flowing through. 

The ritual anointing with  Ashes which begins the season of Lent is meant not so much to remind us of the certainty of death, but rather to immerse us in the process of dying. This means accepting our hollowness as a precondition for the inflow of a breath of fresh air from the Spirit thus producing another harmonic and a deeper resonance each time. Curiously enough it is a process that enables us

to live life more fully and in so doing be life-giving to others as well. 

Christopher Mendonca, India 

(The author teaches Meditation in the Christian Tradition)

cjwm1943@gmail.com

The Way of Dispossession

“We are not meditating in order to get some sort of insight. In fact we are not meditating to gain any possession whatsoever. Now that is a very difficult concept to come to terms with because we are all brought up to be such materialists, such possessors, such controllers. To sit down and to voluntarily make ourselves poor, to dispossess ourselves, as we enter into the presence of God, is such a challenge. For many of us, especially at the beginning, it will seem that the time we spend in mediation is a complete and utter waste of time….[T]he essence of meditation is that we become absorbed in God, where we lose all sense of ourselves and find ourselves only in God.” From “Without Expectations” in The Hunger for Depth and Meaning: Learning to Meditate with John Main, ed. Peter Ng (Singapore: Medio Media, 2007), p. 112. Information: 732-681-6238 | GJRyan@wccm.org | www.WCCM.org | WCCM-CentralNJ.blogspot.com