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.