The Prsent Christ

“Christ is light. Christ is the light that gives range and depth and unity to our vision. Without Christ’s light our vision would be tied to the partial and our spirit could not move beyond itself into the infinite liberty. . . . Our consciousness would, however wonderful, remain an observer on the periphery. . . . Instead, thanks to the power of this light, our center of consciousness moves beyond the limits of self-preoccupation and we discover that our true center is in God.” John Main, OSB (The Present Christ). Information: 732-681-6238 | GJRyan@wccm.org | www.WCCM.org

Join Us

Weekly Christian Meditation Group - Mondays, 7:00-7:45 pm. Begun more than 30 years ago in St. Rose Parish, this small ecumenical group meets each week to meditate together and to support its members in their twice-daily practice of Christian meditation. Over time, this ancient way of contemplative prayer, marked by silence, stillness and simplicity, transforms our entire life — body, mind and spirit. First, we listen to a talk by Benedictine monk, John Main (1926-1982), on the tradition and practice of Christian meditation, and then we meditate together in silence. Many people find that this ancient way of prayer helps them to develop from their own experience a deeper understanding of the truths of our Faith, as well as to learn how better to face the personal challenges of living in today’s society. You would be most welcome. Information: GJRyan@wccm.org | www.WCCM.org

Meditation and Reality

“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.” — John Main OSB, THE HEART OF CREATION

Love & Happiness

“Meditation is purification of the heart and the death of desire. As there is a birth for every death, there is also the regeneration of desire as desire for God. This can never be desire for an object of ego-satisfaction. But it is of course a desire for our own happiness: we can never desire to be unhappy. Desire for God. . .is desire for our happiness by obedience to the law of . . .love. [This law] states that the only kind of desire that will make us truly and permanently happy is the desire for the happiness of others.” — Laurence Freeman OSB, “WCCM Newsletter, Winter 2000.”

A Simple Concept

Meditation is a very simple concept. There is nothing complicated about it, nothing esoteric. . . . In essence, meditation is simply being still at the centre of your being. Being still. The only problem connected with it is that we live in a world of almost frenetic movement, and so stillness and rootedness seem quite foreign to most of us. But in nature all growth is from the centre outwards. The centre is where we begin and again that is what meditation is about. It is making contact with the original centre of your own being. It is a return to the ground of your being, to your origin, to God. . . .St. John of the Cross, in his reflections on the nature of meditation, wrote that "God is the centre of my soul." [. . . .]

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 egoisim 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 being to meditate requires nothing more than the simple determination to begin and then to continue. . . .

[Meditation] is the way of attention. [W]e must go beyond thought, beyond desire and beyond imagination and in that beyond we begin to know what we are here and now in God, "in whom we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28). The way of simplicity is the way of the one word, the recitation of the one word. It is the recitation, and the faithfulness to that recitation every morning and every evening, that leads us beyond all the din of words, beyond all the labyrinth of ideas, to oneness. . . .[M]editation is a way into full communion, oneness of being. In meditation, and in the life enriched by meditation, we just are fully ourselves, whoever we are. -- John Main OSB, "God is the Centre of my Soul," THE WAY OF UNKNOWING

"Meditation Creates Community"

View this video of National Coordinators around the world celebrating the community that meditation creates.

"Breathe Christ"

“Turning attention away from ourselves toward the greater reality ‘outside us’ that contains us is the great act of contemplation. It is the same act of contemplation, however we manage to do it—in relationships, in art, in service, and in prayer. Certainly, learning to meditate—a lifelong art to learn—is a fundamental way to do it. But it is not limited to the actual work of meditation. To meditate is to learn how to live contemplatively in everything we do, [to], as St Antony of the desert once called his disciples to do: ‘always breathe Christ.’” — Laurence Freeman OSB, Common Ground.