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.