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 

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