READINGS – 01/08/2014
1) READING
From John Main, Fully Alive
The Power of Meditation
When you begin to meditate, you begin to become very deeply
relaxed. The early Fathers of the desert used to call their prayer
“relaxing in the Lord”. In that deep peacefulness, there is just Jesus
and you. You begin to take off the normal suppressing mechanisms
of your psyche. Most of us spend quite a lot of our energy
suppressing guilts, fears, whatever it may be.
When you begin to meditate, after some time those suppressions
are taken off, and the fear that you are turning from or the guilt that
you are trying to bury gradually bubbles up to the surface. So you
might find after your meditation that instead of feeling more deeply
relaxed you can feel vaguely anxious, vaguely worried, and you are
not sure why.
The power of meditation is that as you persevere on the path,
the thing that you are suppressing, or the fear that you cannot face,
or the guilt that you don’t want to admit to, is as it were burned away
in the fire of divine love. Very often, you will never know consciously
what it was, but it is gone and it is gone forever.
The times of our meditation are like times of epiphany. God is
with us always, and we seek him always, and we love him always.
Our priority must be very clear: His Kingdom first.
Listen to how Jesus expresses this in the Gospel of Matthew:
Do not store up for yourselves treasure on earth where it grows
rusty and moth-eaten and thieves break in to steal it. Store up
treasure in heaven where there is no moth and no rust to spoil it,
and where there are no thieves to break in and steal…The lamp
of the body is the eye. If your eyes are sound, you will have light
for your whole body. If your eyes are bad, your whole body will
be in darkness. (Matt 6:19-23)
We have to, in our prayer, open the eye of our heart and allow
our heart to become one with the heart of Jesus, and in that
experience, to enter his liberty and his love. All that is required is
daily fidelity to your prayer, and in the time of your meditation,
absolute fidelity to the word.
2) OPENING PRAYER AND MEDITATION
“Heavenly Father, open our hearts to the silent presence of the spirit of your Son. Lead us into that mysterious silence where your love is revealed to all who call, ‘Maranatha…Come, Lord Jesus’.”
3) READING AFTER MEDITATION
BEDE GRIFFITHS OSB, Meditation and The new Creation in Christ
In the Muslim tradition, the Sufi Ibn Al Arabi showed that behind the God of the
Koran is Al Haqq – the Reality. In Judaism, in the Kabbala, they spoke of Ein Sof,
the Infinite. Behind Yahweh, the Law, the Prophets, and everything, is Ein Sof, the
Infinite.
We are all discovering that behind the projections of the physical world, the
psychological world, and even of religion, is the Reality that we are seeking. Karl
Rahner called it ‘the holy mystery’, the mystery beyond everything. That is the goal
of our religious search. We need a physical world and we need the symbols of
religion, but we have to go beyond them to the Reality. That is our calling.
4) SHARING, COMMENTS
5) FINAL PRAYER
Let us pray.
Lord Jesus Christ,
meek and humble of heart,
you offer to those who follow you
a yoke that is good to bear,
a burden that is light.
Accept, we beg you, our prayer and work of this day,
and grant us the rest we need
that we may be ever more willing to serve you,
who live and reign for ever and ever.
Amen.
