From John Main OSB, “God is the Centre of my Soul,” THE WAY OF UNKNOWING (New York: Crossroad, 1990), p. 19.
Meditation leads us to pure clarity–clarity of vision, clarity of understanding and clarity of love–a clarity that comes from simplicity. [Meditation] is the way of attention. [W]e go beyond thought, beyond desire and beyond imagination and in that beyond we begin to know that 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, and in the life enriched by meditation, we just are fully ourselves, whoever we are.
After meditation: William Wordsworth, “Lines Composed above Tintern Abbey,” Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol 2 (New York: Norton, 1979), p. 156.
That blessed mood,
In which the burden of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened–that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,-
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul;
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
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