From John Main OSB, “Growing in God,” THE WAY OF UNKNOWING (New York: Crossroad, 1990), pp. 79-81.
What is the difference between reality and unreality? One way we can understand it is to see unreality as the product of desire. One thing we learn in meditation is to abandon desire, and we learn it because we know that our invitation is to live wholly in the present moment. Reality demands stillness and silence. And that is the commitment that we make in meditating. As everyone can find from their own experience, we learn in the stillness and silence to accept ourselves as we are. This sounds very strange to modern ears, above all to modern Christians who have been brought up to practice so much anxious striving: “Shouldn’t I be ambitious? What if I’m a bad person, shouldn’t I desire to be better?”
The real tragedy of our time is that we are so filled with desire, for happiness, for success, for wealth, for power, whatever it may be, that we are always imagining ourselves as we might be. So rarely do we come to know ourselves as we are and to accept our present position. But the traditional wisdom tells us: know that you are and that you are as you are. It may well be that we are sinners and if we are, it is important that we should know that we are. But far more important for us is to know from our own experience that God is the ground of our being . . . This is the stability that we all need, not the striving and movement of desire but the stability and the stillness of spiritual rootedness. Each of us is invited to learn in our meditation, in our stillness, that there we have everything that is necessary.
After meditation: “Winter Trees” by Paul Zimmer in THE GREAT BIRD OF LOVE (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989), p. 55.
WINTER TREES
To watch snow sift into the woods is to
Feel yourself growing gently toward death.
Yet it is trees that teach us how to live.
In some places a person can exist
For many years without seeing a tree.
That must be the way of anger and despair.
Better to have the constant example
Of their patience and perfection,
To witness their blossoming and decay,
Watch snow resolve itself through branches,
Gathering softly at the nodes and shag.
Better to somehow join them and become
Part of the last stand in the world.
