WCCM Journal, March 2026. Dearest Friends by Laurence Freeman, p3.
In a time of crisis, everyone is a seeker and the common question is persistent: What is the point of it all? Realising how most young people were coming to experience life as broken, empty and meaningless, he also saw the failure of traditional religious approaches to give them guidance and hope. Fr John felt the urgent need – and the opportunity – of restoring an authentic contemplative dimension to our world and to the church.
Therapists today often observe that there lies a deeper loss of meaning behind our endemic anxiety and loneliness. For many, life is busy and pressured but weightless and empty. Espoused values sound good but prove to be provisional. Institutions, including religions, are disconnected from the reality of the sacred. John Main’s teaching speaks directly into this condition because he understood the core problem. He did not attempt to repair religion at the level of ideas or external structures. He went to the root. Religion, he believed, must be grounded in experience. Authenticity was increasingly undermined and our assent to truth had (as Cardinal Newman saw a century before) to move from being a ‘notional’ assent to concepts, dogma or abstractions, to being a concrete personal experience that awakens passion to right action.
Real assent, John Main believed, could not be fabricated merely through enthusiasm or a regressive appeal to external authority. Like Evagrius and the Desert tradition that inspired him, John Main saw the true ‘theologian is one who prays and one who prays is a theologian’. Prayer needs to be redefined beyond intercession and devotionalism and re-discovered as what is described by Jesus: a personal encounter with reality. Meditation restores religion to its true purpose: ‘re-ligere’, re-connecting the human person to an ever-present origin and source. This does not take place outside ourselves or in a future time. It takes place within, here and now: the mystic’s eternal now. He therefore stressed the
ordinariness and simplicity of the daily practice of meditation.
Gitanjali 66, From Gitanjali (Macmillan and Company, 1916) by Rabindranath Tagore
She who ever had remained in the
depth of my being, in the twilight of
gleams and of glimpses; she who never
opened her veils in the morning light,
will be my last gift to thee, my God,
folded in my final song.
Words have wooed yet failed to win
her; persuasion has stretched to her its
eager arms in vain.
I have roamed from country to
country keeping her in the core of my
heart, and around her have risen and
fallen the growth and decay of my life.
Over my thoughts and actions, my
slumbers and dreams, she reigned yet
dwelled alone and apart.
Many a man knocked at my door
and asked for her and turned away in
despair.
There was none in the world who
ever saw her face to face, and she
remained in her loneliness waiting for
thy recognition.
