From Transformed in Christ, John Main, Meditatio Talks Series 2017 A
One of the great needs of our time is for men and women who are confident in the gift of their own life. Men and women who can live their lives out of the power that has been set free in our world by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Meditation is our daily commitment to the reality of that power, the power of Jesus that has been set free and is flowing in our world, in our hearts. The great gift that is given to us, once we plunge into this stream, is the gift of liberty. We are made free by the power of that life, death and resurrection.
Freedom, we often think of, as being the capacity to do what we want to do. But only the most rudimentary experience of meditation, of making contact with the power of Jesus in our hearts, only the most rudimentary contact will show us that freedom is in essence not the freedom to do what we want to do, but the liberty to be who we are: the redeemed, the loved of Christ.
To be who we are, we have to be in relationship. We all know the great fact that we cannot be ourselves in isolation. And the fundamental relationship of our life is our relationship with God; and our meditation is our commitment to that relationship. Prayer, we could describe as ‘selfless attention to God’. That is why in meditation we don’t think about ourselves; we attend to God. Jesus tells us ‘only God is good’, that is he is all-goodness. And the marvel and wonder of prayer is that in this state of selfless attention, we enter into his all-goodness, and so we become good ourselves, not because of any sort of platonic striving but simply because we enter into the orbit of his goodness. This I think is the essential basis for all morality, that we participate in the goodness of God.
The ancient Fathers called this ‘purity of heart’. Our heart is cleansed of all desire, even the desire for God. We do not want to possess God, to possess wisdom or to possess happiness. Simply, in quiet stillness, we are who we are and we are content thus to be – to be good because we are in him who is all goodness.
In meditating we don’t seek to manipulate God for our own purposes. We are not, as it were, trying to involve him in our lives. We are discovering the wonder of our involvement in his life. Saying our mantra, coming to silence, coming to stillness, going beyond desire, coming to purity of heart; we are simply open to reality in its purest and most intimate revelation. We are open to God’s presence, within us, around us, the presence who sustains us by his love.
The importance of meditation is that we come to know this with certainty. We are in the presence of the one who purifies us by his love, by his forgiveness. And we are in the presence of the one who renews us with limitless energy out of that same infinite source of love.
Never forget the purity of heart that is involved in saying the mantra. It is the faithfulness to the mantra from the beginning to the end of every meditation that brings us to this simplicity, to this innocence, to this purity, because we leave self behind. To give us the confidence we need to proclaim Christ, to witness to him personally out of our own knowledge, we need to be faithful – faithful to our daily practice, and within the practice, faithful to the mantra.
The Retreat By Henry Vaughan
Happy those early days! when I
Shined in my angel infancy.
Before I understood this place
Appointed for my second race,
Or taught my soul to fancy aught
But a white, celestial thought;
When yet I had not walked above
A mile or two from my first love,
And looking back, at that short space,
Could see a glimpse of His bright face;
When on some gilded cloud or flower
My gazing soul would dwell an hour,
And in those weaker glories spy
Some shadows of eternity;
Before I taught my tongue to wound
My conscience with a sinful sound,
Or had the black art to dispense
A several sin to every sense,
But felt through all this fleshly dress
Bright shoots of everlastingness.
O, how I long to travel back,
And tread again that ancient track!
That I might once more reach that plain
Where first I left my glorious train,
From whence th’ enlightened spirit sees
That shady city of palm trees.
But, ah! my soul with too much stay
Is drunk, and staggers in the way.
Some men a forward motion love;
But I by backward steps would move,
And when this dust falls to the urn,
In that state I came, return.
