An excerpt from John Main OSB, “The Way of Silence” in The hunger for depth and meaning: Learning to meditation with John Main (Singapore: Medio Media, 2007), p. 161.
To learn to meditate, you have to learn to be silent, and not to be afraid of silence.
[. . . .] [W]e don’t have to create silence. The silence is there, within you. What we have to do is to enter into it, to become silent, to become the silence. The challenge of meditation is to allow ourselves to become silent enough to allow this interior silence to emerge. Silence is the language of the spirit. The language of the spirit is love. And the purpose of meditation is to be in the presence of love, the love that, as Jesus tells us, casts out all fear.
After meditation, an excerpt from “Traditional Irish Blessing” in EARTH PRAYERS: 365 Prayers, Poems and Invocations from Around the World, ed. by Elizabeth Roberts and Elias Amidon (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), p. 204.
May the blessing of light be on you, light without and light within. May the blessed sunshine shine on you and warm your heart till it glows like a great peat fire, so that the stranger may come and warm himself at it, and also a friend.
And may the light shine out of the two eyes of you, like a candle set in the two windows of a house, bidding the wanderer come in out of the storm.
