We are on the pilgrimage as long as we say our mantra

From Awakening 1 by John Main OSB, Meditatio Talks Series 2014 C – Release date 1 September 2014

Prayer is the life of the Spirit of Jesus within the human heart, the Spirit in whom we are incorporated in the Body of Christ, the Spirit which takes each one of us fully awakened to the Father. Prayer is awakening to this Spirit in all its fullness in our heart.

I don’t think there are forms or methods of prayer; there is only prayer. And that prayer I like to think of as the stream of love between the Spirit of the Risen Jesus and his Father, the stream of love in which we are incorporated. Similarly, once you begin to pray, you pray always. There is no part-time prayer or partial prayer. The Spirit is always alive in our heart, and that stream of love is always a reality in our heart. Our times of meditation, our times of prayer, are simply times when we make this complete turn of consciousness to
the ever-present Reality.

The more you give yourself to this, plunging deeply into this stream of love, the more you become aware of what St Paul meant when he called us to pray without ceasing. This is the state that is sometimes called enlightenment, when the awareness of the reality of the love of Jesus for his Father is constant in our hearts. Insofar as we can be analytical about this, what we are aware of is our total poverty, our total dependence upon the sustaining love of God and our infinite enrichment in that love.

As I have been talking to you about a journey, about a pilgrimage. The pilgrimage is to the source level of your own being. We are on that pilgrimage as long as we say our mantra with simplicity and persevere in our renunciation, in our poverty, renouncing thought, imagination, and ultimately our own very self-consciousness. As the mantra becomes rooted more and more deeply in us, and more thoroughly integrated in our consciousness, so does our whole being participate in this response to the Spirit. The journey leads us to an integration of our selfhood where every part of ourself is in his loving, harmonious response to the Father. Our aim is to accept fully the salvation that Jesus has achieved for us, the total deliverance from everything that is isolating, total union with the whole of creation. And what we discover is our own essential unity. As we
discover too – an intoxicating discovery – the absolute freedom that we possess to soar to the Father.

Now, don’t let me mislead you with rhetoric. There is no doubt about the absolute demand of the mantra. There is a real sense in which saying the mantra is such an act of pure faith that it amounts to religious recklessness because it is, in essence, our total acceptance of the reality of God’s love flooding our inmost heart through the Spirit of the Risen Jesus. And it calls us to die to self. It’s an absolute renunciation to throw ourselves completely upon the love of Jesus. And it is only that absolute renunciation, and absolute
faith, that allows us to rise in his power, to share his power, to share his authority, and above all to share his love. And I want to end by saying as clearly as I can that we cannot manufacture or anticipate this experience.

Experience is a gift of God. All we can do is to learn to be still, to be silent, and to wait. And as we learn that stillness and silence, and as we learn to wait, we will do so with an ever-growing sense of our own potential and our own harmony. We must be patient and we must wait. In God’s time we will experience the flooding of our heart with the love of Jesus and we will be ready to respond to that summons when it comes, a summons that asks us to respond to the fullness of our own personhood in this encounter with Jesus. Every member in the Church is called to this awakening; every member of the human race is called to this awakening. Our great responsibility is to wake up ourselves, to be ready, to be at the disposition of the Father, and then in humility and love to bring the glory, the enlightenment of that wakefulness to all mankind.