Not running away – 31 August 2012

Father John Main, seized by a sudden simplicity, wrote as follows:

Meditation is a discipline of presence. By stillness of body and spirit we learn to be wholly present to ourselves, to our situation, to our place. It is not running away.  

Not running away.  Sometimes we shed light on something by saying what it is not.  It is not running away, finding who or what is to blame as though that were a solution, finding excuses.  It is not living in denial.  It is not living behind some façade.  It is simple acknowledgement of our fears.  It is sitting for a while outside our dreams and fantasies.  When we sit down in stillness and silence we are doing so in full awareness of the many things whose solution, if there is one at all, which there may be not, certainly doesn’t lie with us. 

In meditation we are doing the best and truest thing we can.  We are paying attention, devoting our attention to what is real and now – I am here, and this is how I am and what I am -- and away from what is unreal, illusory, past regrets or future hopes.  Contemplatives sometimes call this mindfulness, and it is best done in silence and stillness, without words and without images. 

We have stepped outside the web of our own self-reflective weaving, says John Main.  I find that very interesting.  Sitting there and trying to puzzle things out, for instance, is self-reflective weaving.  We are trying to frame our solutions or our explanations.  All well and good, no doubt, but the issue now, in meditation is not that, but to be still, in the humility of only the mantra, and the presence of God.  Moreover, sitting there and trying to image God… that too is self-reflective weaving, because the image will be, like all idols, some reflection of ourselves, inevitably. 

John Main calls meditation a “discipline of presence” -- wholly present to ourselves, to our situation, to our place… not running away.  God is wholly present to us. 

Perhaps then, as some would say, the whole thing is just self-indulgence.  Well no, it is not.  Just the reverse.  Meditators find the disciplines of contemplative prayer are quite life changing.  They begin to see ways forward invisible before.  They learn the deeper meanings of faith.  They start to live without the facades and pretences.  Problems which seemed insoluble now appear to have some light shining through them.  The silence and stillness, the attention and mindfulness, simply do honour to God in love and in truth.