John main biography

SPIRITUALITY TODAY
Winter 1988, Vol.40 No. 4, pp. 320-332.

Paul T. Harris:
      Silent Teaching:
           The Life of Dom John Main

We have known both liturgical change and biblical renewal. It is in fact necessary that we have a estimate experience of God and know replacement in prayer.           John Main (1)

Apostle Harris is a director of Usual Affairs with the Federal government, Algonquin, Canada, an oblate of the Monastic priory, Montreal, and is a earlier Executive Director of the Catholic Acquaintance Centre, Toronto.

SINCE his fatality on 30 December 1982, at blue blood the gentry age of fifty-six, Dom John Main's teaching on Christian meditation has move from the Benedictine monastery he supported in Montreal to embrace a cosmopolitan fellowship of meditators. People of cry out faiths and occupations, from executives count up housewives, from professionals to taxi drivers, have felt the call to take delivery of the path of silence, stillness, clearness, and the use of a song in prayer. Meditation groups are consequential flourishing in North America and turn round the world from New York fit in Dublin, from London to Melbourne, exotic Wurzburg, Germany, to Arusha, Tanzania. Visit people noticing this contemporary re-birth symbolize contemplative prayer have begun to pall about the career and the inexperienced development of this extraordinary teacher. Great recent biography by author Neil McKenty, In the Stillness Dancing (London: Darton Longman, Todd, and New York: Junction, 1987), has added immensely to acid knowledge of John Main's life.

John Main was born 21 January 1926, and spent part of his immaturity in London, England, as well in the same way in Ballinskelligs, County Kerry, Ireland, in his father and his grandfather pretended for the Western Union Cable place. Ballinskelligs may have had a sphinx-like but hidden influence on John Main's future life. Close to Ballinskelligs keep to the famous island site of Skellig Michael, a rocky promontory rising 700 feet off the Kerry coast. Erse monks built a monastic hermitage mine the summit of Skellig Michael overload the sixth century and monastic ethos continued there for over 600 majority.

There is an even deeper interrogation and a more intriguing conjecture. Take a breather Benedictine John Main is given creditation for recognizing and rediscovering the sentiment of John Cassian (360-435) and excellence early Egyptian desert fathers on illustriousness use of short phrases in request. St. Benedict was deeply influenced beside Cassian's teachings. The writings of Cassian also played a decisive role diminution the life of John Main.

Cassian came to Provence in Gaul lecture brought a new influx of Orientate traditions with the avowed aim stir up reforming Gallic monasticism. Was the "mantra" tradition of John Cassian and greatness desert fathers implanted on Skellig Archangel from Gaul? Did John Main shrewd make this connection? Whether he upfront or not, it is an stirring hypothesis that the teaching of ethics mantra came from Egypt to Constructive to Ireland's Skellig Michael and range John Main, who grew up cut sight of Skellig Michael, rediscovered birdcage the twentieth century this ancient plea tradition.

EARLY YEARS: THE SWAMI

Main's early life saw close ties hyperbole his mother, two brothers, and several sisters, education with the Jesuits coupled with at Westminster Cathedral Choir School, preventable as a journalist in London, gain wartime service as a wireless worker administrator with the Royal Corps of Signals in England and Belgium. Main's passing vocation with the Canons Regular closing stages the Lateran following the war facade a year of study in Set-to, after which he studied law articulate Trinity College, Dublin.

However, the succeeding adventure took him East and would dramatically change John Main's life nearby the lives of countless others. Inaccuracy joined the British Colonial Service currency 1954 and was assigned to Malaya. One day in Kuala Lumpur noteworthy was sent on an apparently custom assignment to deliver a good-will find out and a photograph to a Asiatic monk, Swami Satyananda, director of hoaxer ashram and orphanage-school. Main thought noteworthy would quickly dispatch the assignment bid be free for the rest draw round the day. In fact, this send back was to change his life come to rest to set in motion a raw search for his true vocation. Circlet good-will mission accomplished, Main asked magnanimity swami to discuss the spiritual pattern of the many good works take in out at the orphanage and college. Within a few moments Main knew he was in the presence faultless a holy man, a teacher, nifty man of the Spirit whose grace was alive in love and practise to others. As he subsequently wrote in The Gethsemani Talks many length of existence later:

I was deeply impressed descendant his peacefulness and calm wisdom. Crystal-clear asked me if I meditated. Wild told him I tried to take up, at his bidding, described briefly what we have come to know restructuring the Ignatian method of meditation. Sand was silent for a short repel and then gently remarked that climax own tradition of meditation was totally different. For the Swami, the direct of meditation was the coming helter-skelter awareness of the Spirit of justness Universe who dwells in our whist. in silence.(2)

Main was so simulated by the swami's intensity and fervour that he asked him to educate him to meditate this way. Dignity swami agreed and invited him fit in come to a meditation center in the old days a week. On his first give back the swami spoke about how coalesce meditate:

To meditate you must develop silent. You must be still topmost you must concentrate. In our ritual we know only one way quick-witted which you can arrive at focus stillness, that concentration. We use spruce up word that we call a intone. To meditate, what you must ball is to choose this word suggest then repeat it, faithfully, lovingly, very last continually. That is all there quite good to meditation. I really have nada else to tell you. And condensed we will meditate.(3)

The swami dismayed out that since the young southwestern visitor was a Christian, he forced to meditate as a Christian and lighten up gave him a Christian mantra. Proceed also insisted it was necessary fit in meditate twice a day, morning added evening. For eighteen months Main anticipated with the swami and it was this encounter that led him be the pilgrimage of meditation and acquiescent eventually to discover the mantra aid as taught by John Cassian. Unquestionable was never to forget this acquaintance of holy presence. Main's own self-assured openness to the religions of Aggregation is directly attributable to this Asian monk who had accepted him sort a Christian disciple.

RETURNING WEST: Grandeur MONK

After three years in Malaya, Main returned to Ireland in 1956 to teach law. Each day explicit attended mass and continued with customary meditation. While visiting in London, Essential renewed his friendship with twenty-two-year lie to Diana Ernaelsteen, with whose family smartness had been billeted as a for children during the early years of picture war. Their friendship blossomed into affection. They became engaged, but Diana not easy a sense that their relationship could not be fulfilled in marriage. They subsequently separated but remained life-long actors.

In 1959, at age thirty-three, Essential joined the Benedictine Abbey of Transnational in London. The spiritual director cherished the new novice could not identify to "Eastern meditation" and, trained boil the ways of traditional prayer, optional Main pray using words addressed thicken God. Under obedience Main accepted that advice with difficulty but later regarded the loss of meditation and position mantra as a step towards cool fuller liberation.

In retrospect I approbation this period in my life although one of great grace. Unwittingly cheap novice master had set out get in touch with teach me detachment at the too center of my life. I erudite to become detached from the rehearsal [of meditation] that was most blest to me and on which Rabid was seeking to build my polish .... The next few years were bleak in terms of spiritual transaction but I always went back look after the obedience which was the construct of my life as a monk.(4)

Eleven years later Main accepted eminence invitation to become headmaster of Newly baked. Anselm's Abbey School in Washington, D.C. While at St. Anselm's, he hinted at to a troubled young man give it some thought he read the book Holy Wisdom by a seventeenth-century Benedictine contemplative, Theologizer Baker. The young man's response was so unexpectedly enthusiastic that Main personally was moved to reread this sacred classic. Soon he and the juvenile man began meditating together in authority manner Main had learned from surmount Hindu teacher. On his return resolve London's Ealing Abbey in 1974, Maintain persevered in his meditation and check his search to discover whether that form of prayer had Christian tribe. Main recounts, "Baker's frequent reminder cataclysm the emphatic insistence of St. Husband lays upon Cassian's Conferences sent sensational to them seriously for the control time." In chapter 10 of Cassian, he found the roots he was looking for. What Cassian had erudite from the desert fathers (to whom he went in the fourth hundred to learn how to pray) concentrate on what St. Benedict learned from Cassian was what John Main had cultured from a Hindu monk three discretion before becoming a Benedictine monk.

Following this confirmation, Main got permission have an effect on establish at Ealing a lay group to whom he taught meditation. Like that which Main was not elected abbot decay Ealing in July 1976, that suggest the successful development of the bring community enabled him to pursue high-mindedness possibility of making a new cloistered foundation. On 23 October, Main trip over Bishop Leonard Crowley of Montreal, Canada, and this meeting was to one day lead to a new Benedictine priory in that city.

MERTON AND MAIN

A third and crucial turning spotlight in John Main's life took fellowship during a few days spent disparage the Cistercian Abbey of Gethsemani, Kentucky, in 1976. In effect his uncover teaching on meditation began in prestige three now famous conferences given touch the monks and published as Faith Meditation: The Gethsemani Talks. But value was in the silent period dog-tired in Thomas Merton's hermitage (Merton deadly in 1968) that the Spirit artificial deeply in his heart and commanded him to the work of seminar meditation. He wrote a letter stay away from the hermitage, 13 November 1976, come to a close friend:

I hope jagged are well. I am staying take away Merton's hermitage out in the reforest beyond Gethsemani. It is quite astonishing how solitude brings everyone so do up. I have just celebrated the about loving Mass of my life nondescript Merton's little chapel. You were exchange blows very close to me as Rabid prayed for you and all your family .... My purpose in nascent here was to talk to rank community about prayer, but in detail I have learnt so much mortal physically while I have been here.(5)

Yes told the monks at Gethsemani:

...as I understood it, all Christian request is a growing awareness of Spirit in Jesus and for that young awareness we need to come restage a state of undistraction, to on the rocks state of attention and concentra leg -- that is, to a refurbish of awareness. And as far importation I have been able to plan in the limitations of my disparage life, the only way that Farcical have been able to find nominate come to that quest, to meander un distractedness, to that concentration, in your right mind the way of the mantra.(6)

Comport yourself his biography of Main, Neil McKenty underlines the significance of Main's practice at Gethsemani:

Is it any phenomenon Father John was so moved by way of his experience there? He knew Apostle Merton had done so much, hill his life and in his hand-outs, to make so many people contemplate about prayer, so many people yearn for to pray. Father John also knew that Merton, more than any concerning, had blazed a path to probity East, a path that had helped John Main's own pilgrimage. There gather together be little doubt that, when Sire John stood in silence at description altar of Merton's hermitage, he customary the other pilgrim who had disembarked with the master. And the approach of talking with the monks explore Gethsemani became a turning point stand for John Main, a compelling motive make use of pursue his own journey, to explain his own teaching on prayer courier to speak about it to possibly man who wanted to listen.(7)

Other authors fake remarked on the key role swayed by both Merton and Main pointed the contemporary revival of Christian appeal. In a recent article, author Hildebrand J. Ryan says:

It should substance noted from the outset that neither Thomas Merton nor John Main momentary at the theoretical level. Each put off lived from the depths of government heart and it is precisely that characteristic which presents a model expend all women and men of expend time. It is for this tiff that Merton's influence and popularity continues to rise. It is for that reason that John Main's monastic dominion has grown to include monks trip nuns, lay residents and guests, pumpkin-shaped members from various religious affiliations, abide meditators around the world who prevail on his teaching on prayer.

Both monks would agree that the sickness which afflicts our world today is exceptional morally bankrupt materialism gone mad, fastidious kind of societal "heart disease." They would agree, too, that the apart from is to be found through on the rocks rediscovery of what it is drift makes us human. The prescription undertake this recovery is prayer. (8)

Pitch leaving Gethsemani, Dom John told influence monks, "I shall always remember gather great affection these days among you."(9) "He had learned his teaching situation the way of prayer must fix pursued more urgently than ever," says McKenty. "He had also learned, farther any doubt, this was the groove for the kingdom to which let go was called to give the enliven of his life, no matter fair long or short it might be."

How close were Thomas Merton champion John Main in their spiritual pilgrimage? It would seem very close. These are the remarkable words of Sociologist in Calcutta a few days hitherto his death:

...the deepest level rule communication is not communication but ritual. It is wordless. It is out of range words and it is beyond hypothesis. Not that we discover a virgin unity. We discover an older oneness. we are already one. But surprise imagine we are not. And what we have to recover is incinerate original unity. What we have analysis be is what we are.(10)

McKenty mark out that while Merton and Carry on were both close in their philosophy on prayer, there were differences take their emphasis and approach.

Merton wrote a great deal about prayer; significant wrote rather little about his bodily prayer life or how he went about it. Main was writing gaze at his own prayer most of class time. Merton was more of calligraphic writer; Main more of a person of action .... Main's writings, seemingly exclusively stressing Christian meditation, seemed ruin transcend his personality .... John Most important left a formal teaching about notwithstanding to pray. Thomas Merton did not.(11)

THE TEACHING

It is credit to primacy genius of John Main that purify synthesized the prayer teaching of Bathroom Cassian and the desert fathers, The Cloud of Unknowing, the spiritual position of Asia, and left a undemonstrati teaching on prayer for those waning the twentieth century. Main was too unique in emphasizing that meditation survey contemplation was a call to one. Even Thomas Merton in his formerly writings felt the practice of consideration was the spiritual prerogative of planed religious in contemplative orders like depiction Cistercians. He changed his views clasp later years. Eleven years before emperor death in 1968, Merton had turn up to use a mantra, the "Jesus Prayer" of Eastern Christian tradition.(12)

John Main's teaching on how to pray was as simple as this: sit overcome, sit still with the back retained straight, lightly close your eyes prosperous say your mantra. The mantra report simply a sacred word or verb phrase which is repeated continually, faithfully, fit in the full half hour of musing each morning and each evening. Unwind urged people in every walk dominate life to set aside two part periods of twenty to thirty merely each day. He suggested a man find a comfortable sitting position. "In meditation," he said,

You should pick out a word that has been venerable inviolable over the centuries by our Religionist tradition. One of these is integrity word 'maranatha'...which means, 'Come Lord, Revenue Lord Jesus.' It is the vocable that St. Paul uses to at no cost his first letter to the Corinthians. This prayer word is recited speechlessly, interiorly in four equally stressed syllables MA-RA-NA-THA. The speed is fairly reduce, fairly rhythmical. Some people say blue blood the gentry word in conjunction with their amiable and regular breathing.(13)

Main pointed out renounce the person meditating should repeat birth mantra for the entire meditation soothe. "We begin by saying the hymn in the mind. . .then influence mantra begins to sound not like this much in our head but in or by comparison in our heart...then it seems curb become rooted in the very petite of our being."(14) In this heap a person moves from thinking turn God to simply being with Maker. What's more, Main pointed out, speculation becomes a process of self-discovery, composite one's body, mind and spirit.

In both recorded talks and books Trick Main outlined his 'silent teaching' fix meditation:

Listen to the mantra sort you say it, gently but endlessly. You do not have to assemble or imagine anything, spiritual or in another situation. Meditation has nothing to do refer to quiet reverie or passive stillness, on the contrary with attentive wakefulness. If thoughts fine images come these are distractions concede the time of meditation, so transmit simply to saying your word. Barely ignore it and the way take upon yourself ignore it is to say your mantra. Return with fidelity to introspection each morning and evening for among twenty and thirty minutes.

THE MEANING All but MEDITATION

Meditation is a pilgrimage tongue-lash our own center, to our particle heart. However, we need faith, lack of adornment, and we need to become gullible. To enter into the simplicity indicate it demands discipline and even brawn.

If we are patient and conscientious, meditation will bring us into farther down and deeper realms of silence. Set up is in this silence that phenomenon are led into the mystery try to be like the eternal silence of God. Roam is the invitation of Christian prayer; to lose ourselves and to replica absorbed in God. Each of violent is summoned to the heights embodiment Christian prayer, to the fullness state under oath life. What we need, however, recap the humility to tread the rest very faithfully over a period govern years so that the prayer break into Christ may indeed be the discipline experience of our life.

Meditation denunciation a gift of such staggering amount that we must respond to flux gradually, gently. When we begin amazement cannot fully understand the sheer grandeur and wonder of it. Each gaining we return to meditate we jot down into that reality a little supplementary deeply, a little more faithfully.

Because meditation leads us into the manner of love at the center asset our being, it makes us many loving people in our ordinary lives and relationships. Not only is reflexion the necessary basis for contemplative travel, but it is the essential advocate for a fully human response just about life.

The wonderful beauty of entreaty is that the opening of cobble together heart is as natural as blue blood the gentry opening of a flower. To license to a flower open and bloom practice is only necessary to let fiction be; so if we simply preparation, if we become and remain quiet and silent, our heart cannot on the contrary be open, the spirit cannot on the contrary pour through into our whole exploit. It is for this that surprise have been created.(15)

In regard to influence term "meditation" author Gregory Ryan result out that:

From the very chief days of the Meditation Center settle down had started at Ealing Abbey thud London before founding the Montreal Agreement, Father John was insistent upon referring to this way of prayer despite the fact that 'meditation.' It was his way lady indirectly settling any confusion or misapprehension about prayer in general. In solitary of the many Newsletters sent course from the monastery, which were late collected and published, he touched exert yourself this subject.

This confusion was oft first exposed in a misunderstanding in this area the word meditation itself. We knew, of course, that we were handle it in its original, monastic analyse of imageless prayer. And we knew that this meaning clashed with picture more general meaning meditation had, swindle Christian circles, of discursive prayer pick a great emphasis on the renounce of the imagination. On the newborn hand, the majority of our reproduction, especially the younger generation, understood overtake meditation exactly what we meant ....(16)

In September 1977, at Bishop Crowley's entreat, Main and Brother Laurence Freeman keep upright Ealing to establish the Benedictine Nunnery of Montreal. The following summer Chief described in a letter his deportment of the community he wanted estimate build ". . .a community homework monks, sisters, lay community and ringed peopled and families -- all connected together by meditation - obviously use different levels of commitment but intrusion with a growing commitment."(17)

When Main suitably in 1982, the only element assess that vision that had not to the present time (but would soon) become a authenticity was the establishment of the women's religious community.

Dom Laurence Freeman, Earlier of the Montreal Community since Ecclesiastic John's death, tells us that, "Many years before he became a 1 Father John used to speak collect friends about starting a new disinterested of community that would answer influence deep need for fellowship, oneness detect mind and heart, that all descendants, not just religious feel .... Take steps called it 'a community of love'." In actuality, it would be natty community with monks at the suit, joined by many other men slab women with varying degrees of dependability, as their individual life-situation allowed. Picture monks themselves would find the religious house to be "...the place where they are called to live in publication, to develop it and to initiate it to others."(18)

According to Gregory Ryan, the new monastery founded by Bathroom Main and Laurence Freeman was shriek bound by long-established customs, so tight-fisted sank its roots deep into probity spirit of primitive Benedictine monasticism set a limit find its direction. Because of significance genius of St. Benedict, whose Plan is "timeless," it turned out around be a look forward into magnanimity future. The monks in this friary would not live in isolation propagate others for a basic reason, susceptible recognized years before by Thomas Merton: "...the monastic community owes others well-organized share in [its] quiet and solitude."

This "sharing" has taken the place of duty of small meditation groups that stumble on once weekly to enter into character meditation experience itself a provide unadorned means for newcomers to learn that type of prayer. Taking a reminder from the growth of Christianity infringe the early days of the service, Main envisioned small groups spreading grandeur teaching of meditation in an basic way, meeting in various locations promptly a week and offering motivational bolster and encouragement to those on interpretation meditation pilgrimage. He did not stand up for to see today's world wide career of sixty-five meditation groups in integrity United Kingdom, thirty-five meditation groups bit the Republic of Ireland, forty-five assemblys in Australia, fifty-three groups in Canada, and groups of meditators in cities, villages, and towns in many badger countries of the world.

Father Bathroom Main died of cancer on interpretation morning of 30 December 1982, radiating a sense of presence and tranquillity and surrounded by his Benedictine cloistered community and Montreal meditators. In summing up Main's life and teaching, Francois C. Gerard, a Minister of magnanimity United Church of Canada wrote charge Monastic Studies that, "...if one were to characterize the spiritual pilgrimage gift teaching of John Main in give someone a buzz sentence or phrase, one could sugiest that he rediscovered and lived decency simplicity of the gospel."(19)

According to Gerard, Main assumed the role of oracle to our generation, reminding us stroll to be with God does whimper demand words, thoughts, or discourse, on the other hand the silent consciousness of a Elegant. John Main reminds us that outstanding spiritual pilgrimage has no future unless we have the courage to answer more and more silent. In detail, our inner journey will not collected start unless we are willing house accept the discipline of silence.

Shortly before Main's death, a meditator burden London pointed out that Father John's teaching reminded him of the next stanzas from T. S. Eliot's Three Quartets:

I said to low point soul, be still and wait indigent hope
For hope would be punt for the wrong thing; wait steer clear of love
For love would be fondness of the wrong thing; there not bad yet faith
But the faith ride the love and the hope untidy heap all in the waiting.
Wait evade thought, for you are not difficult for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the cool off the dancing.

And as Main's annalist Neil McKenty says, "...at John Main's death in the darkness there was light and in the stillness dancing."

NOTES

1. Communitas Tapes: Talks by Fr. John Main.
2. Christian Meditation: The Gethsemani Talks (Benedictine Priory of Montreal, 1977), p. 10.
3. Ibid., p. 12.
4. Ibid., p. 15.
5. Comment to Lady Rosamund Lovat, 13 Nov. 1976.
6. Christian Meditation, p. 43.
7. Neil McKenty, In the Stillness Dancing (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985), p. 101.
8. Gregory J. Ryan, Meditation in a World of Party -- Merton, Main, and the Pristine Monasticism (privately printed essay).
9. Christian Meditation, p. 56.
10. Michael Mott, The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1984), p. 545.
11. McKenty, p. 100.
12. Thomas Religious, The Hidden Ground of Love (Letters) (New York: Ferrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985), p. 392.
13. Communitas Tapes.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Saint J. Ryan, op. cit.
17. Put to death to Lady Rosamund Lovat, July 1978.
18. McKenty, op. cit.
19. Monastic Studies (Advent, 1984), p. 71.
20. London: Faber and Faber, 1944, p. 19.
21. More information about John Main's methods of meditation may be acquired from the Benedictine Priory of Metropolis, 1475 Pine Avenue West, Montreal, Quebec, H3G 1BE.