John Main Morning Prayer Wednesday, 30 December, 2020 Monk and Master of Christian Meditation (1926-1982) Psalm 34:1-8 1 I will bless the LORD at all times; * his praise shall ever be in my mouth. 2 I will glory in the LORD; * let the humble hear and rejoice. 3 Proclaim with me the greatness of the LORD; * let us exalt his Name together. 4 I sought the LORD, and he answered me * and delivered me out of all my terror. 5 Look upon him and be radiant, * and let not your faces be ashamed. 6 I called in my affliction and the LORD heard me * and saved me from all my troubles. 7 The angel of the LORD encompasses those who fear him, * and he will deliver them. 8 Taste and see that the LORD is good; * happy are they who trust in him! 1 First Reading - Acts 2:42-47a 42 They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. 43 Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. 44 All who believed were together and had all things in common; 45 they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. 46 Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, 47 praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved. Second Reading - 2 Corinthians 6:1-10 6 As we work together with him, we urge you also not to accept the grace of God in vain. 2 For he says, “At an acceptable time I have listened to you, and on a day of salvation I have helped you.” See, now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation! 3 We are putting no obstacle in anyone’s way, so that no fault may be found with our ministry, 4 but as servants of God we have commended ourselves in every way: through great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, 5 beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger; 6 by purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness of spirit, genuine love, 7 truthful speech, and the power of God; with the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left; 8 in honor and dishonor, in ill repute and good repute. We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; 9 as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see—we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; 10 as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything. Gospel Reading Matthew 6:24-33 24 “No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth. 25 “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? 26 Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather 2 into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? 27 And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? 28 And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, 29 yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. 30 But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? 31 Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ 32 For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. 33 But strive first for the kingdom of God] and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. John Main Monk and Master of Christian Meditation (1926-1982) “All Christian prayer is a growing awareness of God in Jesus. And for that growing awareness we need to come to a state of undistraction, to a state of attention and concentration – that is, to a state of awareness. And as far as I have been able to determine.the only way….to come to that quiet, to that undistractedness, to that concentration, is the way of the mantra.” In 1959 at the age of thirty-three John Main entered Ealing Abbey in London and became a monk in the Order of St Benedict. This marked the resolution of one question – whether he was meant to live a married life or become a monk. He had previously had a wide range of experience “in the world,” as a soldier, a lawyer, and a civil servant in the British Overseas Service in Malaya. Ultimately he had felt called to a life of prayer and total dedication to God. But becoming a monk only opened the door on a different kind of spiritual search to find the contemporary relevance of monastic life to the needs of the world today. After fifteen years as a monk, mostly spent teaching in Benedictine schools in London and Washington, D.C., Main was increasingly struck by the great spiritual hunger afflicting the modern world. He was convinced that part of this reflected the loss of a spiritual dimension to life and that the answer to this was prayer. But what kind of prayer? What was needed, he believed, was a form of prayer adapted to the demands of life in the world. 3 Main remembered a friendship he had enjoyed years before with a Hindu swami in Malaya. The swami had contrasted the verbosity and self-consciousness of Christian prayer with the simplicity of the mantra – the repetition of a word or phrase – that was a common method of prayer in the East. This memory led Main to return to the pre-Benedictine sources of monasticism, the spirituality of the desert fathers described by John Cassian. Cassian had recommended just such a discipline, the constant repetition of certain sacred words, as a way of emptying the mind of concepts and rooting oneself in the divine mystery. Cassian had suggested, as an example, the ancient Aramaic prayer Maranatha – “Come Lord Jesus” – and Main later adopted this for his personal use. In 1975 Main organized a small prayer group at Ealing Abbey to experiment with this new form of Christian meditation. As he later explained, “To meditate means to live out of the center of our being.” Through imageless prayer and the repetition of the mantra, he taught, one might move away from the surface of consciousness to penetrate the silent place where Jesus lives and prays within us. Many lay people were attracted to Main’s circle, confirming his belief that he had rediscovered a way of prayer widely accessible and meaningful to ordinary people. This led Main to ponder the possibility of a new type of monasticism in which monks, nuns, and lay people might be able to share a common life of prayer and work together. In 1977, an invitation from the bishop of Montreal provided an opportunity to launch the kind of experimental monastic community that he had envisioned. The Benedictine priory in Montreal became a center that attracted seekers from around the world – both monks and lay people. Gradually the influence of this school of spirituality spread far and wide, as local prayer circles inspired by Main’s writings began to form. This again confirmed Main’s conviction that prayer, far from being a solipsistic activity, was the rich soil of community. From many parts of the globe countless numbers of people began to describe the ways that their lives were turning around through the simple discipline of sitting in meditation for half an hour, once or twice a day. While remaining intensely focused on Christ, Main’s approach to prayer also fostered dialogue with people of other faiths. After a visit by the Dalai Lama, he described how they had meditated together: 4 “We meditated together in absolute openness to love and to the Lord of love. We were not trying to convert one another. Our challenge as Christians is not to try to convert people around us to our way of belief but to love them, to be ourselves living incarnations of what we believe, to live what we believe and to love what we believe.” Little time was given to Main to develop his experimental monastery. In 1982 he was discovered to be in a state of advanced lung cancer. His last months were spent in terrible pain and debilitating treatments, yet few apart from his closest friends were aware of the seriousness of his condition. Until the end he continued to write and give conferences. In his last major talk he spoke at length on “the inner journey”. “The inner journey is a way of union. Firstly, it unites us to ourselves. Then (as our personal fulfillment is found beyond ourselves) it unites us to others.