Meditation not something new

Archbishop Raymond Roussin, SM, recently met with members of the Canadian Christian Meditation Prayer Community who are hosting a national conference at the end of June at the University of British Columbia. The practice of Christian meditation will be introduced at the conference by keynote speaker Father Lawrence Freeman, OSB.

Father Freeman is director of the World Community for Christian Meditation and the successor to Benedictine Dom John Main who, some decades ago, focussed on the meditative practices of early Christian spiritual teachers and contemplatives and taught a method of meditation which has been adopted by Christians around the world.

The archbishop spoke to The B.C. Catholic about his introduction to meditation as taught by Dom Main and how he considers meditation an important form of prayer.

The B.C. Catholic: The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines Christian meditation as a quest wherein "The mind seeks to understand the why and how of the Christian life in order to adhere and respond to what the Lord is asking." How has meditation affected your life, and should it play a part in how Christians seek to understand God's purpose for their lives?

Archbishop Roussin: I learned about Dom Main's meditative practices when I was a chaplain teaching courses in the Old Testament to the nuns at a Benedictine monastery in Winnipeg in the late 1970s. One of the nuns spent a week with him in Montreal, after which she returned excited about meditation as a particularly simple yet effective form of prayer which could be taught to lay people and to which God's grace certainly responds. I certainly have found this to be true in my life.

BCC: We have seen the practice of meditation increase around the world, espoused by people of many different faiths. Can you outline your thoughts on how meditation fits into the Catholic's study of the Scriptures and other spiritual works and his or her prayer life.

AR: At the beginning of religious life, you are taught prayer by meditation. We would pick up a scriptural text or perhaps read about the life of a saint, put it aside, and then spend time prayerfully meditating on what we had read.

It's not anything new; it was around at the time of the Desert Fathers as well as when the Benedictines began practising the Rule of St. Benedict.

There is, as taught by Dom Main, another way to do this, which is to use a manta or word on which to concentrate during meditation. You choose a word such as "Jesus" or "hope," then become calm, just breathing in and out. Slowly you relax, and repeat the word many times.

BCC: Is it a regular practice for you?

AR: I tend to move from one form of prayer to another. There is oral, silent, and meditative or contemplative prayer, which is probably the form I use most often. I concentrate on emptying my mind, because when the mind is stilled, you become better at listening to the voice of God.

BCC: The Catechism of the Catholic Church says Christians "owe it to themselves to develop the desire to meditate regularly, lest they come to resemble the three first kinds of soil in the parable of the sower." Many Catholics in our modern age do not learn meditation; others seem sceptical about it. Why have the great meditative traditions of the Church mystics and contemplatives been lost?

AR: To say that meditation is not of the Church is to not have looked at it very carefully. There is not just one way to pray. Whatever causes us to have a deeper and more profound union with God is what we seek, and meditative prayer can do this. Certainly, oral and silent prayers are good and should be practised as well.

If we don't seek union with Christ through prayer at the deepest level possible, it is not God's fault; it is our own. Meditation means to listen, to be quiet and listen. If our aim is just to get our prayers over with, we are not using our time of prayer in the right way. We should develop our prayer life to live our lives in a prayerful attitude.

BCC: Could meditative prayer which concentrates on being in God's presence rather than on listing our problems and petitioning Him for answers be an effective antidote to a modern, goal-directed approach to prayer?

AR: We are all so busy. Everybody says this. It is certainly one of the problems of modern life that we don't seem to have time to sit back, to kneel, to prostrate ourselves and listen to what God has to say.

God has something to say to us about our lives but we don't listen because we always have to be doing something. Even focusing on a Scripture text can prevent me from listening to what God wants me to hear. In meditative prayer and contemplation, you cannot do this.

Look at the Jesuits and their Ignatian retreats where you read, you ponder, and then you keep still. If people are surprised or frightened, for instance, by the mantra concept, they should know that the early contemplatives, monks, and hermits prayed that way.

BCC: Certainly it is difficult to find silence in our world today.

AR: What do we do when we get into the car? We turn on the radio. At home we turn on the TV. I sometimes think we are afraid of the silence because something may surface which we don't want to hear.

We should realize how God's grace is there for us. The process of contemplative or meditative prayer also helps you to hear other people better. You discover through meditation that calming down and becoming silent lets you really hear what others are saying, and you can therefore be there for them in a much more profound way.