Wednesday, January 24, 2018

Freedom and Frankness

We are reading a lot of John Main lately, and look to continue for quite a while.  He is not as widely known as some contemporary teachers, but Elizabeth and I find him to be a rare soul, full of love, and a guide on our road of new forms of community.  He left England to found a Benedictine priory in Montreal, in which they shared the practice of mantra meditation along with the traditional Benedictine life.  He died too soon, in 1982, and the priory eventually closed, but his successor continued to build the network.  Today it is the World Community for Christian Meditation.  Check it out at http://wccm.org.

Today I read these words:
"As our society becomes increasingly less religious its need for the authentically spiritual intensifies.  Religion is the sacred expression of the spiritual but if the spiritual experience is lacking then the religious form becomes hollow and superficial and self-important. . .

How often does the violence with which men [sic] assert or defend their beliefs betray an attempt to convince themselves that they do really believe or that their beliefs are authentic?  The spectre of our actual unbelief can be so frightening that we can be plunged into extreme, self-contradictory ways of imposing our beliefs on others rather than simply, peacefully, living them ourselves.

When religion begins to bully or to insinuate, it has become unspiritual because the first gift of the Spirit, creatively moving in man's [sic] nature, is freedom and frankness."

May you be blessed with that Spirit today.

(Source: John Main: a selection of his writing, ed. Clare Hallward.  Springfield IL:  Templegate.)

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