John Main: Biography

Stefan Reynolds

JOHN MAIN 1926-1982.

The mystical tradition has its source in a God who makes him/herself known through human experience. There is a great richness and variety as the experience of God takes shape within particular lives and historical epochs. The ‘Word’ is constantly being ‘made flesh’ within the uniqueness of individuals and eras in which they lived. There is diversity but also a common thread. Tradition is passed on, it develops, and it is this that makes it a true doctrine, a living word.

The continuity and adaptability of the mystical tradition can be seen in the case of John Main. Drawing on the teaching on prayer of the early desert fathers he took monastic spirituality beyond its traditional boundaries. He showed that ‘pure prayer’ beyond thought and image was a universal calling, the birthright of all Christians and a normal flowering of baptismal grace. The purpose of the monastic channel was always to overflow its banks and make its teaching accessible to all people. The universal relevance of the monastic teaching on prayer took on a further and more expansive dimension in the relation between Christian meditation and the meditation practices of eastern religions. In the 1950’s John Main learnt the art of meditation with a mantra from a Hindu monk in Malaya and later discovered the Christian tradition of meditation in the Conferences of the desert fathers recorded by Cassian.

John Main’s teaching on prayer was never theoretical but always a way of experience. His concern was to draw people into an encounter with God in the silent depths of their heart. In our global culture inter-religious dialogue has become very important. John Main felt that the wisdom of the monastic teaching on prayer was the practical response to the problem of human alienation and communal needs of our time. In ‘Word into Silence’ he writes that:

“The modern Christian’s mission is to resensitise our contemporaries to the presence of a spirit within themselves… Our first task, in the realisation of our own vocation and in the expansion of the kingdom among our contemporaries, is to find our own spirit because this is our lifeline with the Spirit of God… Humanity finds its own spirit fully only in the light of the One Universal Spirit.”

John Main’s emphasis on personal experience and self discovery in God as well as the clear method of prayer he uncovered for Christians made Bede Griffiths call him “the most important guide in the Church today”.

John Main’s own life journey is a parable of his teaching. Like in a labyrinth, his movement towards ‘the one thing necessary’ took him on a circuitous route. That one thing for John Main was the saying of the mantra.

He was born in 1926 in London of an Irish family. He was called Douglas; John was the name he took on entering the monastery. The Main family previously lived in Ballinskelligs on the western tip of Kerry. John Main’s Scottish grandfather had worked here setting up the first trans-Atlantic cable and where he met his wife, John Main’s grandmother. It is also an ancient monastic site within view of the Skellig rocks where the Celtic monks once lived and prayed. This spirit of the frontier, of adventure and new beginnings was to infuse John Main’s own monastic vision. John Main had a noticeably English manner and reserve, as well as a memorable sense of humour and exuberance he inherited from his close and fun loving family. The two sides of his character coexisted in rich paradox. When he later joined the Benedictines in London he said that if he joined an Irish monastery he would have lost his faith!

Douglas joined the army in the last year of the war and worked as a radiographer in the intelligence unit. Working behind enemy lines his job was to pinpoint the exact location of enemy radio signals. Later he was to use this as an analogy for the mantra. It was a time, he said, when accuracy was becoming much more possible because of the use of quartz crystal. The mantra similarly helped one to stop drifting in prayer but tune in with precision to the wavelength of Jesus, the Word or sound of God that vibrates in us and in all creation. The mantra helps us to pick up the signal of God, the prayer of Jesus in our own hearts, the frequency that puts us in contact with the Father. It’s maybe curious how this metaphor John Main used was based on picking up enemy signals, but he was known for a rather mischievous and paradoxical sense of humour. During the war for example he was with his brothers on the roof of their house in Hampstead to watch the sunset. Down below on the street was a bus stop full of evening commuters. In a loud and clear voice he called, “Bomb! Bomb!”. When the crowd quickly scattered he was impressed by the power of one little word - like the power of the mantra to dispel distractions!

One of the things John Main’s life shows is that all our experience is related to what is central. Everything that happens to us is a metaphor of who we are and why we are here. After the war Douglas Main sensed that his life experience pointed towards a vocation to religious life. He joined an Augustinian religious Order, the Cannons Regular, and went to study in Rome. However the stuffiness and misogyny he encountered there put him off. All his life Douglas was close to his mother and sisters.

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