Conferences IX & X - On Prayer

John Cassian

Summary of Main Points - cont.

Many felt his temperament somewhat authoritarian but John Main was never life denying and was always open to others. Later on he was to teach that deep prayer leads to fullness of life; this was the real ‘religious life’, one that was open to all people. On his return from Rome he studied law at Trinity College in Dublin. One feels that he revelled in the paradox of being a very English Irishman and a Catholic in a Protestant college. The boundaries of nationality, denomination and even religious faith were never a prison of identity for John Main but a rich part of the play of life.

On graduation John Main took a job with the British Colonial Service in the Far East. It was a time when colonies were being given their independence. Douglas Main would have revelled in this, politically he was always socialist and as an Irishman never sympathetic to British imperialism. He must have enjoyed the paradox of lending his skills to the process of political independence in Asia. He was sent to Malaysia.

One day Douglas was sent on an official visit to thank a certain Swami Saccidananda for his work running an Ashram and Orphanage outside Kuala Lumpur. Douglas was impressed by the holiness, the energy of joy and the deeply centred nature of the monk. They got to talking about prayer:

Saccidananda: “Do you pray?”
Douglas: “Yes”
Saccidananda: “How?”
Douglas: “Well, I read a piece of Scripture, I reflect on it, ask God to speak to me through it, make some resolution and try to apply that in my life”.
(Comment: This is what we would call ‘discursive’ prayer).
Saccidananda: “That is very good.”
Douglas: “How do you pray?”
Saccidananda: “We pray slightly differently. We don’t think, we come to an inner silence”.
(Comment: And here the Swami quoted from the Upanishads):
“The spirit of the One who creates the Universe dwells in the human heart and in silence is loving to all”.
Douglas: “How do you come to this inner silence?”
(Comment: Douglas Main found here an echo of his own faith. The maturity of his faith is shown in that he responded with a ‘how’ not a ‘what’, practice not theory).
Saccidananda: “It is difficult, there are distractions, the mind is like a tree full of chattering monkeys, to clear a way through the jungle we take a single word, a Mantra, and repeat it ceaselessly in our mind and heart, giving it our full attention.”
Douglas: “Could you teach me as a Christian to meditate?”
Saccidananda: “Certainly, it would make you a better Christian. Try to meditate every day, twice a day, half an hour in the morning, half an hour in the evening and we can meditate together at the end of every week.”
(Comment: As a Christian we often see the form of prayer as restricted to a particular religion, prayer for the Swami however was a universal human response to the mystery of life. It is a testament to Douglas Main’s ability to cross boundaries – ten years before the openness of Vatican II – that he felt able and willing to take this ‘Hindu’ practice up, presumably taking a Christian Mantra.)
Douglas: “How long will this take?”
Saccidananda: “As long as it takes you to say the Mantra.”
Douglas: “What happens next?”
Saccidananda: “There is no next. Say your mantra.”
Douglas: “What about posture? What about distractions? What about insights?”
Saccidananda: “Sit still. Sit upright (there is no need to sit cross legged!). Say the Mantra. Listen to it as a sound within you. Give it your full attention. Let everything else go. It will lead you into the silence of oneness with God”.

Thirty years on, when teaching meditation from his own Christian tradition John Main said that he always came back to the wisdom, the simplicity, the purity of the teaching he received in the East. On his return from Malaysia, having done himself out of a job at the granting of independence, he taught International Law at Trinity College, Dublin. He enjoyed his work and friends and the cultural (especially musical) life of the city and he kept up his meditation practice. This was at a time long before the Maharishi and the Beatles had made meditation known. It was a solitary path. When he talked about it to religious friends and priests meditation was greeted with complete incomprehension, even suspicion. The fact that he persevered shows the depth to which the teaching he received had affected him.

At the age of thirty five however two things happened that made him reassess life. Firstly, he fell in love. Diana Ernselsteen was a childhood friend of all the Main family, yet for Douglas it was a friendship that was blossoming into love. He asked Diana to marry him. She said yes. However later she changed her mind. John Main remembered later a moment when he and Diana were praying together in a Church in Dublin about their marriage and, he said, it seemed to dawn on Diana that it wasn’t meant to be. They remained friends throughout John Main’s life. The Main family never treated the relationship as more than a friendship but for Douglas it was a turning point. Deeper than the heartbreak of any rejection he may have felt was the realisation that he was not called to marriage. The love he felt called to would need to be expressed in another way. It was a painful moment. At the same time he was faced with another loss. The husband of his sister Yvonne was killed in the war and Douglas had helped to bring up his two nephews. He felt like a father to them and they lived close to him in Dublin. However at the age of eleven one of them developed a brain tumour. Douglas cancelled all work and stayed by the boy’s bed for two weeks until he died.

These encounters with loss and death led Douglas Main to reassess the direction of his life. He realised that his meditation practice was the most important thing for him; he wanted to centre his life on that. The old sense of vocation to religious life returned and he decided to try to be a monk. Part of the letting go he felt called to was to let go of his beloved Dublin, work, family, friends, and to move back to London. At the age of thirty three he applied to join Ealing Abbey. There, at the interview with the novice master, he spoke of his meditation practice. But the words ‘Swami’ and ‘Mantra’ were greeted with suspicion. “This is not Christian prayer”, he was told; “You should follow the Benedictine way”. John Main later wryly observed that this meant the Jesuit way of prayer – using the imagination to pray scripture. “Imagination”, John Main was later to say (somewhat cheekily), “is the great enemy of prayer”. Still he accepted his novice masters advice wanting to commit fully to monastic life and obedience.

Giving up meditation was the beginning of a long desert of prayer for the newly professed John Main. However, remembering this time in later years, he said he was grateful that he had learnt detachment from what was the most important thing for him. When he was to come back to meditation twelve years later, conscious of its Christian tradition, it was “on God’s terms not on my own”. His practice had been interrupted but he felt he had never left it. He found his life as a monk rewarding in many other ways. He was sent to Rome to study at the time of Vatican II and was greatly enthusiastic about the changes that tallied well with his adventurous, generous and life loving temperament. The Church was no longer a fortress of fixed identity but a pilgrim people journeying to God. There was a new openness to relating to the world.
On his return from Rome John Main worked in the school at Ealing. However he, along with the then headmaster proposed some reforms that were considered too radical by many of the other monks – among them the opening of the school to girls, non-Catholics and children of other faiths. In the fallout John Main was sent to a sister monastery in Washington DC to do further studies and reflect. His leadership qualities though were soon evident and he was asked to become headmaster of the school there.

It was right at this busy time when John Main was raising money, reorganising and running the school that there was another major turning point in his life. For years the primary focus of his prayer had been the singing of psalms and the celebration of Mass. However a young student came to visit the monastery. He had been travelling in India had got interested in meditation and was asking about Christian Mysticism. John Main was asked to advise him (he was later to comment how interesting it is that turning points of our lives often come through moments of obedience – doing something we don’t want to do but have been asked to do). Anyway John Main was busy and tried to frighten the boy off by advising him to read the seventeen century book on Benedictine spirituality ‘Holy Wisdom’ by Augustine Baker. This profound but dense work was rarely read by the monks. To John Main’s surprise the boy came back a week later full of excitement: “This is great,” he said, “it is all about meditation, all this stuff about the Desert Fathers”. John Main felt his own spiritual impoverishment and read Baker himself. Baker led him to Cassian, and there amongst the conferences of the Desert Fathers John Main discovered the Mantra again:

“Take the formula (Oh God come to my aid…) and revolve it ceaselessly in the heart so that all the riches of imagination can be let go of, so we can come with ready ease to that first of the beatitudes; blessed are the poor in spirit”.

John Main began to meditate again, now conscious of the Christian tradition of silent prayer beyond thought and image. The whole experience led him to a reassessment of monastic identity. What is the particular form of education monasteries are there for? He came to realise it was to teach contemplation. After the school project at Washington was in place, he returned to Ealing and in 1974 founded a house for laymen in the grounds. This was to host the first meditation group. His vision of a contemplative renewal of monastic life was popular with many of the monks. After a very close abbatial election he was not elected Abbot and in 1977 was given permission to accept an invitation from the Archbishop of Montreal, Canada to found a monastic priory there based around meditation. Laurence Freeman, who had been at Ealing School, was later a part of the laymen community and then novice at the monastery, was to be his companion in the foundation.

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