The Roots of Christian Mysticism Session 22
Summary of Stefan Reynolds's "John Main" talk, The London Christian Meditation Centre, St Mark's, Clerkenwell, 02 May 2006

Introduction

Like Bede Griffiths John Main was important for the meeting of East and West. The Christian mystical tradition today understands itself in relation to other forms of the wisdom tradition in the world. John Main originally learnt meditation from a Hindu monk in Malaya before he rediscovered it in the Christian tradition. He is also important for understanding the call to contemplative prayer as a universal call not only crossing religious boundaries but also not just for the professed religious but also for the laity. His vision was of a contemplative renewal of the Church by lay people and a return to the per-institutional church when people met in private houses.

John Main’s great inspiration was John Cassian. Cassian collected the Sayings of the Desert Fathers from the East and started his own monastery in Marseilles. Benedict was very influenced by him, advising his monks in his Rule to read the Conferences of Cassian. So like John Main Cassian was a bridge between East and West.

Also like Cassian John Main is not a theoretical mystic. He does not create a great system of mystical thought. His view was that we do not learn about prayer by reading books about prayer but by practising it. There is some theology in John Main but it is always there to prepare us for the encounter with God. His is a theology of love (Human love as a paradigm for our relation with God.)

Bede Griffiths regarded John Main as the most important guide in the church of his day.

Life

John Main was born in 1926 into an Irish family. His grandfather was Scottish and had gone to Kerry to set up a transatlantic cable. He settled in Ballinskelligs. His parents had moved to London before John was born. He was born Douglas. He went to the Westminster Cathedral Choir School. In the last year of the war he joined the army and went behind enemy lines in France. He was with the signalmen who were intercepting enemy radio signals. He uses this experience in his talks. The signals were very difficult to block but if you had some quartz crystal you could tune in more finely. He later compared this to the mantra which enabled the fuzzy focus to become more accurate. Later he spoke about prayer as picking up the signal of God. Jesus is the frequency of God. This radio imagery comes in a lot and is a good example of the close connection between our everyday lives and the articulation of our spiritual experience.

After the war he began to think that he had a religious vocation. He went to join the Canons Regular in Rome. He did not like it largely because of what he perceived as their disrespectful attitude towards women. He studied law in Dublin and then went to join the British Colonial Administrative Service to help the British hand over their Empire. He was a Socialist all his life so he was glad to help the hand-over. When he was in Malaya in this connection he met a Hindu monk. John Main was immediately struck by the joy, peace and holiness of the man. In their meeting the monk quoted from the Upanishads, “the spirit is the one who creates the universe, dwells within the human heart and in silence is loving to all.” John Main said this phrase had a big impact on him. He often used it in his talks.

John Main came back to Europe and taught law for some years. He felt a calling to the monastic life. This was triggered by the death of a nephew (aged 12 years) from a brain tumour and by a proposal of marriage which he had made that was rejected.

He went to the Ealing monastery. Whilst in Dublin teaching law he had kept his meditation practice going. At Ealing he told his novice master about this way of prayer and was told it was not Christian prayer and he should go back to traditional Benedictine prayer (which at that time was Ignatian!). John Main gave up meditating when he joined the monastery. When he came back to meditation twelve years later the whole experience was seen as positive because he came back on God’s terms to meditation so although the practice was interrupted there was a purification of the practice because he left it under obedience.

He was in Rome at the time of Vatican II. He was Father Lawrence’s teacher at St. Benedict’s School in Ealing. In 1965 he became headmaster in Washington. A young student came to see him and asked him about Christian mysticism. John Main gave him a book of Augustine Baker (a seventeenth century writer on the desert tradition. His book Holy Wisdom shows that he wrote in a convoluted way.) The student, far from being put off, returned excited . This caused John Main to re-read Augustine Baker which led him to Cassian and the discovery that there was a tradition of Christian meditation. He started meditating again. This was a time of monastic renewal with Thomas Merton. After Merton died John Main went on retreat to Merton’s hermitage and there felt strongly he was called to teach this meditation. Merton had paved the way. John Main considered that monasteries had moved away from their purpose which was contemplative.

He did not continue as headmaster but returned to Ealing and began a house for lay men where Father Lawrence joined him. This was the first meditation group and the year was 1974. In 1977 he was invited to go to Montreal to set up a new form of monasticism with Father Lawrence. He was diagnosed with cancer in 1980 and after just five years in Montreal he died in 1982. The community in Montreal became a real centre of the renewal of monastic life. In his book Community of Love he writes about how he thought monastic life should be. Unlike Merton he did not write much. He was primarily a teacher. All his other books are transcripts of his talks.

Some years later the Worldwide Community for Christian Meditation was founded.

John Main’s Teaching
(1) A lot of teaching on prayer especially in the early monastic tradition was oral, passed down from teacher to disciple. The practice of meditation was taught in monasteries but was not often written down. What John Main did was to present oral transmission of the teaching from the monasteries into the wider world. Technology has helped the transmission. Tapes of his talks have been the main way his teaching has been transmitted. There is also now a school for teachers.

(2) Oblate community. The idea that monasticism is not to be enclosed has been continued by the WCCM

John Main’s Theology of Meditation

His basic theology is that Jesus dwells within us, is in union with us. If we can tune into this frequency this will lead us to an experience of God through Christ. The prayer of Jesus in us is the Holy Spirit. We become more and more united with this, the indwelling Christ. This stream of love becomes alive within us and becomes our prayer. We become one with the prayer of Christ. It is very Christocentric yet Christ is not an object of thought. This takes away from my egocentric prayer, allowing the spirit to pray in me. A lot of his teaching comes from St.Paul’s idea of the Spirit praying within us. In his book The Present Christ John Main goes into the theology a bit more. For him theology was always secondary to practice. His practice focussed on the mantra. The way we come to an experience of God is through purity of heart. “Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.”

The mantra is not a technique but a discipline of letting go of desire. Maranatha is the mantra John Main recommended. It is good to receive a mantra. This is a beginning to going beyond the ego. The vowel sounds resonate. Stay with your word because you need to be rooted in your practice of daily meditation and the mantra needs to be rooted in you so that growth can happen. You need to say the mantra continually. Distractions are continuous so the mantra should be said from the beginning to the end of the meditation. We are not to be discouraged though when we cannot do this. Also there should be no evaluation of a meditation. There is no such thing as a good or a bad meditation. The journey is from the head to the heart. First you say the mantra in your mind. Through commitment to this it becomes rooted and you start sounding it in your whole being. By being attentive the next stage is listening to the mantra sounding in you. Then you go beyond self-consciousness into the pure silence where there is no sensation of self but a silence of ego and thought. We do not choose to stop saying it. You say it until there is no you left. If you are aware that you are on a peaceful plateau and not saying your mantra you should begin saying it again. Beware the pax pernicious!

You could say that the vows of the Benedictine monk apply to the practice. It should become a stable practice (stability). You must become obedient to your mantra (obedience) and constantly return to it (conversion).