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Christian Meditation
It was Father John's experience that he first learned to meditate when he was in the East, some years before he became a monk. That experience probably helped him to recognize the practicality of the teachings on prayer-that he later found in the writings of John Cassian. He was one of the great communicators of the wisdom of the desert tradition.
L.M.: In the fourth century?
L.F.: The fourth and fifth centuries. And really, he was one of the great pillars of the western spiritual, contemplative tradition. Cassian devotes two of his conferences to prayer―numbers nine and ten. The ninth is about the theory of prayer; it's a very beautiful and rich description of the nature of prayer. But he doesn't say how to do it. In the tenth conference, he actually gives a method. The method he gives is to take a phrase, which he calls a formula, in Latin, and repeat that formula incessantly, continuously. He describes the repetition of this single phrase over and over in the mind and heart--as bringing us to that poverty of spirit-which is the first of the beatitudes. Now, John Main recognized this, not just as a theory, but as an actual practice. His teaching comes directly out of the wisdom of Cassian. You will find the same tradition in many of the other great teachers, including the author of The Cloud of Unknowing.
L.M.:The anonymous, fourteenth-century English mystic. I understand that when Father John first became a Benedictine, there wasn't any knowledge of the way of the mantra in his monastery in Britain. In fact, he had first learned of the mantra through a Hindu teacher he met in the East.
L.F.: When he first became a monk in the fifties, it was still a long time before meditation would become generally known.
L.M.: It took another decade, the sixties.
L.F.: Exactly, this was before before the great era of TM-Transcendental Meditation and the Beatles, and the great influx of Eastern spirituality into the West. Most of the religious orders, including monastic orders, and all the seminaries, had effectively lost touch with that central tradition of Christian contemplative prayer. They had really got themselves restricted to mental prayer, discursive prayer, or meditation. When John Main became a monk, his
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