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LAURENCE FREEMAN
about our diplomatic status; we don't have to try to win the argument. Sometimes, it is people who don't win the argument who are the most eloquent.
L.M.: I am reminded of how both Charles Foucauld and Carlo Carretto gave their authentic Christian witness among Islamic groups in North Africa, though they didn't attempt to convert them.
L.F.: A few years ago we got a letter from a French priest who had been in the Arctic for many years. He was coming to the end of his career and was about to retire. And he felt he was a complete failure. In all those years, he had maybe one or two baptisms. So he was looking at his life as something that may have been wasted. Then he began to meditate in the last year or so of his work there. And he realized through that dimension of prayer, that all those years he had been witnessing he had been the presence of Christ to the people. That is really all we are called to do. We are not called to control the conversion process that is between them and the Holy Spirit. Our work is to be, as fully as we can, channels of that humble love of Christ—that humble love which Christians need to tune into more.
L.M.: I noticed on the meditation community's website that you have what you call "bed and meditation," I think it is. So are people coming to your meditation centers the way they might go to a bed and breakfast place when traveling?
L.F.: Well, the "bed and med" as we call it was started by a wonderful couple in England, Daphne and Gordon Mackenzie. He recently died on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The idea was that this would be a way of developing community among meditators. We have a lot of people who would be happy to share their house, or room, on a bed and breakfast basis with other traveling meditators. They would meditate together, of course. And it has taken off; it is a very enriching, and economical, way of traveling.
L.M.: How does meditation help us to face-help us to cultivate-the good death—as Saint Paul said of himself: "I die daily"?
L.F.: John Main, shortly before his death, gave a series of teachings on death on the role that meditation plays in preparing us for death. He was
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