Waiting
Joyfully
Recently,
I visited a couple whose wedding I had officiated earlier in the year.
As they held hands and stroked her distended tummy they spoke of the
expectancy and joy of pregnancy. Something new was coming to life,
the fruit of their love together. They had some apprehensions too
but the overall feeling was one of great joy and expectancy.
Joyful expectancy is also the over all feeling of the season of Advent,
the start of the new Church Year, which begins today. The readings
for today's Mass point to different comings of Jesus. There is the
final coming of Christ in Judgment, the coming in the Eucharistic
Celebration, and there is the liturgical coming on Christmas night,
now less than a month away. We are urged to be alert and awake, to
be ready for the different ways of his coming.
Meditation is a way of being alert and ready for the Lord. It is a
form of prayer in which we do not use words or images. We just BE
in God's presence and repeat a prayer word, called a MANTRA. Christian
Meditation is described as follows by the Benedictine Monk John Main
(1926-1982); "You just sit still and upright. Close your eyes
lightly. Sit relaxed but alert. Silently, interiorly begin to say
a single word. We recommend the prayer-phrase 'MARANATHA' Recite it
as four syllables of equal length. Listen to it as you say it gently
but continuously. Do not think or imagine anything - spiritual or
otherwise. If thoughts and images come, these are not to be entertained
at the time of meditation, so keep returning to simply saying the
word. Meditate each morning and evening for between twenty and thirty
minutes."
As
we move towards the year 2,000 there is a growing concern about the
meaning of life and a growing hunger for forms of prayer that will
bring us to greater depths of self knowledge and freedom. There is
also a growing awareness that there will be a new birth in Christian
Prayer and that this will come from dialogue with the Religions of
Asia. After the death of Christ when things looked very bad for the
little group of defeated Christians that he left behind, the Gospel
was preached to the Greek world and this led to a great revitalization
of expression and practice. Something similar may be happening now.
With the recognition, by the Second Vatican Council, that God speaks
to us in all traditions, there is a greater openness to learning from
the ancient religions of Asia. The language of these religions is
Silence and this may well be the central religious language of the
future. At present the Basic Ecclesial Communities (BEC) is the official
way of being Church in the Philippines. This is a big development
in pulling God out of the sky and enabling people to experience the
workings of God in the midst of his people. The growth of meditation
groups is a sign of a further development towards recognizing and
being with the God who dwells in our hearts.
In
these reflections we will try to listen to the Spirit in the "Signs
of the times," the happenings around us. We will try week by
week to give a progressive education on meditation, especially but
not exclusively, as taught by John Main OSB. We will try each Sunday
to link up with the Gospel of the day. The Spirit that we read of
in the Scriptures is also the Spirit that we BE WITH in meditation
and they always enrich one another.
We hope that these reflections will encourage people to start meditation
groups, assured that we will be with them each week to encourage and
enlighten them on the journey. As John Main, about whom we will tell
you more in the next few weeks, used to say, "The important thing
is to start, and then to keep on keeping on." We will do this
with joyful expectancy.
Taken
from Sundays
into Silence - A Pathway to Life. Copyright © 1998 by Claretian
Publications
