Who am I, to
question the prayer of the World Community for Christian Meditation, a global
movement present in 100 countries? However, even if I’m seen as a quisling or
turncoat, I have to say that as a lay Carmelite member of a Christian
Meditation group I now have serious doubts about this method of prayer. ‘Im
indoors says I’m in good company – Richard Dawkins’.
I joined CM to
support people wanting deeper prayer, and for a while I was hooked. CM is ecumenical,
simple, accessible; I thought it was the best thing since sliced bread. Now I believe
my initial graces flowed simply from a resolution to adopt CM’s twice-daily prayer
routine: as Woody Allen has said, ‘showing up is half the work’. Then I began
to think I was showing up at the wrong address.
I was
discombobulated by CM’s claim to have retrieved from 4th century obscurity
a prayer practised by Carmelites for the past eight hundred years. Recorded
talks by CM’s founder John Main and his successor Laurence Freeman told us week
in, week out to ‘say your mantra’; it sounded like to get God’s attention that was
all we had to do.
CM is Hindu
in everything except intention, and abolishes all distinctions between styles
and stages of silent prayer. You ‘say your mantra’ (an effectively meaningless
word) until you can’t say it - when God supposedly intervenes, infusing
contemplation - and recommence when you realise you’ve stopped. Never mind traditional
prerequisities for receiving contemplation like conformity to God’s will, humility,
service, generosit y, purification, penance, receptivity, solitude,
determination; just ‘say your mantra’. Was this a prayer word, I wondered, or a
god?
John
Cassian, a disciple of the desert fathers, was ‘discovered’ by Main as the Christian
authority he needed for the meditation he’d learned from a swami, but on
becoming a monk had obediently abandoned. The prayer which Cassian (who incidentally
is to be found, quoted, in the Divine Office) had learned from one Abbot Isaac is ejaculatory, continuous
prayer, not reserved to periods of meditation. Detachment (in essence, the
conditions given above for contemplation) was essential for such prayer, which ‘we
hand on only to a very small number of souls eager to know it’: a principle
reiterated in The Cloud of Unknowing (oft-quoted
by CM), by Doctors of the Church Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross.
But CM is
taught to allcomers – thousands, maybe millions - in the pious belief that regardless
of their spiritual state, the Holy Spirit fetches them there and sits them down
to repeat a meaningless word while emptying their minds of everything,
including Jesus Christ- who taught that ‘no one comes to the Father except
through me’ (Jn 14,6). And astonishingly, should the Spirit offer them the blissful
experience of God’s love, they ought to refuse it.
To CM’s theory
of ‘one size fits all’, we may cite contrary, incontrovertible evidence:
‘Strait is the way, and few are they who find it!’( Mt 8,14).
