On a frosty morning recently, parked
in my car with the motor running to keep the heater on while changing my
jacket, and still in drive mode with the brake off, I goofed, bigtime. My right
foot inadvertently hit the accelerator. Hard. And I drove my Honda Jazz Sports
up the church steps.
I exaggerate, of course - hyperbole
was ever my long suit. I drove up one step. My reaction was to reverse smartly,
switch off the engine and bury my face in my hands.
‘Im indoors, who for once was
outdoors, round the corner watching our grandson the mighty Quin play soccer,
surveyed the crumpled front fender and the sinister pool beneath, and kissed me.
My friend the sacristan cried, ’Aha!
‘Old Lady Drives Into Shop’!’
Our dear P P, emerging from the
presbytery, said fervently, ‘How embarrassing!’
Hmmm. I felt for ‘im indoors, who’d
be sharing his car with his high-risk wife and shelling out once more to the
panelbeaters, and for my pious poodle who’d be missing daily Mass, or rather
the church carpark, for however long it took; ‘im indoors doesn’t believe in
dogs in cars. But I wasn’t embarrassed. Why not?
For one thing, I’ve had lots of
practice at being humiliated - by playing the organ at Mass for example, rather
badly. Humiliations willingly accepted are a necessary evil, revealing our true
selves as devoid of any good not given by God, and dependent on him for
everything except the lamentable inclination to sin. The other reason I can poke
fun at myself in this column or my blog, I believe, is the humbling effect of contemplation,
and the key to that door is found in the practice of Christian Meditation.
In Christian Meditation, a prayer
of silence, stillness and simplicity, the Spirit joins us to Christ’s prayer to
the Father. The term ‘meditation’ linked with ‘mantra’ may invoke images of maharishis
performing asanas in the dhoti, but was usurped by CM in the ‘60s presumably as
a godly alternative to the transcendental variety glamorised by the Beatles.
It’s hardly a come-on for people versed in the Catholic vernacular of deeper
prayer, so when an inter-faith CM group started here I approached warily, hoping
only to accompany anyone eager to join the search for ‘the pearl of great
price’.
I discovered that CM’s founder,
John Main OSB, didn’t differentiate between meditation (humanly produced, by thinking)
and contemplation (which is divinely infused). But Main’s ‘mantra’ is a ‘prayer
word’ originating with the Desert Fathers, being essentially what Teresa of
Avila calls ‘one of the best ways of concentrating the mind’, leading to prayer
of the heart, the grace of contemplation. And Main’s successor, Laurence
Freeman OSB, says that progression is best accelerated by ‘little acts of
kindness’ – a dumbed-down, modern equivalent of Teresa’s insistence on ‘intense
practice of the virtues’.
Christian Meditation is a question
of the chicken and the egg. It effects change, which effects deeper prayer. It’s how we go to God.
