Many in the Diocese of Waterford and Lismore found the Church to be a beacon of hope. Mindful Living
We have been exploring the depth of meaning in the John Main prayer which we say before meditation. The prayer is very simple and reads ‘Heavenly Father, open our hearts to the silent presence of the spirit of your son. Lead us into that mysterious silence where your love is revealed to all who call’.
I love its simplicity and clear focus. The prayer itself is not a mental or discursive prayer but a deep cry of the heart that we might be awakened to the reality of the present moment; that we might discover how intimately we are linked to the presence of God in whom we live and move and have our being.
The thing that we have to face is that life is as simple as this. We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and God is shining through it all the time”
The Christian meditation community also has a closing prayer for meditation which is used by some meditation groups. By comparison, it is much less concise and more verbose. For that reason, I have written a very short closing prayer which is closer in theme and style to John Main’s opening prayer. It reads: ‘Lord, may our hearts remain open to your presence and guide us to love like you’.
While the opening prayer asks God to lead us into the mysterious, silent presence of his son, we have seen that the request is not for a brief insight limited to the period of meditation but that we should be awakened to the fact that God is ever-present in our lives. It is we, who, through our business and our continual focus on the small, separate, egoic self rather than the true-self, lose sight of the bigger picture. Teilhard de Chardin expressed it as follows: “We are not human beings on a spiritual journey. Rather, we are spiritual beings on a human journey.” Thomas Merton was even more poetic: “The thing that we have to face is that life is as simple as this. We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and God is shining through it all the time. This is not just a fable or a nice story, it is true.” The practice of meditation helps to awaken us to the truth of this and helps us to appreciate how human life can be utterly changed if enough people lived their lives knowing this to be true.
The short closing prayer I am recommending asks that our hearts would remain open to God’s presence in our lives and that this awareness would guide us to love like Jesus. It prays that our faithfulness to our daily meditation would help us to put on the mind of Christ and to live life as he would wish us to do. While we can never come to know God fully in this world, our faith encourages us to live with an ever-deepening and abiding awareness of the presence of God in our lives every day. It is the task of a lifetime to figure out how to realise our full humanity as we strive to respond to the circumstances and events of our lives after the example of Jesus.
That is why the second half of the closing prayer asks that our open hearts would guide us to love like him. What does it mean to act like Christ, to love as he would, in the world today? How are we to love our neighbour following the example and teaching of Jesus? This is not a matter of creed but of ‘credo’. Creed has come to mean giving intellectual assent to a set of doctrines and dogma formulated by the fathers (and mothers) of the Church. But ‘credo’ points instead to a heartfelt response to the call to become like Jesus. The theologian Karen Armstrong reminds us that ‘credo’ derives from the Latin phrase ‘Cor do’ which means ‘I give my heart’; so its original meaning is closer to ‘trust; commitment; engagement; involvement’ rather than creed.
Meditation helps to bring about the personal transformation which leads to such a mind-set. It frees us from our conditioning and from the tendency, which we all have, to react rather than respond. The fruit of meditation, of all contemplative prayer, is contemplative action in daily life. As Mother Teresa of Calcutta said: “If you pray without serving your prayer is in vain; if you serve without praying your service is in vain. Go forward, pray and serve in the power of the Holy Spirit.”
Lord, may our hearts remain open to your presence and guide us to love like you”
We are called to respond with compassion to the myriad situations we encounter in life; not to react out of our conditioning but to respond as each situation calls for. We are called to be like the Good Samaritan. What distinguished him from the others in that parable was that he saw clearly. The priest and the Levite were blinded by their conditioning, perhaps by their religious conditioning, but the Samaritan saw clearly the suffering before him and was aroused to respond with compassion and kindness.
And that is why the closing prayer for meditation that I offer you today reads: ‘Lord, may our hearts remain open to your presence and guide us to love like you.’ It challenges us to live our lives informed by our deepest connection and communion with God.