Monk and mystic John Main.
Benedictine monk and mystic John Main (1926-1982) was a key figure in the revival of Christian meditation. Professor Bernard McGinn, widely regarded as the preeminent scholar of mysticism in Western Christianity, reflects on Main’s contribution to our understanding of how meditation can open us to the infinite love of God.
I have been reading John Main’s books for many years and recently also been listening to his tapes. For decades my wife Pat and I have practised John Main’s style of inner prayer, though in an adapted way within the context of our liturgical morning and evening prayer, which we in an old-fashioned way speak of as Lauds and Vespers. I want to begin my brief reflections, however, by saying something about what I think are John Main’s major contributions to contemporary spirituality.
I see John Main as one of the most important figures in the modern revival of contemplative prayer, though he himself most often used the word “meditation.” Both “contemplation” and “meditation” have ancient roots in the history of Christianity. At times they have been used as synonyms; at other times, different teachers have distinguished between them. John Main most often spoke of “meditation,” but he did not shy away from “contemplation.” Just to give one example, I point to the chapter on “Contemplation and Action” in The Way of Unknowing, where we read, “Every Christian is called to live the contemplative dimension of the Christ-vision” (p. 128).
I think both meditation and contemplation can be used interchangeably to point to forms of inner prayer that go beyond words and formulae, that do not concentrate on inner images of the life of Jesus and the truths of the Christian faith (important as these forms of prayer are), but rather, seek the experience of unity—“unity within yourself, body and spirit, unity with all creation” (ibid., 68), and finally unity with God.
John Main, like Meister Eckhart, is uncompromising in his opposition to images in the higher stages of the life of prayer. If we become preoccupied with images, especially images of ourselves and our progress, we will miss the mark. Again I cite The Way of Unknowing (p. 40): “If we used the time of meditation to satisfy [our hunger for self-analysis], we would fail to meet our deepest need, which is for unity. The essence of meditation is taking the attention off ourselves and looking forward, beyond ourselves, into the mystery of God; of traveling beyond ourselves, into his love, into union.”
These quotations suggest for me the central truth about Main’s teaching that first attracted me to reading him. Let me put it this perhaps surprising way: John Main does not teach us how to pray, but rather teaches us how not to pray. If we think of prayer, as I once did, as something we do toward God, an activity of submission, or respectful petition of God, the concentration is on the self—on what we are doing, and how we are getting on with it. Are we doing OK? Are we falling short? That is not real prayer for John Main. True prayer is letting go of the self, especially our terrible worry about how we are performing. Prayer should not be a question of us doing things, but rather of us opening ourselves up, leaving the self behind and allowing God to take over.
In other words, prayer is allowing God to pray in us. Again, I cite just one passage among many from Main: “When you begin to meditate, the less you think about God, the less you talk about God, the better. Be unconditionally open to his gift. His gift is your own personhood” (The Way of Unknowing, 16).
This is why silence and stillness are such an important part of John Main’s teaching and discipline. Silence, of course, is one of the most ancient spiritual disciplines, not only in Christianity, but in many other religions, not least Hinduism and Buddhism, and the ancient Greco-Roman mystery cults. It is also found throughout the Bible. In the Psalms we read the wonderful verse, “Be still and know that I am God” (Ps. 45:11). In the New Testament we find the mysterious passage in Apocalypse 8:1 where at the opening of the seventh seal there is silence in heaven for half an hour.
The silence of the ancient desert Fathers, especially as brought to theological expression in Basil, Cassian, Augustine, Benedict, and so many others, makes it a central Christian virtue, and not just for monks. Silence is mentioned everywhere in Christian mystical literature, although there are surprising few systematic treatments (one of them is by the so-called mystical heretic, Miguel de Molinos, in his Spiritual Guide).
John Main has an especially rich treatment of silence. In the chapter “Stillness” in The Way of Unknowing (pp. 82-84), he insists on only two things at the outset. The first is “the faithful recitation of the mantra,” the second is “the necessity for stillness.” As he puts it: “Stillness is the way to rootedness and it focuses the challenge that faces us all, to be rooted in our true self … Stillness helps us to be rooted in the gift that God has given us in our own being, which we learn by being still in one place.” Main insists that as long as we are making noise, especially the noise of our prayers, we cannot hear God—or better, God cannot hear himself praying in the essential stillness of his divine nature.
All the books of John Main that I know are filled with praise of silence and stillness. To stay with The Way of Unknowing, we can look at the chapter on “The Discipline of Silence,” where he says, “The quality that everyone of us needs most urgently is silence. We must simply learn how to be silent and how to remain in silence … Make no mistake about it, the silence that each of us is summoned to enter is the eternal silence of God” (p. 54). In another place Main puts it this way: “In order to realize our complete incorporation into the Word, we have not only to listen to its silence, the silence within us, but also to allow the cycle of its life to be completed in us and to lead us into the depth of its silence. There in the silence of the Word we share His experience of hearing Himself eternally spoken by the Father” (Word into Silence).
I have been especially intrigued with Main’s teaching about the two forms of silence found in meditation. At the outset of The Way of Unknowing he has a chapter on “God’s Two Silences” (p. 5-8). These are first, the silence of presence, revelation, and love, and second, the silence of absence and loss.
Regarding the first kind, Main says: “God calls us from the very beginning, speaking the Word when the time is ripe. So, the silence of God is, from the first human experience of it, pregnant with love, pregnant with power.” Hence, in meditating we encounter the vibrant presence of God’s love.
Main goes on, however: “There is also another silence of God that we could describe as his testing of us. It is a magisterial silence.” This silence of loss teaches us that we must never become possessive of God. Both kinds of silence are necessary. “One of the things we learn through meditation,” he says, “ …is to be equally content with either of these forms of silence, with the infinite sense of his presence and the finite sense of his absence.”
Yet Main allows: “We haven’t reached the stage where we can be equally content with absence as with presence … We are always looking for our meditation to satisfy us … The purpose of the second form of silence, his absence, is to purify us so that we learn to love God selflessly as he loves us (and himself).”
The end of this brief chapter summarizes the message about the two kinds: “The two silences are both of them equally powerful in teaching us: the silence of revelation fills us with wonder and the silence of absence teaches us fidelity. The Word is present in both.”
Finally, I would like to note just one other aspect of John’s Main teaching about silence. Main’s insistence on the use of the mantra (especially the New Testament Maranatha) has been questioned by some as a Buddhist, or Hindu intrusion into true Christian piety. This objection has weight only for those who have never read the masters of Christian prayer and piety like Cassian and the Cloud author.
Such simple prayer formulae (sometimes called “monologistic”) have been part of Christianity from the beginning as a way of focusing the attention, of rejecting distractions, and of centering the soul in the reality of God and not the self. And yet they are still a way—a means, not the goal. God is always the goal. Main makes this perfectly clear in a passage from Word into Silence (pp. 54-55): “Meditation is in essence the art of concentration precisely because, the higher we toil up the mountainside, the fainter becomes the mantra sounding in the valley below us, and the more attentively and seriously we have to listen to it. There then comes the day when we enter that ‘cloud of unknowing’ in which there is silence, absolute silence, and we can no longer hear the Mantra.”
John Main had read many mystics and pondered a number of the spiritual masters. Nevertheless, he was not a scholar of mysticism in the usual sense. He was that much rarer person—a true mystical teacher, one who absorbed much from the teachers of the past, such as John Cassian, Meister Eckhart, and the Cloud author (to name but a few), and then recast and refined what he had found into the mold of his own original teaching. In that sense, Main’s insights are both new and old, like the householder of the gospel, who brings out “things new and old from his storehouse” (Mt. 13:52).
Much of what he had to say echoes the common teaching of the tradition of Christian prayer, but he says it in a new way that speaks to contemporary people who long to find a deeper prayer life, one which does not imprison them in their own subjectivity, but opens them out to the infinite love of God. That is the reason that John Main must be numbered among the true “Modern Mystics.”
The Rev’d Dr Bernard McGinn is Emeritus Professor, University of Chicago Divinity School. His numerous books include ‘The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism,’ (Crossroads Publishing) and ‘The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism.’ (Random House).
John Main’s teaching led to the creation of the World Community for Christian Meditation. See: www.wccm.org
Roland Ashby, contributing editor of Living Water, will be leading a six-day silent retreat on meditation and mindfulness in the Christian tradition at The Abbey, Raymond Island, Victoria, 26-31 October. For more details and registration see: https://www.trybooking.com/events/landing/1322889