Tap into a deep spring of love, joy and peace within; a ‘living water’,
Jesus said, with which we will never thirst
Meditation in the Christian tradition is offered on Wednesdays at 5.30pm in the Church Hall, St Peter’s Eastern Hill, 15 Gisborne Street, Melbourne. The Deep Spring Centre at St Peter’s has been established by the World Community for Christian Meditation (WCCM) in Victoria, and is facilitated by long-time meditator Roland Ashby. See his article below.
Deep Spring Centre’s online community meets via Zoom on Tuesdays at 7.30pm.
All are welcome. For more information email Roland Ashby at: editor@thelivingwater.com.au
Deep Spring Centre for Contemplation and Action
Living Water and Deep Spring Centre for Christian Meditation are part of Deep Spring
Centre for Contemplation and Action. For more information about its offerings, including Lectio Divina (an ancient form of meditation on Scripture) and Eco-Spirituality Meditation and Mindfulness, see https://www.deepspringcontemplationcentre.net/
Tapping into a deep spring of love within
By Roland Ashby
In the Parable of the Prodigal Son, (Luke 15: 11-32), Jesus portrays God as pure, undiluted, unconditional love. Meditation is a way to find this God, this love, within.
When we tap into this deep spring of love, joy and peace, this ‘living water’, as Jesus called it, at the centre of our being in meditation, our hearts are broken open and we see with new eyes of compassion and understanding. We are filled with a desire to serve others, and to seek justice, healing and well being for all, and for the earth. This is the Christ mind, or Christ consciousness.
Mantra meditation
The Deep Spring Centre, which is run by the World Community for Christian Meditation in Victoria, offers mantra meditation.
Mantra meditation is not new to the Christian tradition. In the latter half of the 20th century Irish Benedictine monk John Main discovered that it was indeed a long-established tradition in the Church, going back to one of the Desert Fathers, St John Cassian, in the fourth century, who advocated the repetition of a short phrase, or mantra, when praying. His teaching had a formative influence on St Benedict and the foundation of Western monasticism.
John Main’s life and teachings led to the setting up of the World Community for Christian Meditation (WCCM).
Bede Griffiths OSB said of John Main’s teaching: “I do not know of any better method of meditation leading to the experience of the love of God in Christ than that of John Main.”
Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has also said that, “John Main effectively put the desert tradition of prayer to work in our own day. The World Community for Christian Meditation which continues his mission is for me, as for many throughout the world, a taste of what a committedly contemplative church might look and feel like.”
We are living in dark times. Division, hate, violence, rampant consumerism and greed, scandal, corruption, abuse of power, populist and divisive leaders, and the effects of global warming are part of our daily diet of news.
The need for contemplative wisdom and consciousness is urgent. Without a change in consciousness, the future for humanity, and the whole of creation, looks bleak.
The Deep Spring Centre believes a change to a more contemplative consciousness can offer a more hopeful future. This consciousness has at its core what theologian and Anglican Solitary Maggie Ross calls “Deep Mind”, which in Christian terms is an encounter with the Holy Spirit. This is the fount of love, grace, wisdom, care for others and all of creation, forgiveness and healing, unity and reconciliation, and life-giving creativity.
Getting in touch with this Deep Mind is what 20th Century mystic and trappist monk Thomas Merton called returning to the Source, which is reminiscent of the Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15: 11-32). What joy there is when we return to the Father, the Source, who is ever-watchful for our return, waiting with eager longing to run to us, and embrace us with infinite love and compassion.
Merton says that as we are made in God’s image, love is the reason for our existence, because God is love. And therefore, he says, “if we do anything or say anything or know anything that is not purely for the love of God, it cannot give us peace, or rest, or fulfilment or joy”.
This is an echo of St Augustine, who said our hearts are restless until they rest in God.
And how are we to return to the Source, how are to find this love of God? We must, Merton says, “enter the sanctuary where it is hidden, which is the mystery of God”.
Returning to the Source was the key motivator for the Desert Fathers and Mothers, the Abbas and Ammas of the 3-5th Centuries, in seeking the solitude and silence of the desert. These early Christian contemplatives were dismayed by both the decadence of the time and also Emperor Constantine’s embrace of Christianity as the Roman State’s official religion, with the inevitable compromise and corruption of the Gospel’s radical message and way of life this entailed.
This desire to return to the Source, and the primacy of love, is beautifully encapsulated in the following story: “Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, ‘Abba, as far as I can I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace and as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do? Then the old man stood up and stretched his hands towards heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, ‘If you will, you can become all flame.’”
In this and other sayings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, what we find, Merton says, is a “repeated insistence of the primacy of love over everything else in the spiritual life... Love in fact is the spiritual life, and without it all the other exercises of the spirit, however lofty, are emptied of content and become mere illusions.”
The 20th century theologian Karl Rahner famously said that the future Christian will either be a mystic or not exist. Of course it depends on what he meant by mystic, but his understanding of the term might well have resonated with the definition offered by Maggie Ross: a mystic is someone who lives the ordinary through transfigured perception.
In my experience the profoundest way to transfigured perception has been through silent contemplation: particularly through meditation using a mantra.
In my 20 years as a meditator, I have found meditation to be life-giving and life-changing, a deep spring of love, joy and peace, in which I have both found that I am loved and forgiven, and can also find the power to love and forgive others. Meditation has also expanded my capacity for compassion, and filled me with a desire to be a compassionate activist, indeed contemplative activist, in the world.
John Main’s genius was to open up the mystery of the inner sanctuary, through his discovery and revitalising of a tradition of mantra meditation within our own Christian tradition, and by showing us the way to the Source through a simple daily discipline of attuning to the power of love at the centre of our being.
For more information about John Main and mantra meditation, see ‘Attuning to the power of love at the centre of our being’ at:
https://www.thelivingwater.com.au/christian-meditation
For more information about the World Community for Christian Meditation see:
https://wccmaustralia.org.au/
https://wccm.org/
The most important thing to know in life is that God is, that God is love, and that meditation can be a direct and powerful way to know this.
John Main OSB