Mindful Living
We have been exploring the John Main prayer which many people recite before their daily meditation. The prayer begins: Heavenly Father, open our hearts to the silent presence of the Spirit of your Son. In this article, I’d like to reflect on the phrase ‘to the silent presence of the Spirit of your Son’.
We are asking that our hearts be open to the silent presence of the Spirit. We are not seeking a talking presence or a mental experience but a silent presence. This clarifies and names our intention in meditation which is to simply be in God’s presence, open and vulnerable to being transformed by the experience.
My granddaughter is three years old now and I can’t tell you how many times over the last three years that she has sat on my lap, alert but resting, both of us gazing out at the garden and watching the birds feeding in the early morning light. On many of those occasions, not a word was spoken but there was deep communion between us. Love is a universal language that can be understood in silence – even by children, perhaps especially by children. Love can be experienced without being expressed in words.
Have you ever sat with a friend who was feeling low? Or perhaps your friend sat with you when you were suffering from some heavy loss or heartbreak. What is needed at such times is not words but a loving presence; a sense of being loved and supported, of being held by love. At times like those, words are neither needed nor sufficient. A silent, loving presence is all that is required.
Although meditation is in part about letting go, letting go of thoughts and images, letting go of desires and emotional reactions, although meditation is about letting go it is not about absence. We let go of those things to make room for something else, to allow love to enter the space we have cleared by letting go. This understanding is captured beautifully in the poem ‘Come Home to Yourself’ from the book Mesiter Eckhart’s Book of Secrets by Jon Sweeny and Mark Burrows. The poem reads:
If you want to discover the truth about God,
don’t strive for things that lie beyond you.
Draw your thoughts inward to the centre, and
seek to become one and simple in your soul.
Let go of all that distracts you, all you desire,
and come home to yourself, and when you do,
you’ll become the truth you first sought.
Meditation is about being open to the mysterious presence of Love in our hearts, a mysterious presence that awakens us to a new kind of knowledge – the wisdom of the heart. This kind of knowing opens a gateway to our innate spirituality – it awakens and then deepens our desire to discover who we truly are at the depths of our being – who we are in God and who God is in us.
Meditation then is a practice, a daily practice in which we set aside our everyday concerns and preoccupations, we set aside all of the things that bother or delight the ego, we let go of our egoic identity, our public face as it were and we simply allow ourselves to be. In letting go of those things we also let go of all that we cling to, including religious belief and non-belief, including doctrine and dogma. For our period of meditation, we let go of all of those mental categories and we allow ourselves to experience reality in practice; we allow reality to penetrate our heart.
As we meditate together, having left our masks, as it were, at the door, we experience that are all equal in the meditation space. We leave our cleverness, our foolishness, our diverse gifts and our various shortcomings – we leave them all outside the meditation room as we move into our inner space. And we discover that, mysteriously, we share this inner space with one another. We discover that through the practice of meditation, not by thinking about it. I know that I am using words now – however badly – to try to describe this truth but, like learning the joy of riding a bicycle, it is a truth that you can only discover ultimately through practice. In meditation we discover that the silent presence our opening prayer speaks of is rooted in us and that we are rooted in it. In fact, it is who we really are. This truth is captured imaginatively and joyfully in another poem, A Horse in the Meadow, from Mesiter Eckhart’s Book of Secrets:
Have you seen how a horse,
On a summer’s afternoon
In a wide green meadow
Gallops and dances and springs
About in the sun and wind?
This is just how God delights
In pouring God’s self into you.
Just like this.
I invite you now to spend some time in the stillness and silence of meditation where you can begin to experience that truth for yourself.
After 40 years in the education sector Noel Keating was awarded a PhD for his research into the child’s experience of meditation and its spiritual fruits. Noel now leads, in a voluntary capacity, a project which offers free in-service to primary schools who may wish to consider introducing meditation as a whole-school practice. Noel is author of Meditation with Children: A Resource for Teachers and Parents.
