Interview: Laurence Freeman

You seem to have a very warm friendship with the Dalai Lama and he speaks of you warmly as his friend  and spiritual brother. How did this friendship develop? When was your first meeting?

The head of an international ‘monastery without walls’, says all religions share a mystic tradition. At his London base, he tells how meditation can benefit everyone from children to business people

I’d agreed a date to meet the Anglo-Irish mystic Laurence Freeman. But where, I wondered, would a Benedictine monk have lunch? “How about the community?” Freeman suggested, mentioning the house in Kensington that is his London base. “We can meditate first, and then join the others at table. I only ask that you make a contribution.”

Palm Sunday

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Monday of Holy Week

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Like Ramadan, the Christian season of Lent offers the practitioners of their faith an opportunity with many graces, to interiorize their experience of the mysteries. We do this by purifying and simplifying our minds as well as our ordinary lives. It is a time to accept that the spiritual is less an ideal than the real. It is about healing and wholeness rather than a perfectionism which dangerously feeds rather than diminishes the ego. About moderation rather than extremes.

It can be a stimulus and refreshment to take on new spiritual disciplines. It can also be a risk. Are they taken on as techniques that we can master to cajole or even force God to reward us? Are they ways of reprimanding ourselves for our weaknesses in a ways that secretly makes us more proud rather than leading to the humility that is self-knowledge?

Father Evdokinov has written: “God created the angels in silence, so our fathers tell us. God guides those who are silent, whereas those who are restless cause the angels to laugh”.

I believe that the angels laugh at this world of ours, so full of restlessness, at all our meetings with their overflow of words, at our talk that cannot create relationship.

I think the angels also laugh at us, dedicated Christians though we are, who should remember Psalm 127: “Except the Lord build the house,/ They labour in vain that build it./ Except the Lord keep the city,/ The watchman wakes in vain./ It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late,/ To eat the bread of sorrows:/ For so he gives his beloved sleep”. I think the angels laugh at us, who know this psalm and repeat it frequently in our prayers, but who are breathless with anxiety and worry about too many things, even in our pastoral work.

I must congratulate Father Laurence, whose book will continue to help men and women – both religious and ordinary church-goers, as well as those still searching for an answer – to enter into Christian meditation and the experience of silence. Christian meditation makes all the difference!

Dearest Friends,

Interview with Laurence Freeman for Svjetlo Rijeci (Light of the Word, Sarajevo)

Fr. Ivo introduces Fr. Laurence Freeman OSB, Director of The World Community for Christian Meditation (www.wcm.org) and presents the booklet “Christian Meditation: Your Daily Practice” and the reasons for his being invited to Bosnia.

1. Fr. Laurence, you have chosen spirituality to be your vocation, your life. What actually is ‘spirituality’?

THE WORLD COMMUNITY FOR CHRISTIAN MEDITATION

The roots of the Community lie in the desert tradition of early Christianity. In 1975 John Main started the first Christian Meditation Centre in London where the first of many weekly meditation groups began to meet. In 1991 the John Main Seminar was held in the old Utopian town of New Harmony, Indiana. It was led by Bede Griffiths and was the basis of his book The New Creation in Christ: Meditation and Community.

Meditators from many parts of the world came together on this occasion to discuss the future of the community that had been forming for many years already as a ‘monastery without walls’. They named it The World Community for Christian Meditation. The symbol of the Community is an ancient image that represents the union of the contemplative and active dimensions of life.