Editorial / Introduction
by Laurence Freeman OSB
If this issue [of Monastic
Studies] were merely in memory of Fr. John Main it would have little interest. except to those who knew him. If it were merely in tribute
to him it would have little lasting significance. Already, in the two years
since he died we have begin to see, with a historical perspective, how much
meaning and interest his life and teaching have, how far more widely than his
immediate circle of influence his teaching is now reaching.
These articles help us to see
this teaching even more firmly inserted into the great traditions of
monasticism-and christian
spiritual teaching as a whole-than it was possible to see during his lifetime.
The personal memoirs and biographical article show not so much the man behind
the teaching as the man achieving that personal oneness with it which characterised the last years of his mission and ministry.
John Main was a prophet. His
teaching is prophetic: it clarifies, expands and inspires. He was a monk-prophet
because he accepted and loved the channel of the monastic life which both directioned and focused his life and work. Simplicity can
be seen in his teaching, not as an easy path but as the most demanding of
paths. His own radical simplicity and the great expansion of mind and heart it
led to, once again informed the tradition with the presence of the teacher's
personal authority.
Fr. John more than once proposed
that the greatest need of the church today was for men and women of deep
prayer, the teachers of the New Testament. He understood how few these were in
the face of the great need and also how little this need was really recognised by the church. As a monk he knew that a human
teacher, such as he had known in the East, was something much deeper than a
'spiritual director'. Human teachers, the staretz or
the guru, inspire and encourage rather than direct. They bring their disciple
to freedom and integrity. They point to Christ as the Teacher whose disciple
they are. The teacher is a disciple of a greater teacher and he accepts his
teaching role as an obedience of his own discipleship. Anyone who would want or
seek to be a teacher has not yet fully learned how to be a disciple. So Fr.
John always pointed those he taught to Christ as the teacher within and also
reverenced the Church as magistra. Possessing a
strong and creative personality he took pains to prevent it overinfluencing
people, just as he avoided the formation of any personality cult. His personal
integration allowed him both to be fully himself and to be faithful to the
monk's commitment to transcend his own limited personality by identifying with
the person of Christ.
The monastery was therefore for
Fr. John the natural place for a teacher to teach. He even went so far as to
say that the Christian teacher is himself in community and that the teaching is
verified by the community, even though his may have been the initial impulse
for the community's formation. He could see this so clearly because he saw
Christ as the teacher and the abbot as his vicarius.
A monastery had to be vitalised by the teaching of
Christ brought to bear personally upon the lives of the monks, through the
teaching of the abbot. The disciplina of the Rule was
merely the way of creating the environment where Christ could teach each monk
personally, through the multiple adaptability of the abbot to different
temperaments, through the joys and trials of community living, through personal
evolution, and, preeminently through prayer, in prayer.
Fr. John said the only way to teach
someone to pray is to pray with them. His confidence that silence is the
supreme medium of the Spirit's self-communication was the gentle strength of
his authority which changed so many people's lives when they met him and which
also found expression in the written and spoken teaching he left behind. This
is bearing fruit. And it is by his fruit that he will be known.
He courageously concentrated his
teaching into these three words: say your mantra. The fruit of his own fidelity
to that teaching was evident before he died. It continues to burgeon in the
lives of those who follow it.
Laurence Freeman OSB
Benedictine Priory of Montreal
(Now a Monk of the Monastery of Christ the King in London
and Director of The World Community for Christian
Meditation)
“John Main’s Monastic Adventure”
by
Laurence Freeman OSB
John Main said he became a monk
because he wanted to be free. To many, his life, up to his entering the
Benedictine monastery where his monastic adventure began, seemed already to
express a very free spirit. It was a life that had moved freely through several
cultures, English, Irish, European and Oriental, through war and peace, through
church and state, through love in its human and divine manifestations. Despite
the variety of his pre-monastic experience, however, one senses as he did
himself, not a restless wandering but a passionate, directed search for his
vocation. It was a search that so expanded his native capacity for freedom and spontanaeity that when he became a monk he was already superbly
confident in his own identity. By the time he took the habit he had done a lot.
He was now concerned to be more. "The real freedom," he would write
shortly before his death, "is not the freedom to do but to be." This
was the spirit of freedom he breathed in from the beginning of his life, from
the family he was born into.
PREPARATION
Douglas William Victor Main, born
in Hendon, London, on January 21, 1926 was the second son
and third child of David and Eileen Main. A sister and brother followed into what
became and still is a closely-knit and intensely vital family. David Main was
born in 1893 in Ballinskelligs, country Kerry. His
father had moved there from Scotland
to establish the first transatlantic cable station. Douglas
loved Ballinskelligs, where some of the family still live. He felt it to be his home in an atavistic
sense, a place where he belonged through blood and ancestral consciousness, the
topos where he was known. He was moved and impressed
when Kenneth Clark started his story of "Civilisation"
at the Celtic monastic settlement of the Skellig
Rocks that rear up grandly from the Atlantic seven miles off the coast of his
beloved Ballinskelligs.
Eileen Hurley was a nurse who met
her future husband during the terrible 'flu' epidemic of 1919. David fell in
love with her and persevered in his intentions even when she had told him of
her engagement to another man. He swept her off her feet and gave her his ring
before she had time to return her fiancé's. Douglas
inherited his father's passion and determination. David and Eileen were married
in Cork city on February 7th 1920 but moved to London
after the birth of their first child.
Family life was colourful, entertaining and often dramatic, dominated by
David's strong temper and flamboyant but generous hospitality, moderated by
Eileen's equally strong but steadier will and quieter spirit. The fun and humour of his childhood shaped Douglas'
expectation of life wherever he was. His most disparaging epithet for people,
communities or events was 'dull' or 'boring.' He was criticised
later for equating dullness with lack of goodness. He did not. But he felt it
must be a rare exception, and one to be pitied, to be good and dull. Goodness
for him meant vitality and vitality was for him a way to goodness. The words of
Jesus that he loved especially and often quoted to describe meditation were
those of Jesus describing his mission: "I have come that men may have
life, life in all its fullness". John Main also understood D.H. Lawrence's
exciting words: "What I want is life and the pure contact with life".
For less exuberant spirits his intense vitality could easily become
threatening. This pattern of response to his personality was the cause of much
pain of misunderstanding. Selfconfidence and optimism
in such a personality could easily be seen as ambition. The strong protective
and caring concern for others could be seen as domination. In fact, John Main,
like his father, was too ambitious for pure contact with life to be satisfied
by fame or success. Their freedom from materialism lies behind David Main's
bankruptcies and his son's major uprootings. They
both knew that the person unable to renounce success or wealth would be
possessed by them.
Every summer the Main family went
on special holidays. One year David hired a truck and driver to transport the
eight members of the family on a tour of Sussex.
The highlight occurred when they were parked near a travelling
circus and a giraffe poked its head into the back of the truck to the delight
of all the children. Sunday evenings in the Main house were
times of visitors and family entertainment. David Main sang well and there were
games likes the 'One-Minute Speech'. Topics were drawn
from a hat and Douglas' topic for his brother Ian on one
occasion was 'Early Byzantine Architecture'. Even at the age of seven or eight,
people were not certain how seriously to take him. Even then he had a serious
air but a quick wit and took pleasure in confounding people's expectations of
him, as he did throughout his life. While playing 'Doctors
& Nurses' he calmed his sister Yvonne, whose leg he was supposed to
amputate, by saying "Don't worry madam, the knife is quite blunt". He
liked to sit and talk with his mother's tea guests and once, at the age of
eight, he startled a London matron
by walking into the room, sitting beside her and asking her intently "What
do you think of the Abyssinian question?"
The Main
home was a religious one of deep Catholic faith (although Eileen Main would
confidently overlook Friday abstinence if it meant good food going bad). Their
faith was human and uncompromising. Waifs and strays, unwed mothers turned away
from rectories, abandoned wives or alcoholics were not only welcomed into the
family for their stay but often given the room of one of the family who would
return to find himself assigned to the sofa. The children played ecclesiastical
games in which Douglas usually assumed the role of
Bishop. His sisters were dragooned into serving his 'Mass' and scolded for not
lighting the candles or ringing the bells on time.
In 1932 Douglas
spent several months in Ballinskellings. He was
regarded as a 'delicate' child and the country food and healthy air, it was
hoped, would build him up. He did not like school work and was always up to
pranks or persuading fishermen to take him out to the islands. When he returned
to England, his
parents moved to Highgate where he spent an intensely
unhappy time at a council school where his refined manners drew the opprobrium
of the class. He always had an aversion to crowds and street-life. But in 1937
he was accepted into Westminster Cathedral
Choir School where he found the
life and companions more congenial. He was groomed to serve mass for Cardinal Hinsley in the private chapel of Archbishop's House, a
special privilege. Douglas was not good at sports but
learned to dance, enjoyed the teadances and wore an Eton
suit with panache. He was academically successful and caught the attention of
the Headmaster who wrote in a prophetic moment: "Pleasing boy -- smart --
very good mimic -- tendency to Benedictines."
In 1939 because of the war Douglas
was moved to a Jesuit school which was then evacuated to the country. Douglas
and his brother Ian stayed with a family who were friends of the Mains. Douglas
was thirteen, the only daughter of the family was six.
It was the beginning of an important friendship in his life.
Douglas
was not happy with the Jesuits whom he found rigid teachers. He was glad to
leave school and returned to London
where he worked both as a reporter for a local newspaper and as a fire-watcher
during the Blitz. In 1943 he trained privately as a wireless operator and
enlisted with the Royal Corps of Signals whose records describe him "6
foot 1 3 / 4 inches in height, weighing 145 pounds, blue eyes and light brown
hair". He was assigned to S.C.U. 3, a special communications unit whose
secret and highly sensitive work was to detect enemy espionage signals and Douglas
was actively involved in it in Belgium
by January 1945. Working sometimes behind the retreating enemy lines, Douglas
experienced physical danger but also the camaraderie of warfare. An exploding
shell gave him a lifelong back problem. His older colleagues were protective
but respectful. He wrote love-poems for some of them to send home to their
girlfriends. They taught him to swim. He visited most of the churches that his
unit passed en route.
After serving
for nearly three years in England,
Belgium and Germany Douglas was restored to civilian life but with a
stronger sense of his calling to the priesthood. While working as a
journalist he had met the Canons Regular of the Lateran, a religious order
whose community life was shaped by the Rules of St.
Augustine and St. Benedict. The novitiate was held in Bodmin Moor, Cornwall,
stark surroundings which could not depress his enthusiasm or good spirits. When
his sisters visited him with a birthday cake he amused them by mimicking the
members of the community. He took simple vows a year later and began studies at
the Diocesan seminary of St. Edmund's, Ware. His superiors at this time
remember him as an attractive personality interested in the eremitical life. He
was chosen for special studies in Rome
and went to study theology at the Angelicum. He was
soon to have doubts about his vocation, however, and eventually decided to
leave. It was a difficult time and he later remembered receiving little
sympathetic support. Over twenty years later however, while visiting the
Canons' church in Rome, the Lateran
Basilica, he ran into his former novice master, now the superior-general. The
recognition was mutual and immediately warm and they spent an hour in the
General's room catching up on their life-stories. Douglas
did not speak much about this early attempt at his vocation except to praise
the Canons for teaching him how to study. He was young and had been deeply
affected by the war when he entered but this attempt only strengthened his
sense of having a vocation.
There had been a monastic flavour to the life of the Canons to which he had been
attracted, but not monastic enough to satisfy his need for an absolute
commitment to God. Nor was he yet mature enough to express this commitment with
the balance and moderation which temperamentally he could not abandon. His humour and good spirits never expressed lack of true reverence
but were his way of keeping his intense spiritual life both private and down to
earth. The stories of those first student days in Rome
show his characteristic blend of religious idealism and iconoclasm. In his
childhood and adolescence the seeds of his later prophetic vision of
monasticism and the church were sown. He would say that seriousness leads to
joy, solemnity, to triviality. Though he could laugh at ecclesiastical
self-importance and pomposity there was also anger in his rejection of such attitudes
because he saw them to be not only humanly destructive but belittling to the
mysteries of the sacred. These mysteries he reverenced in his heart silently,
shyly, and at this stage of his life even with a certain embarrassment.
There was never much delay in
making decisions in John Main's life. He could also, if necessary, wait long
and patiently. But he could not be depressed for very long. He felt the tide of
life pulling him too strongly. After leaving Rome
he went to Dublin, where his family
now lived, and began to study Law. The Catholic university would not accredit
him for his previous studies but Trinity
College was eager to receive him
and did. Special permission was reluctantly granted by the Archbishop to allow Douglas
as a Catholic to enter Trinity.
He loved Trinity and his years of
academic law. His professors applauded his intelligence and style. His
fellow-students found him the best of company, imaginative, lively and, often
disconcertingly honest in his reaction to others. He lived a disciplined life,
reading extensively in literature, theology and history, rising and doing most
of his day's studying very early, thus leaving the day free for the Dublin
social life that he loved and would like to transplant to other locations in
later life. He went to parties, gained a reputation as a dancer and developed a
highly profitable betting system at the races. In 1954 he graduated but was
already looking beyond Dublin for
his next adventure.
OUTWARD PILGRIMAGE
Douglas
was politically a socialist. His Irish roots and his own intellectual formation
as well as his personal temperament also made him, if not a complete republican
(he liked ceremonial both liturgical and constitutional) at least pragmatically
anti-imperialist. When he joined the British Colonial Service in the Fall of 1954 many countries in the British Empire
were gaining their independence. Douglas joined, eager
to be involved in this momentous period of history. It was also to be a
decision of eternal moment in his own life. He was
assigned to Malaya and studied Chinese in London
at the School of Oriental
and African Studies. He was to remember the motto inscribed over its front door
when writing on meditation years later: 'knowledge is power'. He rejected that
claim. The only real power, he wrote, is love. But in 1954 he was eagerly
absorbing knowledge and new skills to train him for the exercise of civil power
over large numbers of people. In January 1955 he sailed for Malaya.
On the boat out he broke with convention and offended some of his superior
officers by throwing a party on a grand scale, assuming a custom usually
reserved for the senior members of the Service. On arrival in Kuala
Lumpur, he continued his study of Chinese (Hokkien dialect) at a language school housed in a Confucian
temple and assisted in the preparation of the first elections for an
independent Malaya. His life was that which English
imperialists had cultivated overseas for several generations and, though he
lived it energetically, it was clear both to his closer friends and himself
that it was not his life. A friend asked him why he didn't go into the Church. Douglas
replied he hadn't given up the idea. The Director of his Language
School wrote of him: "He was
exceptional. In that large body he had the gentleness of a child. His
intelligence was keen, quick and vibrant.... He was out of place in a brash
society emerging from colonial rule which was crude compared with the
intellectual and spiritual realm which was later to be the home of Douglas
Main."
One of his duties was that of
Protocol Officer and one day it sent him on an apparently trivial mission. He
was to deliver a photograph of the Governor to a Hindu monk who ran an
orphanage of the "Pure Life Society" on the outskirts of Kuala
Lumpur. Fr. John thought he would quickly dispatch the
assignment and be free for the rest of the day. In fact it was a mission that
changed his life and gradually revealed to him his own vocation.
Swami Satyananda,
the Hindu monk, was born in India
in 1909. He was educated in a Roman Catholic mission and had often considered
baptism. At the age of seventeen he entered the Malayan Government service
which he left in 1936 to become a monk in India
where he spent several years of study and discipleship with spiritual masters, including
Ramana Maharshi. He was
sent back to Malaya in 1940 and, through the "Pure
Life Society", founded in 1949, expressed his life's goal, to
"restore the consciousness of the kingdom
of God among his fellowmen".
His school, orphanage, 'Temple of
the Universal Spirit,' adult education classes and regular group meditation
classes all aimed to harmonise the diverse
communities and races living in Malaya. In 1954 he was
made a Justice of the Peace. But he was preeminently a monk, a meditator since the age of eighteen, a teacher and
disciple, a man of the spirit whose faith was alive in love and service.
Douglas Main recognised him at their first meeting.
In retrospect their lives seem a strangely similar blend of experiences. Both
died at an early age. He later described how this encounter led him to the
pilgrimage of meditation.1 He returned each week to the ashram. to meditate with his teacher and thirty years later
remembered the importance of that experience of holy presence. John Main's own
confident openness to the religions of the East can be traced back to the
openness of the Hindu monk who had accepted him as a Christian disciple and
taught him to meditate as the way to deepen his discipleship to Christ. It was
the experience of this human relationship and its underlying spiritual courage
that formed John Main's later attitude to teaching meditation himself-to "all
who come to pray with us".2
Douglas Main returned to Dublin
in the summer of 1956 and for the next four years taught Administration and Roman
and International Law at Trinity College.
He was popular with both colleagues and students. He was still outspoken.
Questioning the controversial appointment of a new lecturer considered by many
to be unqualified, junior Professor Main said in the senior common room that he
could not see wh~* a third-rate intelligence should
be appointed when there were already so many second-rate ones around. It was an
example of his realistic and mischievously iconoclastic wit that won him
friends and disciples as well as misunderstanding. To a few of his more
perceptive acquaintances he appeared, as he was, a "deeply religious man
possessing peace and tranquility". He went to mass daily and meditated
twice a day. His academic career was bright and promising. "Had he
remained with Law Douglas would have been a national authority". [3] His
friends from the period went on to become the country's leaders such as Garret
Fitzgerald, the present Prime Minister and his lifelong friend.
Douglas Main's friendship with
the daughter of the family he had lived with during the War had continued and
in 1957 blossomed into love. They would meet when Douglas
came to London to eat his dinners
at Grays Inn
where he would later be called to the Bar. In their long talks and walks
through the city they discussed socialism and especially Douglas' idea of a
society of people living in community -- a community of love.4 The
most intense emotional period of their twenty-year old relationship was to
begin at a restaurant in London where Douglas entertained her with some Malayan
friends and two Buddhist monks of his acquaintance. During the next few days
Douglas and Diana talked about their marriage. She broke off her engagement to
another man but neither she nor Douglas felt really confident of the fulfilment of their plans. Praying together in a church in London
on one of their long walks she experienced a sense that their relationship
could not be fulfilled in marriage. They both recognised
that two intense forms of love, human and divine, were interacting in two
strong, passionate personalities. Shortly after their time together in London
she wrote to him saying she had become re-engaged and some months later she
married.
Douglas's
response to this trauma of detachment (they remained friends until his death)
was immediately steered by another-the trauma of death. His eldest sister's
son, eleven year old David, developed an inoperable brain tumour.
Douglas took him to the doctor for the diagnosis while
his sister was out of the country as he had become a second father to all his
sister's children since her husband's early death. David and the other children
worshipped him. He always had a marvellous rapport
with children, telling stories (acting every part), taking them for walks and
mystery tours, playing all sorts of magical tricks. He sat beside the bed of
his dying nephew for weeks. David died in September 1958. A
year later Douglas Main was a monk.
He told his sister he did not
want to become a monk but knew that he had to. He compressed his reasons into a
few words in The Gethsemani
Talks:
About this time, 1958, a nephew
of mine, one of my sister's children, became seriously ill and died. The death
of this child had an enormous effect on me and brought me face to face with the
questions of life and death and the whole purpose of existence. As I reviewed
my life at this time I was forcibly struck by the fact that the most important
thing in my entire existence was my daily meditation. I decided, therefore, to
structure my life on my meditation and sought to do so by becoming a monk.5
He carried his suffering lightly
as he did his learning and, later, his spiritual experience. But he did not
dissimulate his feelings and was usually disconcertingly frank in replying to
direct questions. He avoided depression and nostalgia with characteristic Irish
zeal. He drove up for his interview at Ealing Abbey
in his shiny new red MG. The abbot accepted him. The novice-master predicted he
would last only a month. Why England?
Why Ealing and not Downside or Ampleforth?
He said that if he had entered the church in Ireland
he would probably have given up religion altogether. Another reason was that,
as a true Irishman, he could love his country best only in self-imposed exile.
He felt too old for Downside, and Ealing attracted
him for two reasons. He knew of another Dublin professor who had recently
joined there and on visiting Ealing seemed to him,
under Abbot Rupert Hall, "a very civilised and
relaxed place".6 More importantly, it seemed to him a place of
potential in the new church, a monastic community in the city with a strong
apostolate in school and parish work, a place of growth. Becoming a monk was
not an escape but rather the discovery of a new and more ultimate path of
growth. He always had and he always would respond to misfortune by expansion of
heart. He took the name of John, the disciple of love. John Main loved Ealing because of his faithful commitment to the community
to whom he made Vows which to him were sacred and inalienable events of his life.
Early in his novitiate he met
with his novice master to discuss prayer. Fr. John remembered this meeting
differently from the novice master, no doubt because it was such a turning
point in his own life. The description of the meditation he had been practising since his meeting with the Hindu monk struck the
Benedictine novice master as nonchristian and he
advised Br. John to desist and return to a way of prayer employing words and
images. It seemed a cruel stroke of irony, a final and decisive impoverishment.
Much later, when he had been led back to the mantra through
the very English Benedictine tradition that had diverted him from it, he saw
this spiritual detachment as a preparatory ascesis
enabling him to return to the pilgrimage entirely on God's terms, "not on
my own". [7] His own absolutist temperament, his tendency to
balanced extremism, enabled him to see the same qualities in the way God
directed a human life. "In retrospect I regard this period in my life as
one of great grace".8
He stopped saying the mantra. But
the "spiritual desert" he now entered was not without human
friendship and laughter. Fr. John's impulse was always to absorb the inevitable
and make it his own. His novitiate was a happy and joyful time largely because
of sharing it with a fellow-Celt. Those were still the days when novices were
given the cast-off habits of the community and the novice-master's used
razorblades. Fr. John often said, though, that it was one of the simplest years
of his life. He was then sent to Rome
to study at the Benedictine university
of S. Anselmo
and for these years was immersed in the milieu of European monasticism,
visiting monasteries in Italy,
France and Germany
on his annual return home and making friends for life in monasteries around the
world. Perhaps even more decisive was his sharing in the extraordinary
renaissance of catholic Christianity that began with the Second Vatican
Council. They were stirring years to be at Rome:
to see seminarians blocked by Swiss Guards as they moved out of St. Peter's in
protest at a Papal pronouncement, to see Holy Office agents expelled from
lectures by suspect professors; but above all and most positively to feel the
new waves of hope and the energies of both intellectual and pastoral growth
that were re-forming the Church he had always loved but never feared to criticise.
The record of
Fr. John's Rome years show the many simultaneously active parts of his
character. He relished his studies, especially the Trinitarian theology and
contemplative-liturgical approach of Dom Cipriano Vagaggini. He held in some contempt the more childish
insistence of some lecturers on learning names and dates by heart. He loved the
cultural atmosphere of an international community, his holidays and hiking
trips with fellow-students. He enjoyed the fun of organising
a tour of Roman fountains for the German monks which carefully avoided all
fountains.
Shortly before his ordination on December 21, 1963 Fr. John's younger
brother was killed in a car accident in Australia
and his father died of cancer in Ballinskelligs. His
mother was unable to attend the ordination but a large family contingent did.
He left soon afterwards for Dublin where an appointment with the Irish
President had been arranged and Eamon de Valera knelt one January night in 1964 to receive the first
blessing of Dom John Main.
For the next three years he
taught in the school. As the youngest professed monk he was the porter at the
1967 abbatial election and fetched the monks for their interview with the abbot
president. He was also one of the candidates in the election. Another monk was elected,
however, and Fr. John was appointed his replacement as Deputy Headmaster.
Headmaster Bernard Orchard and John Main made for strong and imaginative
leadership in the school. As a result there was soon a major clash of policy
within the community, about whether or not to expand the school. Obviously,
personalities and larger issues of monastic life were also involved. The
outcome was the resignation of the Headmaster. John Main, who did not need to
resign and who would have been his obvious successor, felt honour-bound
to do so in the Spring of 1969. The Community was divided and its internal
divisions were common knowledge in school and parish. Fathers Main
and Orchard as the epicentres of the storm were to go
away. Fr. Bernard went to Rome
where he used the opportunity for research to earn a prominent place in
international biblical scholarship. Fr. John was offered a position at the University
of Oxford which he was not allowed
to accept. A plan to establish a Benedictine chaplaincy at the University
of Sydney fell through. In the end
he was sent on what was for a man of his credentials a less than flattering
assignment, to do a doctorate at the Catholic University of America.
He felt hurt by the decision and
the manner of its implementation. But, as usual, he accepted the given and made
it his own. Academic theology in Washington
he found narrow and frustrating. But by September 1970 the Abbot of Washington
asked the Abbot of Ealing if John Main could be their
new headmaster at St. Anselm's. By the Fall of 1970,
Fr. John was on a new part of his monastic adventure. He took over an American
school with severe administrative and personnel problems at a time of general
student rebellion. But he rebuilt morale, reassured parents of their religious
doubts by his powerful and evident vision of Christian education and also by
his Irish charm and English urbanity. He took charge. He got people to work
together towards a common goal. He began to raise a million dollars for a new
science wing. He drove his old friend Garret Fitzgerald, now Foreign Secretary,
around Washington and was drawn
into the social round of the diplomatic world. He was successful and life had a
glitter. "It was the busiest period of my monastic life", he wrote
later.9 Another abrupt change in direction
was imminent and entirely unexpected.
RETURN PILGRIMAGE
The turning-point of John Main's
life occupies an ontological rather than a chronological centre. Unusually,
this point is historically visible in his life and he describes it in the
persuasive simplicity of The Gethsemani Talks. A
young man who wanted to learn about Christian mysticism came to stay in the
monastery from the ashrams of California.
Fr. John gave him Augustine Baker's Holy Wisdom to read, the quintessence of
English Benedictine spirituality. Written in the 17th century it is now little
read and certainly cannot rival the Cloud for popular appeal. Fr. John was all
the more surprised therefore to see the young man return aglow with enthusiasm.
Fr. John was moved to reread Baker. Baker sent him to the Cloud of Unknowing
and then back to John Cassian. He rediscovered the
mantra and started to meditate again.
He read Cassian
not with the eye of an historian or a textual scholar but as a monk guided by
grace towards a deepening of his life in the spirit. He recognised,
by reference to his own earlier experience, exactly what Cassian
and the Cloud were saying. When he came, as he did very shortly, to teach others,
it was by expressing the same teaching in contemporary terms. It was not Cassian or the Cloud that needed to be communicated. They
were themselves communicators. The message was not the letter but the spirit.
John Main was concerned not with mere scholarship but a
living tradition, one that had come alive again in his own life and which he
was now increasingly giving his life to serve.
Shortly before he left for Montreal
a community meeting was held at Ealing to discuss who
would go with him. One monk rather naively asked if it would be necessary for
any one else going to pray 'in John's way'. Fr. John was amused and
disappointed at the implication. He responded strongly by saying that
meditation was no invention of his own but that it was the tradition that,
consciously or unconsciously, had shaped them all. He reacted in a similar way
if people later thought his teaching an 'eastern form' of prayer. It is no more
eastern than western, he would say, and what makes meditation Christian is
precisely the faith in Christ that we bring to it. When he taught meditation
John Main used almost exclusively the western tradition and the Christian
scriptures. There was no doubt in his mind that this teaching went back in
direct line to the apostolic community of the primitive church and to the
Master himself.
He began to meditate three times
a day, coming back to the monastery from the school across the campus to
meditate at midday. He taught
meditation at this time only to those individuals who had come to him for personal
advice. Interiorly his life was undergoing an accelerated re-formation, a
catching up of an interrupted pilgrimage while external events were shaping his
life to harmonise with the interior world. In 1974 he
left Washington and returned to London
by way of Australia
where he visited his brother's grave and discussed again the establishing of a
Benedictine chaplaincy in Sydney.
The deepening of his prayer was changing his views on what constituted an
appropriate monastic life in the 20th century.10 What specially Christian formation was given to graduates of
the Benedictine school he had worked in? What were the real needs of parishes
and society at large? These were no longer academic questions, the material for
articles, but matters of integrity. The response he found to them in 1975 was
to be the pattern of the rest of his life: meditation and the community that
silence creates.
Most of his brethren were sceptical about Fr. John's proposal for a lay community
living alongside the monastic community, sharing its work and worship and in
addition meditating together. However he went ahead to restore an old, run-down
house on the property-the sort of project he relished-even though there was no
sign of anyone coming to join a community with no members. He set up a
meditation room with floor cushions, meditated there himself and waited. Before
long a group of six young men had come. The form which the rest of his life was
to take had come into being.
THE INNER JOURNEY
The events of the remaining seven
years can be found described in his own words. The
decision of the Ealing community to allow him to
respond to the invitation from Bishop Crowley of Montreal
and establish a contemplative monastery in the city allowed him to realise the form of the new monasticism he had envisioned
since the Vatican Council. In 1975 he was almost elected abbot to two
monasteries. He would have undertaken the office energetically but he knew it
would not have enabled him to live the radically singleminded
monastic life he was able to create in Montreal.
He longed for a new, simpler, more truly traditional and so also more
contemporary monastic community. He was able to see it beginning before he
died.
The events of this venture are an
integral part of the teaching which flowered in these years and bore such
extraordinary fruit in so many hearts. In Letters from the Heart and in the
sequel which appears in 1985 one can see the spiritual and theological growth
that occurred in Fr. John simultaneously with the growth of the Montreal Priory
he founded in 1977 with one other monk from Ealing.
His faith worked a monastic miracle which served the Church and the secular
world of which it was and remains part. "A monastery does not exist for
itself", wrote Fr. John, "but for the Kingdom". It was the
secret of his monastic freedom and courage.
A definitive turn in his monastic
pilgrimage took place during a few days spent at the Abbey of Gethsemani in 1976. One might say his public teaching on
meditation began in the three now famous conferences given to the monks. But it
was in the time of silence spent in Thomas Merton's hermitage that the Spirit
moved so deeply in his heart and pointed him towards the work for the kingdom
to which he was called to give the rest of life and, as we can now see, his
death also. He wrote one letter from the hermitage on 13th November to a close
friend:
"... I hope you are well. I
am here staying in Merton's hermitage out in the woods beyond Gethsemani. It is quite extraordinary how solitude brings
everyone so close. I have just celebrated the most loving Mass of my life in
Merton's little chapel. You were all so close to me as I prayed for you and all
your family.
My purpose in coming here was to
talk to the Community about prayer, but in fact I have learnt so much myself
while I have been here..."
The full story of what John Main
had learnt continues to unfold through the growth of the teaching which he was
given to experience so purely in his own spirit and to pass on to future
generations. He stands in the great tradition: the living tradition of
Christian teachers of prayer whose authority derives from the humility and love
of their discipleship to Christ.
Fr. John's knowledge of Christ
began in his earliest years in the heart of a warm and Christian family. His
love of Christ grew and matured through the richly varied years that led him to
the monastic life. It was a quite unsentimental love, a disarmingly intense and
honest love. It hungered for absoluteness. It was progressively inclusive and
excluded nothing except what compromised the absolute.
He had always felt he would not
live to old age. When he saw that his death was coming so
soon it intensified and accelerated the inner work of integration, the
pilgrimage as he called it. He felt himself drawn ever more fully into
the point of concentrated light which dilated and absorbed him more completely
at each time of prayer. He died on December
30th 1982, in the monastery he had founded as a disciple of his
Master. Those he was leading on the same path were beside him.
On October 6th he spoke on
'Death: The Inner Journey' to two thousand participants at an international
Palliative Care Congress in Montreal.
He spoke of death as an essential part of the life-process and meditation as
the way we enter the Paschal Mystery. Though in great pain he
gave his last public teaching on November 18th. He worked on his
correspondence up to the middle of December. As he approached death he lived as
fully and loved as selflessly as he had ever done. It was increasingly clear to
him and to those who were caring for him that the Master he served was calling
him to the even greater service of love through a faithful death. It was so
clear because as he traveled into the light that shone so brilliantly in his
heart it made his Master visible. The light shone in his flesh. His teaching
became perfected in silence. The freedom he had sought in the monastery now
transcended all limitations and traveled the paths. of
the Spirit with Jesus who greeted him and led him past the final boundary.
Those paths are more knowable to us by his life and teaching, by the tradition
he revitalised with the gifts of his own spirit and
the energy of his loving heart.
As John Main's influence spreads
through the books and tapes containing his teaching it is important to see how
his pilgrimage and mission were fully inserted into his humanity. It is an
essential element of his teaching and vision, that we must become the person we
are called to be, fully human, fully loving. Those who loved him best in this
life were those who meditated with him. Those who will come to know him in the
Spirit will also be those who have found the grand poverty of the mantra.
Notes
[Editor's Note: Since this article was written,
many of the titles quoted in the Notes have been reissued. Visit www.MedioMedia.org online to order the latest editions and many other Christian
meditation resources.]
This article draws on research for a forthcoming
biography of John Main by Neil McKenty. [Editor’s
Note: Subsequently published as In the
Stillness Dancing.]
1. Christian
Meditation: The Gethsemani Talks, (1977) pp.
11-13.
2. Lettersfrom the
Heart, (1982).
3. Remark of colleague on Trinity College Law
Faculty.
4. Cf. Community of Love (1983).
5. Christian
Meditation: The Gethsemani Talks, p. 14.
6. Remark to his sister, Yvonne.
7. Gethsemani Talks,
p. 15.
8. Ibid., p. 15.
9. Gethsemani Talks,
p. 16.
10. Letters
from the Heart, Introduction.