From John Main OSB, “A Call to the Fullness of Life,” MOMENT OF CHRIST (New York: Continuum, 1998), pp. 110-111.
One thing we learn in meditation is the priority of being over action.
Indeed, no action has any meaning, or at least any lasting depth of meaning, unless it springs from being, from the depths of your own being.
This is why meditation is a way that leads us away from shallowness to depth, to profundity. Learning to be is learning to begin to live out of the fullness of life. That is our invitation. It is learning to begin to be a full person. The mysterious thing about the Christian revelation is that as we live our lives fully, we live out the eternal consequences of our own creation. We are no longer living as if we were exhausting a limited supply of life that we received at our birth. What we know from the teaching of Jesus is that we become infinitely filled with life when we are at one with the source of our being, . . . our Creator, the One who describes himself as “I Am.”
The art of living, living our lives as fully human beings, is the art of living out of the eternal newness of our origin and living fully from our center, . . .from our spirit as it springs from the creative hand of God. The terrible thing about so much modern, materialistic living is that it can be so shallow, without a serious recognition of the depths and the possibilities that are there for each of us if only we will take the time [to] undertake the discipline to meditate. . . .
In the Christian vision we are led to this source of our being by a guide, and our guide is Jesus, the fully realized man, the person wholly open to God. As we meditate each day we may not recognize our guide. That is why the Christian journey is always a journey of faith. But as we approach the center of our being, as we enter our heart, we find that we are greeted by our guide, greeted by the one who has led us. We are welcomed by the person who calls each one of us into personal fullness of being. The consequences or results of meditation are just this fullness of life—harmony, oneness and energy, a divine energy that we find in our own heart, in our own spirit. That energy is the energy of all creation. As Jesus tells us, it is the energy that is love.
After Meditation, from THE SOUL OF RUMI: a New Collection of Ecstatic Poems, tr. Coleman Barks (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), p. 33.
Love is the way messengers
From the mystery tell us things.
Love is the mother.
We are her children.
She shines inside us,
Visible-invisible, as we trust
Or lose trust, or feel it start to grow again.