It is important to be aware of the danger of using the imagination when you come to think about prayer or meditation. I don’t think it is any exaggeration to say that the imagination is the great enemy of prayer. This idea has been impressed on me by people I have met recently who seem to me to miss the whole point of prayer and the richness of the Christian understanding of prayer by an over-active imagination. The imaginative stories I have heard people tell of praying in a church at night, when suddenly Christ walks down the aisle to speak to them. When I ask them. What did he look like?’ they say. ‘Tall, Jewish, with flowing hair, piercing eyes . . .’ and so forth . . .
Now I don’t question for a moment the sincerity of people who see visions of this kind, even though these visions are often caused by badly digested meals. What I want to suggest is the more important conviction of the early Church concerning the reality of the presence of Jesus within us. This is the reality of the presence of his indwelling Spirit. The real wonder of the Christian life is that each one of us is called to live out of this reality, to live out of the eternal part of our own being. The two great Christian words that refer to this living out of the eternal are meditation and contemplation.
Meditation means remaining in the centre, being rooted in the centre of your own being, and contemplation is being in the temple with him. The temple is your own heart, your own centre. The essence of being with him in the vision of the early Church is an absolute oneness, a oneness with the Absolute. We have to try to proclaim to the world that it is our destiny to be thus divinized by becoming one with the Spirit of God. Divinization is something utterly beyond our imagination and beyond our own powers of understanding to comprehend. But, and here is the mystery that the New Testament speaks of, it is not beyond our capacity to experience it in love. It is our capacity to love and to be rooted in love that is the essence of our divinization.
When St Paul speaks about the reality of this, he emphasizes the present-ness of it. For him it was Jesus who has already brought us salvation. ‘Salvation’ is deliverance from all our own limitations. It is the Hebrew word for deliverance from bondage and slavery into the ‘glorious liberty and splendour of the children of God‘.1
It is he who brought us salvation and called us to a dedicated life, not for any merit of ours but of his own purpose and of his own grace, which was granted to us in Christ Jesus from all eternity, but has now. at length, been brought fully into view by the appearance on earth of our Saviour Jesus Christ. For he has broken the power of death and brought life and immortality to light through the Gospel.2
The Gospel is just that ‘good news’ of our deliverance from slavery. If we wanted to put that into language for our own time, it is a deliverance from our own egoism, from everything in us that isolates us. limits us: all these limitations are exchanged for the limitless love of God. It is the reality of this that we must be open to in our prayer – the present-ness of it. This Spirit of Christ which is pure gift, the gift of his Spirit, is the very basis of all reality. And the art of living, of all fully human living, is not to live at the surface or at the level of trivia but to live out of what Jesus called that ‘inner spring’ of eternal life always welling up within us. This is the message of St Paul:
I want them to continue in good heart and in the unity of love, and to come to the full wealth of conviction which understanding brings, and grasp God’s secret. That secret is Christ himself; in him lie hidden all God’s treasures of wisdom and knowledge.3
This possible for us because ‘it is in Christ that the complete Being of the Godhead dwells embodied, and in him you have been brought to completion‘. 4 That is why in our prayer, as we meditate as faithfully as we can each morning and evening, we must go beyond all imagination, beyond all thought, even holy thought and holy imagination It is why we must be utterly still and reverent in the presence of the mystery of God. this inner spring’, because it is out of that mystery that we are invited to live. ‘Be rooted in him. be built in him. be consolidated in the faith you were taught; let your hearts overflow with thankfulness’.5
Let us see this clearly. Wonderful as this message is, intoxicating though it is, we must approach it with simplicity and humility. That is why we must learn to say our word and to say it with a deepening faithfulness morning and evening We must say it without expectation, without thinking that we are going to put pressure on God or that we are going to twist his arm and make him reveal himself to us m some way We are simply doing the most direct thing we can do if we genuinely want to live our lives to the full and to live them out of the infinite depth they possess, their infinite potentiality.
We live them in union with Christ That is the real wonder of meditation, that we do lose ourselves because we are in the temple with him. It is in that loss of self that we find ourselves in Christ. And in him we are infinitely expanded in heart by love. We are each called to the experience that inspired St Paul to write these words to the Colossians,
Therefore, since Jesus was delivered to you as Christ and Lord, live your lives in union with him Be rooted in him, be built in him. be consolidated in the faith you were taught ; let your hearts overflow with thankfulness . . For it is in Christ that the complete being of the Godhead dwells embodied, and in him you have been brought to completion.6
1 Rom. 8:21
2 2 Tim. 1:9-10
3 Col. 2:2-3
4 Col 2’1-til
5 Col. 2:7
6 Col. 2:6-7, 9
This extract is taken from John Main’s last book before his death on 30 December 1982, Moment of Christ: The Path to Meditation
