From John Main OSB, “Growing Point,” THE HEART OF CREATION, (New York (Continuum, 1998), pp. 105-107.
God is the breath of life. God is presence and he is present deep within our being, in our hearts. If only we persevere we discover that in the power of his Spirit each one of us is regenerated, renewed, recreated so that we become a new creation. “I have poured out my Spirit,” said the prophet Ezekiel. And the Spirit is the presence of power, the power of love. Meditation teaches us that this is the foundational wisdom on which to build life and true religion. What we discover is that we can only live our lives fully if we are always open to this mysterious presence of the Spirit, and always open to the presence more profoundly. That is the pilgrimage we enter upon every time we sit down to meditate. We open our minds, our hearts, our consciousness more permanently to the ultimate reality that is, that is now, that is here.
What is the basis of the Christian mystery? It is surely that the beyond is in our own midst, that absolute reality is here and now. The Christian faith teaches that by being open to the mystery of this reality we are taken out of ourselves, beyond ourselves, into the absolute mystery, which is God. God is how we transcend self. We transcend all limitation by simple openness to the All who is now. The great awakening to the mystery is the Kingdom of heaven and the Kingdom of heaven is now. It is established by Jesus and proclaimed by his own words, “The Kingdom of God is upon you. Repent and believe in the gospel.” To repent means simply to turn in the direction of God. Repenting is turning not so much away from ourselves (for that keeps us still tied to our own center) but beyond ourselves. This means not rejecting ourselves but finding our marvelous potential as we come into full harmony with God. This awareness of potential is the positive basis of Christianity and so, for a Christian, the central concern is not self, nor is it sin. The central reality is God and love and, as far as we are concerned, growth in God’s love. [. . . .]
The Kingdom is established. Faith and obedience teach us to realize it. Remember the practicalities of the work of realization. Learn to be silent and to love silence. When we meditate we don’t look for messages or signs, or phenomena. Each of us must learn to be humble, patient and faithful. Discipline teaches us to be still, and by stillness we learn to empty our heart of everything that is not God, for he requires all the room that our heart has to offer. This emptiness is the purity of heart we develop by saying our mantra with absolute fidelity. The mystery is absolute truth, absolute love and so too our response must be absolute. We respond absolutely by becoming simple.
After Meditation, from Dionysius the Areopagite, Mystical Theology I, 1, noted in Olivier Clement, THE ROOTS OF CHRISTIAN MYSTICISM (London: New City, 1995), 247.
For it is in Silence that we learn the secrets of the Darkness. . . [that] fills with a brightness more beautiful than beauty the minds that know how to shut their eyes.