What if the most meaningful change you could make in your life didn’t require you to acquire something, but to discover the deepest truth of who you are?
What if you could bring peace to those around you, by establishing greater peace in yourself? If we want more peace in our life, if we want to help bring more peace into the world, the work always begins right here, right now. We have each been given all that we need for a new way of seeing and a new way of being. Each of us can contribute to peace in the world through watering and tending to the seeds of peace within ourselves.
Meditation helps us live from our centre of our being, attuned to the sacredness of all beings.
It’s about seeing clearly and acting with compassion. It’s about wholeness and relationship. The simple practice is not the preserve of specialists and it cannot be owned by one group or another. Whether we are five years old or 95, have a PhD or cannot read, the wisdom and healing processes of meditation are available to all of us.
What follows is a glimpse into some hallmarks of the practice and the ‘shape’ of life that flows from it – our vision of a more peaceful world through the restoration and practice of ancient Christian wisdom.
At the heart of contemplation is silence: not an absence of sound, but the context which holds all the sound, the context of our life, the Presence which holds all that is present. In silence, stilling the chattering mind, we cease striving and rest in God, allowing ourselves to awaken. Slowly, over time, we come to realise that we are one with the source of all life, the Oneness in which and all beings “live and move and have their being” (Acts 17:28). Our life becomes increasingly spacious, encompassing and alive.
The contemplative path also requires perseverance, a daily fidelity to practice, to being still and silent before the mystery of our life, before the mystery of God.
It requires great trust to return our attention to where our bodies are, to where our life actually is, and remain here in quietness. It takes trust to set out on a way of prayer that is about handing the controls back to God (though they were, of course, never anywhere else). It takes trust to lift our attention off ourselves. And yet, this is all it takes to discover our life.
In the face of our relentless consumer culture, we have the freedom to make a deeply subversive decision, to see and act in a radically counter-cultural way. We take the opportunity to centre ourselves in silence instead of noise, to act with care instead of carelessness, is before us every moment. We can choose harmony and balance. We can live and love from the wellspring of divine silence and make the most of the precious gift of life.
The contemplative path shifts our focus and balance from simply ‘doing’ to richly ‘being’. It calls us to live from a place of deep listening and awareness, where our actions increasingly flow from the peace and compassion of our deep centre. We increasingly live from the inside out.
Once we are able to observe our thoughts and feelings in the light of self-forgetful awareness, we move from being their reactive ‘victim’ to their silent ‘witness’. We come to see that we are not our thoughts and feelings, but where they happen, the spacious peace of awareness in which they arise and depart.
This blossoming of awareness does not require a withdrawal from life, but brings about a wholly new relationship with it.. No longer driven in large part by unconscious reactivity, we can respond to all life offers us or throws at us with greater peace, freedom and compassion.
The contemplative life embraces both the joys and hardships of life—the “bread and stone” experiences that shape us. In the sweetness and the sorrow, we are drawn deeper into the likeness of Christ. Silence teaches us that every moment—whether nourishing or painful—can be a meeting place with Divine Love.
In a fragmented and fearful world, contemplation offers a quiet, radical response.
One of the greatest gifts of meditation is how it helps heal us of the illusion of separateness, the misperception that veils our essential interconnectedness. The great and all too evident danger of this illusion is that it deeply influences how we relate to each other and the world. A false conceptual distance can quickly become an emotional distance and a moral distance.
Our commitment to a daily meditation practice can become our quiet offering toward the healing of the world. As we learn to be still and silent, the ‘gaps’ between us and God and everything are revealed to be mere conventions, relative perspectives. All notions of separateness break down in the simple light of awareness.
The realisation of oneness is the deepest foundation of peace within us, and the foundation of peace between us. It is the deepest basis for compassion and justice, for our care of each other and of our precious world. To discover that we are one with the vine is to discover that everyone and everything is one within the oneness of the vine. “When it is truly seen,” wrote Julian of Norwich, “no person can separate themselves from another.’
The wisdom at the heart of the Christian wisdom tradition is a universal treasure.
The contemplative dimension is the heart of every religion, helping us come to awareness of our essential oneness with each other and all creation in the oneness of God. The great wisdom teachings of the Old and New Testaments, as well as the wisdom teachings of the Koran, of the Vedas and Upanishads, of the Buddhist Sutras and the great ancestral religions of Australia and the Americas (to name but a few), all bear witness to the truth of oneness, and our need to manifest (incarnate) this truth in our relationships, through our care of each other, through our care of the whole of creation. The two are not separate.
To read more about Meditation from the Christian wisdom tradition, click below.