‘Word into Silence’: A Short Guide to Christian Meditation

A review of ‘Word into Silence’, by John Main; Darton, Longman & Todd Ltd, 1980.

For Pablo d’Ors, Christianity has been emptied of its ‘mystical core’, which risks reducing its laws to rigid arbitrary rules, and its rituals to mechanically repeated acts. The experience of the divine is the essence of spirituality and the root of all mature religion. Indeed, says d’Ors, religion is just the cup; spirituality is the wine.

So Christianity has lost its mystical core; but it was not always so. In the 13th and 14th centuries, Christian mysticism thrived in Europe. Meister Eckhart, the German Dominican, spoke of the soul’s letting go of attachment and meeting God in silent awareness. Thomas a Kempis, writer of The Imitation of Christ, preached a contemplative withdrawal from the concerns of the world with the aim of becoming one with the divine. The Cloud of Unknowing, an anonymous 14th-century text, describes a method of contemplative prayer focused on abandoning rational knowledge to enter into an experiential relation with God. One could mention St. Juan de la Cruz, Teresa de Ávila, Margery Kempe, Julian of Norwich, and others.

Meister Eckhart, the German Dominican, spoke of ‘detachment’ to describe the soul’s letting go.

This surprises some because meditation — what Christian call contemplation —is apt to be linked to Eastern philosophical and religious traditions such as Buddhism and Hinduism. It is telling that John Main, a Benedictine monk and the author of Word into Silence, had to go to India to learn meditation. It is more telling that he was warned against meditation by a superior religious once back in England. His book is a practical guide to contemplative prayer, which he frames as a journey into silence. That silence, chiefly internal, leads to spiritual depth and a closer connection to God.

Main opens with a basic question: Why meditate? Good question. For Main, a person should meditate if she wishes to move beyond self-centred thoughts and bring herself closer to God. The path is simple: repeat a sacred word or mantra — he suggests the Aramaic word maranatha, meaning ‘come, Lord’—twice a day for about twenty minutes to settle the mind. If this is carried out daily, the inner chatter slowly starts to fade, to be replaced by that profound stillness and freshness which, in the poetical language of Christianity, is the encounter with the divine.

The path is simple: repeat a sacred word or mantra.

‘Listen to silence!’ wrote the Sufi poet Rumi. ‘It has so much to say!’ Main agrees. Only when asleep are most of us are rid of what Buddhists call the ‘monkey mind’. So long as we are talking to ourselves, we are not open to the world or to God. This is why silence is important. There is nothing special about the mantra, despite its spiritualist connotations. It is simply used to talk over our inner voice, as it were, until the inner voice, which is the voice of the ego, shuts up. And in silence, Main says, we have a powerful sense that God is present. To return to the question: Why meditate? Main also answers that it is an act of faith, one that brings a person closer to who she is. D’Ors writes in his Biography of Silence that ‘I am who I am when my thoughts and dreams disappear.’ Elsewhere he writes along the same lines: ‘We begin to live to the degree to which we quit dreaming of ourselves.’ There is little theology or doctrine in this book: like the Zen practitioner, Main is concerned with raw experience.

His style is gentle, persuasive, befitting a contemplative. He avoids jargon. There is no fire and brimstone here. Main is concerned with showing readers that contemplation is not about achieving perfection or gaining the power of levitation. It is not even about reaching a mystical state or experience of what Eckhart called Durchbruch (‘breathrough’), akin to Buddhist enlightenment. It is about doing the work, if you like: showing up every day, sitting, quieting the mind, putting in the time, and having the openness and faith to continue day after day.

It is not even about reaching a mystical state or experience of what Eckhart called Durchbruch (‘breathrough’).

Like his prescription for contemplation, Main can be repetitive. If you are already very familiar with meditation, reader, then much of what he says may seem redundant. But by repeating his points, he makes them stick. He also hammers home that practice and consistency is key. (On a personal note, I would add that what one tends to find is that the initial spur to meditate—say, the desire for more calm, more energy or more focus—inevitably goes when meditation bears those particular fruits. This is where having made meditation habitual pays off.)

All in all, Word into Silence achieves two things. First, it introduces readers to the specifically Christian tradition of meditation, or contemplation. Secondly, it lowers the barriers to practising. It invites readers of any spiritual background to try contemplative prayer as a way of quieting the mind, tuning in to a richer reality and finding peace. His central message is that silence is not an absence but a pathway to living in the world more intentionally, intensely and meaningfully. If you are curious about how meditation fits into Christian spirituality, this is a good place to start.