Faith piece in The Age

Last Sunday I managed to get another faith piece in The Age. And even better - thank you Paddy - it seems my subscriber button glitches have been worked out. Fingers crossed!

Here's the Age piece:

As a young Christian, I was often frustrated that while I was exhorted to pray, no one seemed to provide practical details on exactly how to do this. As an older believer I can understand that even fervent pray-ers know that prayer is different for everyone, and don’t want to impose what works for them on others.

It changed my prayer life, however, and consequently everything in my world, when I encountered a group who were willing to share ways of connecting with the Divine that they found helpful.

The World Community for Christian Meditation (WCCM) was founded by John Main, a Benedictine monk.  As a younger man, he spent time in Malaysia and found that he was better able to pray using the disciplines of Hindu meditation than the Christian ones he grew up with.

Returning to the West and taking religious orders, he discovered that despite the popular perception of meditation as an Eastern spiritual technique, it was in fact also an ancient Christian practice described by John Cassian and other Desert Fathers and Mothers in the fourth and fifth centuries.

He proceeded to spread the word, and the WCCM now has branches all over the world. Their basic teaching is simple. You spend 20 minutes, twice daily, sitting still in meditation. And you use a mantra.

The mantra they recommend is ‘Maranatha’, an Aramaic word meaning, ‘Come, Lord’. I prefer to use the name of Jesus, repeated in threes – ‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.’ Using this way of prayer regularly has changed me.

Sitting still, breathing steadily, centring myself and saying the mantra reminds me over and over, in an almost physical way, that God loves the world and everyone in it, and that I want to be a part of that big love. Through the filter of the mantra, pain, anger, jealousy, joy, pride, confusion – all the emotions that used to render me helpless – are contained within the knowledge that God loves me too.

Making time to say the mantra every day isn’t easy. Even harder is the praying itself, during which my mind flits around, distracting itself with thoughts about the day just gone, the day ahead, the shopping list, the idea for a faith column. And I bring it gently back.

That’s all that happens. Some days I will have been sitting for fifteen minutes and I realise I have said the mantra precisely once. That’s ok. What matters is setting aside the time to centre on God, who understands our busy, worrying, human minds. 

The wonderful thing about the mantra is that I can take it anywhere, any time. Concern about the world, conflict with a loved one, exhaustion, happiness, a daily walk, all can be folded through with the mantra, infiltrated by the reminder of God’s love. Helping me, in a tiny way, to be more loving myself.