Living Christ: an Eastertide Anthology

The Spiritual Letters of John Main

As I prepared to become a WCCM Oblate in July 2021, alongside the Rule of St Benedict, I also read Monastery Without Walls.  The collection brings together the quarterly newsletters John Main sent around the world from the growing community in Montreal. These letters present a moving insight into his last five years of ministry, and the early flourishing of what has become the WCCM. Interweaving biblical theology, spiritual wisdom and practical advice, these words continue to encourage and inspire. It is striking how full they are of Resurrection hope and expectation.

I have selected short excerpts, arranged in chronological order, one for each day of the seven weeks of the Easter season. The teachings are paired with a scripture reading they have called to mind. Reflective reading of these texts, in the light of each other, has given rise to the accompanying contemplative wordings. Together, they are offered to nurture lectio divina, to frame a time of meditation, or simply to ponder a while.

Celebrating Easter, may we know the breath of new life in reading scripture, learning prayer, and living Christ.

Peace,
Mark Ball – Kent Regional Coordinator 
Easter 2023

Every one of us is called to be a full person, fully realized in the light of the power of the Spirit continuously springing up into life eternal in our heart, fully mature, fully human. When the Spirit is set free in us, free of the constricting bonds of ego and self-fixation, it pervades every faculty and fibre of our being. Then we become the witnesses we are called to be. We can witness with our own quality of life and our own fearless power to love. We witness to the essential, Christian and truly human experience of the transcendent Spirit of Jesus living in the centre of our being, where he holds us and all things in being. In that experience we find our own inner coherence, our harmony with others and with the forces within us and outside us. The sense of our own coherence creates the confidence we need to leave thoughts of self, self-consciousness behind: to live no longer for ourselves but for him. There is only one Teacher and that is the Lord Jesus, the Teacher within. But in our union with him we are summoned to mediate his teaching, which is only his love – to make his union with all people fully conscious, fully alive.


Monastery Without Walls, pp 35-36

The love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them. From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!


2 Corinthians 5.14-17 (NRSV)

anew
 
 
christ
alive
anew
in me
in you
alive
anew
in christ


 

Prayer, above all, is not nostalgia for God. Prayer is the summons to a full experience of the living Christ. Paul’s emphasis is not on religion as anaesthesia. It is not thinking about the absent God. It is not absenting ourselves from the present moment to be lost in a kind of pietistic dalliance. For Paul, authentic religion summons human beings to enter fully and courageously into the present moment. There we are filled with the life of the living Christ. The call of prayer is to be fully alive in the present, without regret for the past or fear of the future. And so we have to accept the responsibility of being fully alive. We must understand the full significance and depth of the mystery contained in the Christian experience. This experience is in essence being fully open to our own humanity and the gift of our creation. It is nothing less than conscious participation in the self-knowledge of God. What becomes clear is that God is never an object that we know. We know God, not just speculatively in our minds but existentially, lovingly in our hearts. We know and are known in the fullness and richness of prayer that leaves self entirely behind and plunges into the depths of God.


Monastery Without Walls, pp 57-58

I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ. And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what is best, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God. For to me, living is Christ.


Philippians 1.6,9-11, 21 (NRSV)

prayer
 
 
good work
completing
among us
love
overflowing
within us
christ
living
through us
 

Every year the Easter celebration reveals a little more clearly the depth to which the love of Jesus, his own fullness of life, has penetrated our human heart. The Easter Vigil repeats the same ceremonies every year but we are never the same people who celebrate them. Each year we have grown in our capacity to understand and enter the mystery of life they point us toward. We have been made more capable of receiving the revelation of his love – both through our deepening commitment to meditation and through all the many new challenges of our life. And so each year we take another step into full consciousness – toward the full knowledge of the personal mystery that underpins everything we are and do and without which we would lack meaning and purpose. Each year the radical change that the death and resurrection of Jesus has worked in our ability to see God rises a little further in our experience. The risen life that wells up in our heart at prayer and whose tidal flow is felt in every part of our life takes us more confidently into the mystery of Oneness. This is the mystery that is the Resurrection.


Monastery Without Walls, p 114

As they came near the village to which they were going, he walked ahead as if he were going on. But they urged him, saying, “Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.” So he went in to stay with them. When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight. They said to each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, opening the scriptures to us?”


Luke 24.28-32 (NRSV)

even
 
 
as dusk falls
and sunset
deepens
nightward
realisation dawns
recognition rises
and embered hearts
remembered
spark
 

In the faithful commitment to meditation, each morning and evening, we accept and gradually come to see the priority of faith over belief. By repeatedly emptying ourselves of all that is passing away – all words, ideas and images – faith grows and goes deeper. The creative matrix of faith is silence. From human relationships we can see how much faith we need to have in a person to be silent with them. Our faith in a person is deepened by such silence. It is the same dynamic as the silence in mediation. In contemplative work faith becomes active in love. Silence realizes God’s love for us as it is expressed in the love of Jesus. In the silence of faith we are invited to enter into the enduring reality where Becoming is embraced by Being. What is visible passes away, what is invisible endures. Because of Jesus and the communication of his Being to us, this reality is no abstract, platonic idea. It is fully personal and wholly incarnate. The person of Jesus is the revelation of the person of God. And the gospel, which is the continuous extension of his teaching and presence, reveals the priority of the personal over all secondary, institutional forms. An extraordinary discovery is waiting to be made. It is that the goal of each person’s pilgrimage is the transcendent completion of each person realized in Jesus. We are made one with him who is one with God.


Monastery Without Walls, p 157

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading. Although you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy, for you are receiving the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.


1 Peter 1.3-4, 8-9 (NRSV)

matrix
 
 
borne
unseen
unheard
untombed
unheard
unseen
born
 

We see reality divided into inner and outer worlds because our mind is divided. As the etymology of the word implies, religion ‘relinks’ us to the power that brings life to its destined fullness, which is its wholeness. We see with the vision of God. We see the same presence of God shining with supreme, benevolent simplicity in both the mental and material dimensions. The presence of God is never a partial revelation of love. Wherever God is God is wholly present. This is the human ability to be only ‘half-there’ because of our divided, distracted nature. Do we not know this only too well from the sad experience of being with someone who is evidently not as present to us as we are to them; or of being unable to concentrate on what we are doing? To meditate is to know the value of paying complete attention to whatever we are doing or to whomever we are with.


Monastery Without Walls, pp 175-176

While they were talking, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.” They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost. He said to them, “Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.” And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet.


Luke 24.36-40 (NRSV)

complete
 
 
nothing missing
nothing ghostly or apart
peace
has hands and feet
no need to fear
no need to doubt
see touch
touch see
be here
 

We celebrate Easter liturgically over a few days but we discover its meaning throughout a lifetime. Every year I celebrate it I hear these words of St Paul read out during the vigil service and their meaning becomes sharper and more real, more urgent and also more mysterious.
 
By baptism we were buried with him, and lay dead, in order that, as Christ was raised from the dead in the splendour of the Father, so also we might set our feet upon the new path of life. (Romans 6.4)
 
To know this is what it means to be a Christian, not just a member of a church or sect but a joyful personal disciple. It means knowing that this ‘new path of life’ is already opened up for us because of the energies set free within all humanity by the Resurrection. From one point of view we may see only the same tired, worn, old paths. But if the Resurrection energy has touched us and if we have touched it in our hearts, the new path stands out brilliantly as a new way of living that transcends all the old ways. As the snows of winter melted in our garden here, a carpet of brown, withered leaves from last fall was exposed. As we raked them away we found that the soil was covered with young green shoots pushing up from the earth with the irrepressible energy of new life. We have to penetrate beyond the surface to make contact with the new life of the Resurrection.


Monastery Without Walls, p 200

For thus said the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel: In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength. Therefore the Lord waits to be gracious to you; therefore he will rise up to show mercy to you. For the Lord is a God of justice; blessed are all those who wait for him. Your Teacher will not hide himself any more, but your eyes shall see your Teacher. And when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left, your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying, “This is the way; walk in it.”


Isaiah 30.17-18, 20-21 (NRSV)

pathway
 
 
i see
the teacher
clear away a path
from here and now
to there and then
i hear
the teacher’s whisper rise
this path
this way
 

The mystery surrounding Jesus was perceptible from the beginning of his life. Not until his death and resurrection, however, could it be fully apprehended, fully known, because not until then was it complete. Our life does not come to full unity until it transcends itself and all limitations by passing through death. This is why we do not fully comprehend the mystery of Christ, through which we enter the mystery of God, until our own life is complete. We begin to enter it as soon as consciousness stirs into perception and learns the laws of reality by learning to love and be loved. But in this life we are always learning, always preparing for the fullness that eventually comes to us all.


Monastery Without Walls, p 222

So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.


Colossians 3.1-4 (NRSV)

revelation
 
 
it will be
a revelation
in the meantime
a seeking
and a minding
a dying
and a hiding
a life learning how
to be revealed
 

John Main texts are from Monastery Without Walls edited by Laurence Freeman © Canterbury Press 2006

Biblical texts are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible. Used by permission; all rights reserved worldwide. © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America.

Reflective lectio wordings © Mark Ball 2022