Journeying up to the Wistaston Retreat Centre, Crewe, on a sunny Friday afternoon, I felt a sense of real contentment and gratitude about the weekend ahead. Grateful for the many things that led to this point, and content that I was making space for this.
Indeed, for me, “making space” was a theme that threaded through the entire weekend. It showed up on our first evening, as Liz invited us to share our own meditation journeys with the group, then to make space in the silence for us to hold all that was shared. It showed up on our last morning, as Mark celebrated the eucharist, slowing down the liturgy to give space for us to contemplate the holy, to honour the risen Christ, the Christ within us. And it showed up on many occasions in between.
The weekend was a wonderful balance between learning, practising, and meditating together, in a peaceful and welcoming setting. The learning sessions covered the history of Christian meditation from the desert fathers to John Main, rooted in Jesus’s own teaching in Mark’s gospel. Metaphor, symbol, and bite-sized phrases were taught to help us in our own meditation practice: thinking of your mantra as a “radar bleep” and recalling the three basic elements of meditation as “3 S’s” (silence, stillness, and simplicity), were just two. Looking at our practice over time as a journey and some of the issues we encounter was discussed and taught, drawing on wisdom from Christian contemplatives ranging from Evagrius and Dorotheos, to Teresa d’Avila and St John of the Cross. Learning about how to share the gift of meditation saw us working in smaller groups to prepare and then present, a talk on teaching and starting a meditation group. The practical followed by discussion, provided wonderful insights into how we could share this gift in our own unique ways, with others.
Our group meditation sessions, and the liturgy of morning prayer, were for me, the heartbeat of the weekend; sacred spaces made for being still, for resting in the source of Love, for offering up my feebly human attempts to ignore my ego and allow God to be God. As a waypoint along my own meditation journey, the Essential Teaching weekend was revealing, restorative, expansive and spacious in a way that only silence can be.
Anna Appleton-Cole