Hi Maureen,

Although I'm not saying wikipedia is the best authority for Catholic orthodoxy, if any of what is in this article is true, I would be VERY concerned.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Main

You said:
It was this prayer group that brought my sister back to the Catholic Church after being away for thirty years. In fact it was my sister who told me about it. And my sister is one of the most devout Catholics I know.

My test on evaluating various, so-called "Catholic Christian" prayer groups follows this pattern:

Are they:

• loyal to the Holy Father and Church's Magisterium?
• Do they believe in the Real Presence (the Eucharist)? and
• Do they have a devotion to Our Blessed Mother?

If they don't, your sister's perception of what is devout, may be misplaced. What I see in the spirituality of "Fr. John Mains" is more new-age stuff, e.g. saying mantras.

I strongly recommend you stay away from this stuff.

If you wish to meditate on something, meditate on the Gospels and the Life of Jesus and Mary.
The best way to do this is by saying the Holy Rosary.

Too many times, new-age meditation, centers on self, instead of our Salvation: Jesus.
When new-age meditation drains everything from our soul, it allows the devil to easily step in.

Talk to your local priest or pastor about starting a Rosary group at your local Church or get involved with others to pray the Rosary.

Hope this helps,

Mike

Hi Maureen,

There is a place for meditative prayer in the Christian tradition, but one must avoid the practices that come from Eastern pagan religions.

Christian prayer involves a focus on God, filling oneself with God, not emptying oneself of everything as in the pagan practice, since emptying oneself can leave a void that hostile spiritual powers can fill. Also, the Christian prays without reaching out and seeking spiritual experiences, which again can find hostile and deceptive spiritual powers. (Remember, Scripture says even Satan can masquerade as an angel of light.) See, God is God, and God is personal, and if he wishes us to have delightful, warm, fuzzy, spiritual experiences or mystical unions or what have you, it is by His sovereign will, and they cannot be approached in a formulaic manner. We must not treat God as a machine we manipulate to get what we want. Spiritual consolations, as they are called, are purely a grace from God.

Think of it this way: It's like the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden. God asked Adam and Eve not to touch it. They did, and they died. Had they not reached out their faithless hands and touched it, likely God would have plucked the fruit for them and handed it to them in his own time. So it is with mystical experiences.

There is a good radio program you should listen to, at least one particular call to it, and that is my call. The show is Catholic Answers Live <http://www.catholic.com/radio/calendar.php>; go to Search on the right side and put in Show ID CA3256. Listen about twenty minutes in (I am the first caller though there is a bit of intro). The guest addresses this question of meditation and Catholicism.

Hope this helps!

Eric

Hi Maureen,

I want to address the last portion of your last reply. I've sent a CC to some of my colleagues for their comments. I did read through a portion of the John Mains CM home page.

After reading the paragraph on the home page it appears that the John Main Prayer Association sees their type of "meditation" as becoming one as God, instead of the Catholic view of partaking in the Divine nature of God through the Eucharist.

The Catholic view: We are human, but can partake in Divine nature.
Their apparent view: Through mediation, you can become divine nature yourself.

Note: They make NO mention at all about the Eucharist. This is key to any understanding of true Christianity.

RE: Your follow-up reply: The difference between a mantra and repeating the divine chaplet of mercy or the rosary, is that the Catholic acknowledges a difference between himself/herself and God.

They don't appear to make that distinction. We pray to God. They appear to pray to acknowledge God within them through their mantra. Because there is no mention of the Eucharist in their material, God and Self become one. In my opinion, this is just another false Christ, Jesus warned us about.

Your short devotional utterances are great!

Why? Because they acknowledge the Savior Jesus Christ.

Mike

Hi, Mike--

Thanks for sharing your dialogue so far with me.

There have been various efforts to put Eastern-style meditation forms into God's service as part of Catholic Christian prayer, and John Main's "Christian Meditation" is one.

If I understand him right, he steers clear of the erroneous thinking that would blur the distinction between God and His human creatures. Rather, man is a creature and God is the "ground of our being", the One who gives us existence. He wanted believers to sense this constant gift from God through meditation and be aware of it always.

My opinion so far is that John Main's approach is perhaps the best of the various Christian meditation movements (e.g., Centering prayer, "Christian Zen", the writings of Anthony DeMello, etc.). I can't really say with confidence that he did or didn't run into errors here or there in his writings, 'cause I've only read one of his books. My impression, though, is that he was too optimistic in seeing similarities between Eastern meditation and the prayer forms of Church Fathers such as St. John Cassian.

Fortunately, the Church gave some guidance in 1989 about the Christian principles that the Church considers in evaluating any form of Christian meditation, in this document from CDF, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith; that is, the Vatican department Cardinal Ratzinger headed before he was elected Pope:

http://www.catholicculture.org/library/view.cfm?recnum=2932
OR
http://www.ewtn.com/library/CURIA/CDFMED.HTM

The document addresses positive aspects of meditation methods and also various points where Eastern-style meditation can be a mere psychological technique rather than be a true prayer, or may even be in conflict with authentic Christian prayer -- for example, if meditation brings our attention to withdraw within the self, rather than seek union with God through Jesus Christ.

We should consider how a spiritual approach relates to the doctrine of the Incarnation: are there possible errors from seeking to let go of images of God? Our Lord has been revealed as the image of the Father, so if a meditation approach takes a too-negative attitude toward images, it may lead us to neglect God revealed in Jesus, the incarnate Word, the Way, Truth, and Life. Does an Eastern meditation approach come with thinking that disparages the material world? If so, it could lead us to disregard the goodness of creation, including the dignity of the human body; and also the role of the Sacraments as means of encountering God and His grace.

I don't have any knowledge on whether John Main's method ever fell into any of these errors, but I did want to indicate the sort of issues involved in discerning the value and trustworthiness of forms of meditation. Maureen knows Main's thinking better than we do, I'm sure, so she can take some time to consider the ideas in the CDF document and thus have a stronger basis for discernment.

Let us entrust ourselves always to the Sacred Heart of Jesus!

--RC

Hi Richard,

Thanks for the two cents.

I'm open to correction, but I've always considered stuff like:

Centering prayer, "Christian Zen", and the writings of Anthony DeMello

way off bounds from what the Magisterium would allow or wish for practicing Catholics to get involved in. I think that was the point you were trying to make.\\

Mike

Hi Mike,

The CDF went so far as to issue an explicit warning about the writings of Anthony DeMello, so there is definitely some erroneous aspect to his works!

--RC

Dear Mike:

Indeed, you have good cause to be concerned.  I had my friend look into this, and she notes that John Main is a heretic and a New Ager.  She went to Amazon and looked inside one of his books. “John Main: Essential Writings”.

As you know Catholic Culture has been providing Catholic Internet users with qualified reviews of Catholic web sites since 1996. Here is our review of World Community for Christian Meditation:

https://www.catholicculture.org/reviews/view.cfm?recnum=3945

For each site we show its strengthens and weaknesses. At the bottom of our review for this web site are some great article:

• A Closer Look at Centering Prayer
• Centering Prayer Meets the Vatican
• The Danger of Centering Prayer

Hope this helps,

God Bless you!

Kay Reilly from Catholic Culture

Hi, Mike and Maureen--

I looked at the book's content on Amazon, as Kay indicated. Sad to say, I do think there are some problems about the passage from Main that she quoted. He downplays the significance of religious doctrine, treating it as merely something that we believe, rather than as Truth that God reveals to us.

John Main: Essential Writings (Modern Spiritual Masters Series)

Chapter 5: Embracing the Word - middle of Page 168

I recently took part in a huge Catholic conference at the Anaheim Conference Center in southern California. It was an extraordinary experience in many ways. There were about eighteen thousand people participating, all, it seemed to me, seriously interested in deepening the Christian dimension of their lives.

They were responding, I suppose, in a typically Catholic way. Each evening I would get little notes under my door saying "the Sacred Heart invites you to drinks in room 1222, " or "the Little Flower will have a happy hour tomorrow evening.' Yet I was deeply moved by the last group I spoke to which consisted of about 8000 people. We all meditated together, and their openness to become so silent was really inspiring.

My time there made me feel that the great problem we face today is one of commitment. For the Christian this often seems to be a question of committing oneself to certain beliefs or the behavior based on those beliefs. Much of our religious response is indeed based primarily upon our beliefs. But I have come to feel that what we "believe' is not really that important. Belief is like the tip of the iceberg. What matters is faith. For the Christian this means our deep commitment to Christ to the point of self-transcendence, at the very bedrock of our being.

When I was studying eucharistic theology the key word was "transubstantiation." Since then all sorts of words, including "transfinalization," have been proposed by theologians as more suitable for portraying what it means. Words define beliefs. Words change. And so beliefs change. Beliefs are certainly secondary to faith, which does not change. This is our faith -- meaning our transcendental commitment-- to Jesus Christ. The task of life is to make contact with this faith, to reach what is essential by going beyond everything that is peripheral. The clear message of the New Testament is that Jesus Christ is essential and that what he communicates to us is his essence--his own being.

Main is trying to communicate an authentic truth that St. Paul taught:

that faith and love are more important than knowledge.

but he seems to be influenced by a philosophical tendency of the time, to downplay the notion of unchangeable doctrine. Some philosophers spoke as if the intellect of man, even man redeemed in Christ, were utterly incapable of receiving divine reality, as if every statement of doctrine had to be treated as only provisional. This comes from an exaggerated notion of what humility is. These philosophers spoke as if God himself could not communicate divine realities to man in a reliable way.

This is a form of doubt about divine revelation. Historically, this doubt is part of the heretical system which the Church calls "modernism". Popes around 1890-1910 fought it vigorously, but it regained some influence after 1950, and was widespread in the 1960s and 1970s when Main was writing. Now, I wouldn't go so far as to call Main a heretic, but he does express some erroneous ideas here.

Regards--

--RC