| CHRISTIAN MEDITATION AS AN ELEVENTH STEP PRACTICE |
The World Community for Christian Meditation 11th Step Practice St. Mark's, Myddelton Square London EC1R 1XX England, UK +44 0207 278 2070 Email: info@christianmeditation11step.org www.christianmeditation11step.org |
| I find it easier to meditate with others than on my own, and welcome every opportunity to do so; is it not paradoxical that something as simple as a word into silence should be so difficult to do, difficult in the same way that something as simple as not drinking or using is so difficult, so great is our addiction to doing rather than being? |
It is one of the glorious fortuities of the English language that ‘spirituality’,
‘sobriety’, and ‘serenity’ all begin with S and end in Y.
I need meditation to stay sober, yet, had I not become sober, I would not be able
to meditate.
As I sit here writing this on Easter Monday 2007, nearly fifty years of age and six
and a half years sober, I look back on a life most of which has been governed by,
among others, the ruling passions for God and alcohol. (The others have been – are!
– politics, money and sex, but this is not the place for them.)
I ‘became a Christian’ in my teens. Reading, one summer on exchange in Germany,
the Gideons New Testament I had been given at school, made me want to know
more about Jesus, and to that end, I decided, I would have to start going to
church. That is what I did. And I kept coming back, as one might say.
By the time I was in my twenties, and had found my way into the Anglo-Catholic
wing of the Church of England (having been confirmed in the chapel of my
Cambridge college while an undergraduate) my life was characterised by the
practice of both the Christian religion and incipient alcoholism. In my twenties, I
drank aggressively socially, never passing up the chance for a party, manically
joining clubs and societies to stave off loneliness and have an excuse for a drink or
three, while it was in my thirties that I began to drink anti-socially – all this
combined with what looked like zealous Anglican (is that a contradiction?)
Christianity – Mass on Sundays and a couple of times a week, not to mention the
high and splendid feast days that the Church afforded, Evensong and Benediction
(especially Benediction – a love for which has remained with me, for did not
Kenneth Leech describe it as the archetypal service for the outsider?). And, lest it
be thought that I was merely an archetypal Anglo-Catholic ‘spike’, there was a real
desire for spirituality, for ever since my Cambridge days I had discovered the
pleasure of going away on retreat, of getting away from distractions (or at least
the usual distractions – there were always others!) to be somewhere where I might
stand a chance of making real contact with God, of finding the answer to how to
be what He wanted me to be rather than the deeply inadequate and unsatisfactory
‘me’ that I certainly didn’t like and didn’t believe it possible that he could love. I
would make a rule of going on retreat once a year (and, yes, it was nice to stay
somewhere within walking distance of a pub or a shop, so I could pop out for a
livener or smuggle in the odd bottle of Scotch!).
Although I found silence in these places, I’m not at all sure that I really prayed. I
would participate in the offices, listen to the addresses, rather obsessively pray
the rosary in the hope that something would ‘take’ and resort to any handy
retreat-house or monastery library to escape into a book. Yet I knew that I
wanted to pray. I knew that other people did it. Some of them could talk
articulately about it. I envied them. I feared that I could never be like them, that –
unlike them – I was not actually good enough for God, not actually good enough
for God to reveal Himself to, to want to be known and loved by. It didn’t stop me
trying. I tried the Rosary – obsessively, for I have never mastered the trick of
imagining Biblical scenes while praying it, and imagined that if I did it ‘enough’,
then something would happen, that I would ‘have a spiritual experience’. For
years on end, I was fairly assiduous in saying morning and evening prayer from the
Daily Office, which may have given me the satisfying feeling that I had done my
duty to God my distant employer, but it certainly didn’t do anything else. I tried
the Jesus Prayer – very difficult without a chotki, which I acquired very recently
in sobriety while on holiday in Estonia, and wouldn’t have known how to get my
hands on then even if I’d known what one was.
Somewhere along the way, I read (I think in the Catholic Herald) about Christian
meditation and Father John Main. I certainly got some leaflets about it, read
them, tried it. It ‘didn’t work’ How could it, I now realise, when I wanted it to ‘do
something’, to give me a kick, to produce instant results, and that at a time when
half my mind (at least half my mind!) was fixed, not on God, but on the next drink?
Alongside all this, too, I carried on drinking. I drank myself out of dwellings shared
with people who (rightly) found my behaviour intolerable, drank myself out of a
succession of jobs, in each of which I earned less than in its predecessor; drank
myself through psychotherapists and counsellors, into AA, where I thought that
one meeting a week without sharing anything of myself would ‘work’, and out of
it again after my mother’s death, when that belief was proved wrong. At length, I
drank my way into a treatment centre for a five-week respite from the world, and
thence into AA again, since when I have not had a drink, thanks be to God.
It was when contending with the stresses and strains of the world post-treatment
and in early sobriety that I began to discover how sobriety and spirituality would,
for me, be interconnected.
There had been a lot of talk in the treatment centre about things called
‘resentments’, and it was when I got out into the real world that I began to
discover what they were. At one of the first meetings that I went to after getting
out of the bin, someone shared about the use of the ‘resentments prayer’. She was
one of these people who can refer to it by its page number in the Big Book; I’m
not, so I won’t, but it immediately struck me as making perfectly good sense
(wasn’t this what our Lord had been talking about when he talked about praying
for those who mistreat us?) and also as just what I needed under my then
circumstances, when I had enormous resentments against my father on the grounds
of things he had done in past and of the way he was being ‘difficult’ in my early
sobriety, and also – as I had had for many years – against a man who had sexually
interfered with me when I was young, and whom I had tended to blame for my
alcoholism.
What was I to do? I didn’t fancy praying for either of them, but I knew someone
who could – Mary, the Mother of God, who had abandoned herself most perfectly
to the will of God – so I went and got myself a rosary and used it; not in the
traditional way, but offering her each decade and asking her to pray for others
whom I needed to pray for but could not, asking that they might receive whatever
good God had in store for them. I did that for those two persons for a year on a
daily basis. I stayed sober. That is how I still use the rosary today.
It was at (or rather before) that same lunchtime meeting in Buckinghamshire that I
discovered how to meditate. I must have been a few months sober by then. This
meeting is held in a church hall, and on this particular day, I had arrived over an
hour early, so I slipped into the church itself and sat down. Why not, I thought –
after doing my rosary resentment prayers – try that Christian meditation thing I
used to be interested in? How did it go? Ma-ra-na-tha, wasn’t it? (Remembering Fr
John’s story about the Irish lady who accidentally used ‘Macushla’ as her mantra, I
find myself wondering whether recovering drug addicts catch themselves
accidentally saying ‘marijuana’- but I digress.)
Yes, that was it. So I did it. And I did it again. And again. And again. For over half
an hour, in a way I had never done before (and to be honest, have never quite
managed since) I meditated. If there is a star rating system for mystical
experiences, this probably ranked at about six candles, but it was unprecedented
by my standards. I had never experienced anything like it before and words fail
me when I try to describe it, so I won’t other than to say that, for once, God was,
and I was, and it was good, and someone (Mother Mary?) was speaking words of
wisdom, saying, ‘let it be’, and so I did.
If this was meditation, I thought, I want more of it. I still do – is it not
characteristic of the addict to want more, to want never to come down from the
mountain top, and is this perhaps why we are told to keep strict time limits on
our meditation? And I have sought more of it; although I do not live in London, I
try to get to the addiction-oriented meditation session at St Mark’s, Myddelton
Square, whenever I possibly can, and an ‘ordinary’ Christian meditation group has
started up in my home town, which I try to get to as often as possible (it clashes
with the AA meeting of which I am currently GSR!). I find it easier to meditate
with others than on my own, and welcome every opportunity to do so; is it not
paradoxical that something as simple as a word into silence should be so difficult
to do, difficult in the same way that something as simple as not drinking or using
is so difficult, so great is our addiction to doing rather than being?
If asked what the value of meditation is in terms of sobriety, I would say – and this
cannot be other than a personal answer, with which most people in AA disagree –
that it has taught me how to ‘let it be’, how to stop interfering with the way the
world is run, and to simply rest, curled up on the lap of God the Father. It has
brought me back to the Church from which my drinking had alienated me; both it
and sobriety together have enabled me to appreciate that God is not an employer
(the Managing Director or Sales Manager of the Universe?) who demands of me
more than I can give, but the One who loves me and desires only that I should be
sober and happy and share that happiness with others. It is enabling me to accept
things and people as they are rather than rebel against them, to realise that all
manner of things shall be well and indeed already are. It is making me strong
minded; in my experience – and I judge particularly by the comments I get when I
share about this from the chair in meetings – most people in AA are sceptical
about the value of prayer and meditation, and, indeed, hostile towards anything
that they cannot categorise as ‘the programme as originally written down and
practised’. I used to be a people-pleaser; I no longer am, nor do I care what they
think. If their programme works for them, then I am delighted, and the fact that I
am still sober and writing this is evidence enough for me that mine does as well
for me. My programme is one of acceptance, willingness to serve my neighbour
(whether alcoholic or not) whenever called upon to do so, and of gratitude to
Jesus Christ, my Higher Power, who made the lame to run, gave the blind their
sight, raised his friend Lazarus from the tomb, and keeps me sober from day to
day. PRAISE HIM.
Andrew W.S., U.K.
‘sobriety’, and ‘serenity’ all begin with S and end in Y.
I need meditation to stay sober, yet, had I not become sober, I would not be able
to meditate.
As I sit here writing this on Easter Monday 2007, nearly fifty years of age and six
and a half years sober, I look back on a life most of which has been governed by,
among others, the ruling passions for God and alcohol. (The others have been – are!
– politics, money and sex, but this is not the place for them.)
I ‘became a Christian’ in my teens. Reading, one summer on exchange in Germany,
the Gideons New Testament I had been given at school, made me want to know
more about Jesus, and to that end, I decided, I would have to start going to
church. That is what I did. And I kept coming back, as one might say.
By the time I was in my twenties, and had found my way into the Anglo-Catholic
wing of the Church of England (having been confirmed in the chapel of my
Cambridge college while an undergraduate) my life was characterised by the
practice of both the Christian religion and incipient alcoholism. In my twenties, I
drank aggressively socially, never passing up the chance for a party, manically
joining clubs and societies to stave off loneliness and have an excuse for a drink or
three, while it was in my thirties that I began to drink anti-socially – all this
combined with what looked like zealous Anglican (is that a contradiction?)
Christianity – Mass on Sundays and a couple of times a week, not to mention the
high and splendid feast days that the Church afforded, Evensong and Benediction
(especially Benediction – a love for which has remained with me, for did not
Kenneth Leech describe it as the archetypal service for the outsider?). And, lest it
be thought that I was merely an archetypal Anglo-Catholic ‘spike’, there was a real
desire for spirituality, for ever since my Cambridge days I had discovered the
pleasure of going away on retreat, of getting away from distractions (or at least
the usual distractions – there were always others!) to be somewhere where I might
stand a chance of making real contact with God, of finding the answer to how to
be what He wanted me to be rather than the deeply inadequate and unsatisfactory
‘me’ that I certainly didn’t like and didn’t believe it possible that he could love. I
would make a rule of going on retreat once a year (and, yes, it was nice to stay
somewhere within walking distance of a pub or a shop, so I could pop out for a
livener or smuggle in the odd bottle of Scotch!).
Although I found silence in these places, I’m not at all sure that I really prayed. I
would participate in the offices, listen to the addresses, rather obsessively pray
the rosary in the hope that something would ‘take’ and resort to any handy
retreat-house or monastery library to escape into a book. Yet I knew that I
wanted to pray. I knew that other people did it. Some of them could talk
articulately about it. I envied them. I feared that I could never be like them, that –
unlike them – I was not actually good enough for God, not actually good enough
for God to reveal Himself to, to want to be known and loved by. It didn’t stop me
trying. I tried the Rosary – obsessively, for I have never mastered the trick of
imagining Biblical scenes while praying it, and imagined that if I did it ‘enough’,
then something would happen, that I would ‘have a spiritual experience’. For
years on end, I was fairly assiduous in saying morning and evening prayer from the
Daily Office, which may have given me the satisfying feeling that I had done my
duty to God my distant employer, but it certainly didn’t do anything else. I tried
the Jesus Prayer – very difficult without a chotki, which I acquired very recently
in sobriety while on holiday in Estonia, and wouldn’t have known how to get my
hands on then even if I’d known what one was.
Somewhere along the way, I read (I think in the Catholic Herald) about Christian
meditation and Father John Main. I certainly got some leaflets about it, read
them, tried it. It ‘didn’t work’ How could it, I now realise, when I wanted it to ‘do
something’, to give me a kick, to produce instant results, and that at a time when
half my mind (at least half my mind!) was fixed, not on God, but on the next drink?
Alongside all this, too, I carried on drinking. I drank myself out of dwellings shared
with people who (rightly) found my behaviour intolerable, drank myself out of a
succession of jobs, in each of which I earned less than in its predecessor; drank
myself through psychotherapists and counsellors, into AA, where I thought that
one meeting a week without sharing anything of myself would ‘work’, and out of
it again after my mother’s death, when that belief was proved wrong. At length, I
drank my way into a treatment centre for a five-week respite from the world, and
thence into AA again, since when I have not had a drink, thanks be to God.
It was when contending with the stresses and strains of the world post-treatment
and in early sobriety that I began to discover how sobriety and spirituality would,
for me, be interconnected.
There had been a lot of talk in the treatment centre about things called
‘resentments’, and it was when I got out into the real world that I began to
discover what they were. At one of the first meetings that I went to after getting
out of the bin, someone shared about the use of the ‘resentments prayer’. She was
one of these people who can refer to it by its page number in the Big Book; I’m
not, so I won’t, but it immediately struck me as making perfectly good sense
(wasn’t this what our Lord had been talking about when he talked about praying
for those who mistreat us?) and also as just what I needed under my then
circumstances, when I had enormous resentments against my father on the grounds
of things he had done in past and of the way he was being ‘difficult’ in my early
sobriety, and also – as I had had for many years – against a man who had sexually
interfered with me when I was young, and whom I had tended to blame for my
alcoholism.
What was I to do? I didn’t fancy praying for either of them, but I knew someone
who could – Mary, the Mother of God, who had abandoned herself most perfectly
to the will of God – so I went and got myself a rosary and used it; not in the
traditional way, but offering her each decade and asking her to pray for others
whom I needed to pray for but could not, asking that they might receive whatever
good God had in store for them. I did that for those two persons for a year on a
daily basis. I stayed sober. That is how I still use the rosary today.
It was at (or rather before) that same lunchtime meeting in Buckinghamshire that I
discovered how to meditate. I must have been a few months sober by then. This
meeting is held in a church hall, and on this particular day, I had arrived over an
hour early, so I slipped into the church itself and sat down. Why not, I thought –
after doing my rosary resentment prayers – try that Christian meditation thing I
used to be interested in? How did it go? Ma-ra-na-tha, wasn’t it? (Remembering Fr
John’s story about the Irish lady who accidentally used ‘Macushla’ as her mantra, I
find myself wondering whether recovering drug addicts catch themselves
accidentally saying ‘marijuana’- but I digress.)
Yes, that was it. So I did it. And I did it again. And again. And again. For over half
an hour, in a way I had never done before (and to be honest, have never quite
managed since) I meditated. If there is a star rating system for mystical
experiences, this probably ranked at about six candles, but it was unprecedented
by my standards. I had never experienced anything like it before and words fail
me when I try to describe it, so I won’t other than to say that, for once, God was,
and I was, and it was good, and someone (Mother Mary?) was speaking words of
wisdom, saying, ‘let it be’, and so I did.
If this was meditation, I thought, I want more of it. I still do – is it not
characteristic of the addict to want more, to want never to come down from the
mountain top, and is this perhaps why we are told to keep strict time limits on
our meditation? And I have sought more of it; although I do not live in London, I
try to get to the addiction-oriented meditation session at St Mark’s, Myddelton
Square, whenever I possibly can, and an ‘ordinary’ Christian meditation group has
started up in my home town, which I try to get to as often as possible (it clashes
with the AA meeting of which I am currently GSR!). I find it easier to meditate
with others than on my own, and welcome every opportunity to do so; is it not
paradoxical that something as simple as a word into silence should be so difficult
to do, difficult in the same way that something as simple as not drinking or using
is so difficult, so great is our addiction to doing rather than being?
If asked what the value of meditation is in terms of sobriety, I would say – and this
cannot be other than a personal answer, with which most people in AA disagree –
that it has taught me how to ‘let it be’, how to stop interfering with the way the
world is run, and to simply rest, curled up on the lap of God the Father. It has
brought me back to the Church from which my drinking had alienated me; both it
and sobriety together have enabled me to appreciate that God is not an employer
(the Managing Director or Sales Manager of the Universe?) who demands of me
more than I can give, but the One who loves me and desires only that I should be
sober and happy and share that happiness with others. It is enabling me to accept
things and people as they are rather than rebel against them, to realise that all
manner of things shall be well and indeed already are. It is making me strong
minded; in my experience – and I judge particularly by the comments I get when I
share about this from the chair in meetings – most people in AA are sceptical
about the value of prayer and meditation, and, indeed, hostile towards anything
that they cannot categorise as ‘the programme as originally written down and
practised’. I used to be a people-pleaser; I no longer am, nor do I care what they
think. If their programme works for them, then I am delighted, and the fact that I
am still sober and writing this is evidence enough for me that mine does as well
for me. My programme is one of acceptance, willingness to serve my neighbour
(whether alcoholic or not) whenever called upon to do so, and of gratitude to
Jesus Christ, my Higher Power, who made the lame to run, gave the blind their
sight, raised his friend Lazarus from the tomb, and keeps me sober from day to
day. PRAISE HIM.
Andrew W.S., U.K.
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