Dear Group Leaders and Friends in Christian Meditation,
Last week I had the privilege to be at Bonnevaux, our center for meditation and peace for the World Community for Christian Meditation. While there and since, maybe with extra sleep and more than my usual twice daily meditation, my dreams have affected me more. There has been some intensity to them. One of the dreams was a teachable vision of our need for our hearts to be changed. It was a dream of a person having significant heart issues and they needed major surgery. They weren’t getting what they needed and worse yet, the environment was dangerous, as well. As the doctor attempted to perform the operation, the medical instruments wouldn’t work properly. In the operating room, dirt was everywhere. The conditions weren’t conducive to a successful operation. Without this operation, the patient’s heart would die and as we all know, our very survival depends on our heart. At that moment, when all seemed dire, someone stepped in and took an instrument to open the chest and began the surgery that was needed to heal the heart.
Our hearts need healing. Our environment is dirty and treacherous. We need the right instruments for the personal and collective healing of our hearts. We need to risk love for our survival. Father Gerry Pierce was an Irish Catholic missionary who spent most of his life in the Philippines. He spoke of love as a decision. Love, like faith, is a decision we need to make every day of our lives. We need to be intentional in our love for others. We even need to be intentional with our love for our beloveds. It is so easy to lose our attention for those closest to us. It is also incredibly easy to remove our attention from God. Faith is not so much an idea. although our faith is composed of words, notions and intuitions. Faith ultimately is a response. Our acts of faith are a response to God’s continuous love that is shown through the life of Jesus Christ.
When I attended the school for teachers in our Christian meditation community, which is now called the Essential Teaching Workshop, we had to prepare an introductory talk on Christian meditation. When I was working on my talk, I asked a couple of the morning mass folks to sit with me in our little chapel after Mass, to listen as I presented my message. I don’t remember exactly what I said. I do remember the response that I received from one of the people in the small audience. And in that reaction, I recall that I must have used the word “training” because Marian, a woman who had lived in Boston most of her life, was now in the small Michigan town of Alma. As an obstetrics registered nurse, Marian helped birth most of the people who lived in the area for decades. Marian’s response was spot on in her thick Boston accent, “Father, you train animals. You educate human beings.” Marian, of happy memory, was right and that rings true more than ever. We need more education, particularly in love, faith and meditation. We need to follow the lead of his Holiness the Dalai Lama who put it this way:
“My wish is that, one day, formal education will pay attention to the education of the heart, teaching love, compassion, justice, forgiveness, mindfulness, tolerance and peace. This education is necessary, from kindergarten to secondary schools and universities. I mean social, emotional and ethical learning. We need a worldwide initiative for educating heart and mind in this modern age.” HHDL, LA Times, Nov 2017
In these challenging times, where our rhetoric is more and more divisive, as Christians and meditators, we need to offer the world another way.
It seems to me that we need to continue to share Christian meditation. There is a gift to the world that comes through silence, stillness and simplicity and the saying of our mantra. Every time we sit down to meditate, we are allowing love into our hearts and sharing love for the life of the world. This is a gift from our God who is love itself.
Soon we will have our national gathering of Christian meditators. It takes place Friday, October 10 — Sunday, October 12, 2025, at the Jesuit Retreat House in Parma, Ohio (near Cleveland). In these times, when there is distress and struggle, coming together as a community of love, might just be what one needs as we strive to repair hearts. Please join us. More information here.
May we each experience the presence of our God of love whose Presence is always in our midst, even when we don’t pay attention.
Warmly,
Kevin Maksym
