John Main

Before he was a monk, John Main trained and practiced as a lawyer and then entered Britain's colonial diplomatic service, which posted him to Malaya in the 1950s. There, attached to the office of a colonial governor, he met Swami Satyananda, an Indian monk and Justice of the Peace, who taught him a simple form of meditation centered on the silent, continuous repetition of a single sacred word or phrase, a practice Main described later as unlike anything in his own Catholic upbringing yet, once he examined it, deeply consonant with the tradition of Christian contemplative prayer he began studying more seriously afterward.

He entered the Benedictine community at Ealing Abbey in London in 1958 and was ordained a priest, but for some years set the meditation practice itself aside, occupied instead with more conventional monastic duties, including a period teaching law at Trinity College, Dublin, at his order's direction.

He returned to the practice in the 1970s, this time explicitly reframing it within a Christian devotional vocabulary rather than presenting it as an imported technique, and became convinced that a discipline of silent, word centered meditation, far from being foreign to Christianity, recovered something present in the early Christian contemplative tradition, particularly in the teaching of the fourth century monk John Cassian, that Main believed later Western Christianity had largely lost touch with in practice even where it remained present in theory.

In 1975 John Main opened the first Christian Meditation Centre at his own monastery in London, teaching lay people as well as monks a simple structure of two daily periods of silent meditation built around the continuous inward repetition of a single word, for which he recommended the Aramaic phrase Maranatha, come, Lord, an expression that appears in the New Testament itself and that Main valued partly because its unfamiliar syllables in English kept the mind from latching onto discursive meaning while repeating it.

The approach spread through public teaching and through Main's own writing, and in 1977 he accepted an invitation from the Archbishop of Montreal to establish a Benedictine priory there built specifically around this ministry, relocating to Canada to lead it until his death from cancer in 1982. His student and successor Laurence Freeman continued the work after Main's death, formally establishing the World Community for Christian Meditation as an international, ecumenical network of meditation groups drawing on Main's teaching, an organization that has continued to grow in the decades since and that describes itself as continuing rather than concluding the work Main began. The practice as Main and his successors teach it is presented consistently as a form of Christian contemplative prayer rather than as a technique detached from that tradition, and instruction is offered openly through the World Community's own network rather than as restricted or proprietary knowledge.