A Word Repeated, and a Community Built to Teach It

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.