The Heart of Creation - John Main

Re-reading the new edition of The Heart of Creation by John Main is like retrieving a beautiful crystal vase from the back of the cupboard. You haven’t looked at it for awhile and suddenly you see again its many facets of beauty, skill, and practicality. You wonder why you ever put it away for all that time when its richness is so evident. So it is with The Heart of Creation, a collection of talks John Main gave to meditators during the weekly meetings at the Priory in Montreal during the late 1970’s and early ‘80’s. The relevance and power of his teachings are fresh, challenging, uplifting and nourishing. Over and over you realize the liberation, clarity and rootedness each short talk offers the reader who sets out on the simple path of Christian meditation. You are drawn into the gift of meditation by John Main’s insight into the hunger we all experience for meaning and purpose. Here is an authentic teacher with personal conviction, love and compassion showing you a path that leads to self-knowledge, joy and simplicity. He is not teaching to make you comfortable nor to escape from a wounded world but rather John Main is encouraging you to plumb the expansive depths of your life in God and offer it in service to God’s world. “… we come to understand that the great work in life is to communicate this love, to help others to see by its light.” Re-reading The Heart of Creation deepens your commitment to and appreciation for the gift of Christian meditation. If you are reading it for the first time, you will find it like the crystal vase – sparkling with many facets of wisdom. You will find encouragement, strength, liberation and much more. The teaching in The Heart of Creation is an invitation into a way of life that is expansive, loving and fulfilling through the simple, twice-daily practice of silence and stillness and the repetition of a prayer word. The reprinting of this book and others by John Main on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of his death in 1982 is reason for deep gratitude to a great spiritual teacher. Reviewed by The Reverend Glenda Meakin Stratford, Ontario