Die Financial Times is een van die wereld se mees toonaangewende dagblaaie met uitmuntende joernalistieke integriteit en insig. Ek lees die koerant graag.
In vandag se uitgawe is daar 'n onderhoud met Laurence Freeman, een van die bekendste spiritualiteitskrywers van ons tyd en veral bekend in verband met sy wereldwye meditasie-beweging. Dit is 'n boeiende onderhoud, waarvan ek slegs enkele paragrawe wil aanhaal - want die koerant vra dat 'n mens nie hulle artikels sny-plak nie. Dit is 'n insiggewende verhaal, wat iets vertel van die rol wat die Christendom in mense se lewens speel. Wat opvallend is, is hoe Freeman invloed uitoefen op sommige bekende besigheidsleiers van ons tyd, soos blyk uit hierdie onderhoud.
The head of an international ‘monastery without walls’, Laurence Freeman wants to reinsert contemplation into the melancholy heart of organised western religion. Twenty years ago he helped to found the World Community for Christian Meditation (WCCM), and is the director of its global community of 2,000 meditation groups in 114 countries.
Freeman brims with relish in this donnish parsing of a word made up 1,500 years ago. It is also a nod at the theology he can deploy to support Christianity’s almost hidden meditative tradition. The practice dates back almost 2,000 years to the Desert Fathers and Mothers, a fairly anarchic monastic movement that flourished in northern Egypt and Palestine, and through to modern Christian contemplatives such as Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk and author of the bestselling autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), and Benedictine sages such as John Main (1926-1982), who reinvigorated the meditative tradition now carried on by his mentee, Freeman.
Freeman was born in London in 1951 and his upbringing was Roman Catholic in faith and culture – although “nothing fanatical”, he says. The school he attended, St Benedict’s in Ealing, was also “only conventionally and superficially religious”. Main, then a monk at Ealing Abbey, was one of Freeman’s schoolteachers.
I am curious why an Asian statesman such as Lee Kuan Yew should have turned to Christian mediation, and ask Freeman why he thought Lee did not adopt a more eastern approach. “He said he’d tried Buddhism and failed, whereas this approach worked for him as he had a western-trained mind,” Lawrence replies, adding that a hunger for inner stillness rarely emerges quite so deliberately as it did in Singapore’s former prime minister.
“One meditator I know, who made a fortune from strip clubs and who-knows-what-else in Russia, told me the need [for stillness] came upon him while romping in Europe’s most expensive brothel, listening to a muzak version of ‘Amazing Grace’.”
I ask how Freeman realised his own vocation. After reading English literature at Oxford, “my future thrillingly insecure”, he says he thought of becoming an academic or a spy. “But several charming rounds of conversation with MI6 in an elegant house just off the Mall eventually came to nought.”
Two years followed as an investment banker, working at the now forgotten UDT International. “It wasn’t that I wanted to make money, it was more that I was curious to see how money was made. What I also saw was the quiet heroism of some people who were clearly unhappy in their work but endured it as a way to support their families.”
But banking did not suit Freeman, and in 1976 he went on a Christian retreat with his former schoolteacher, John Main, “a great and wise man, so open to the vast economy of the church and its relation to other spiritual traditions. Without him, I might well not be here.”
During the retreat, Freeman learnt how to meditate, gave up smoking, tussled with his soul, and realised how easy it is “to waste your life thinking you are doing what you really want to do”. Six months later, having lost his “competitive egomania” though still “ambitious to succeed, whatever success meant”, he left the retreat. He briefly considered journalism (he now writes a column for the Tablet, a Roman Catholic weekly) but in 1979 took his monastic vows.
He has two projects at the moment. The first is bringing meditation into Australian primary schools: some 12,000 children now participate, most, but not all, at church schools. “Children have a natural appetite for stillness,” Freeman says. “That is where the big change will take place in the 21st century or”, he adds after a pause for thought, “however long it takes.”
The second project, the “Business of Spirit”, is to introduce the benefits of meditation to business people. It kicked off with an October seminar at the John Main Centre for Meditation and Inter-religious Dialogue at Georgetown University in Washington DC. I ask how the attendees, who included policymakers and high priests of finance, could find time to meditate when their lives are so busy. “Sean Hagan, the IMF’s legal counsel, was asked just that. His answer was straightforward. Time is not the issue. As with work, when you are told to do something, or want to do it, you just do.
Freeman warms to this theme. “Perfectionism is like a virus. In religion, it can lead to fundamentalism and self-loathing. The secular equivalent is success. If you only judge yourself by success – of your job, your marriage, your children, even – you are setting yourself up for failure or a sense of inadequacy. Learning to meditate, you have to unlearn perfection and the need for success.”
Given the economic crisis, unlearning success, or rather rediscovering failure, seems especially relevant today. I ask what he makes of it all.
“Clearly, the crisis is hurting those at the bottom most,” he says. “But even at the top there is anxiety, a sense of failure and, perhaps, shame. Clearly, we have to deal with the surface turbulence and strive for the best solutions to minimise suffering and preserve justice. However, the depths of these forces of change come close to, or actually participate in, humanity’s spiritual stratum. This means we cannot manipulate or exploit them but must strive to understand and go with them. This requires a subtlety of wisdom. It also makes one wonder if the crisis is symptomatic of broader change, a new axial age in which old assumptions and ways of living are breaking down.”
I tell him this interview will be published on Christmas Eve, and ask for his thoughts about Christmas.
“Christmas lacks religious significance for many,” he says. “But that does not mean it lacks spiritual significance; mystery lives in its silence and stillness. Then there is Christmas’s moral aspect, the giving – including the giving of oneself, which has a mystic aspect too, of giving without expecting recognition or anything in return, of letting go.”
