I am really pleased to be able to announce that as part of our spirituality and wellbeing through HOST at St Mary Aldermary, we are starting up a new Monday lunch time meditation group.  As with our wednesday evening meditation group, this will use the John Main repetitive anchor word approach.  The group will last for half an hour with at least a 20 minute silent meditation.  For more information please contact here.

I am really pleased to say that Antoinette is joining our Host team of volunteers, who be assisting leading the group as well as BCP Eucharist. So please do join us if you need a break from work.  The group is open to little no or much experience of meditation.

From historical sources, the Church of St Mary Aldermary (Old Mary) is the oldest of the church buildings attributed to St Mary in the City of London.  It is likely that it was founded by Benedictine Monks from the Priory of Christchurch Canterbury, who previously held what is called ‘the gift of the Living’ regarding the appointment of Priests.  Detailed records about these early times are now lost, with the first recorded Rector named as Ernest de Berket in 1233. More recently as a Guild Church, St Mary Aldermary has had responsibilities for furthering Christian Spirituality and the vocations to the religious life.

So we the New Monastic Community of Moot, are bringing a fresh expression of Monasticism to this foundation, contributing to this ongoing tradition which has continued for over 900 years.

For more information on the Church, its history, current services and activities please see here.

We will be holding a Compline Service on Sunday 2nd January 2011 as the last Moot Worship Service in St Mary Woolnoth at 6.30pm.
The Last Stressed In the City Meditation Group will be on Weds 5th January 2011 again at 6.30pm in St Mary Woolnoth. This will be followed at 7.30pm by the last of the Enneagram workshops led by Dave Tomlinson, the third and final session.

So we hope to move the Moot Office and some of our equipment on the 8th January 2011, with services beginning on Sunday the 9th January 2011.  The Moot Eucharist Service will occur at 6.30pm. We are still awaiting information about access to the church to work out if we can proceed with the former Moot Morning Service which will shift back to its old time of 3pm, but this is still needing to be confirmed because an Asian Syrian Orthodox Church use the Church building Sunday mornings and early afternoons.

The first Moot Meditation Group will begin in St Mary Aldermary on Weds 12th January 2011 at 6.30pm.
Serum will move from the Crosse Keys Pub to the Ye Olde Watling Pub right next to the Church on Weds 12th of January 2011 at 7.30pm.

The Church currently has two lunch time Eucharist Services on Mondays (1662 Book of Common Prayer) and Thursdays (Common Worship) at 1.10pm, and we are exploring the possibility of starting up Contemplative Morning and Evening Prayer, which will be open to the public we hope from the first week in February 2011.

So this is all very exciting!!  There will be a special service to celebrate this new beginning, with the Archdeacon of London as the new Guild Church Vicar, myself as the new Mission Priest, and the Moot Community recommitting to its Rhythm of Life in its new home before the Bishop of London. This is likely to happen in the Spiring 2011.

So if you are in the Moot Community, we really need your participation in sustaining our worship, mission and community activities in the next stage of our life, and if you are outside Moot, please pray for us as we seek to develop the next stage of the community’s vision.

In this Reflection Series of the Moot Community Podcast, Aaron Kennedy, Jonny Spoor and Ian Mobsby discuss the place of Christian Meditation as a spiritual practice. In the Moot Community Rhythm of Life is the commitment to the practice of prayer and meditation (daily, rhythmic, individual and in community). So what are the benefits? What does meditation bring? How do you start? And how do you sustain regular meditation? This podcast seeks to engage with these issues, and ends with some advice from one of our teachers, the Benedictine Monk John Main.

moot podcast archive | subscribe to podcasts in itunes | subscribing to podcasts through RSS feed | other podcast subscribing | podcast player for your site

Meditation in the Christian tradition is an ancient practice aimed at getting beyond our self-preoccupation through business, thinking and feeling to then be free to encounter God.

In the Moot Community, we are seeking to resource people to go deeper with daily prayer alongside regular meditation and contemplation.  Meditation and Contemplation are both creative approaches to prayer with the aim of encountering God.  Meditation does this by a process of stillness and getting beyond your thoughts and feelings.   Contemplation does this by utilising the imagination as the vehicle for encounter of God.

In this first recording, John Main explains the basic approach to Christian meditation.  If you have not done it before, we suggest 20 minutes as a starting place, as it takes a little while to get the hang of it.  Remember meditation is not like going to the gym, there is not an instant hit of enhanced spirituality, but you will experience an emerging sense spiritual awareness and welbeing in your daily life.

If you have not meditated before then don’t forget that Moot has a weekly meditation group on wednesdays at 6.30pm in the City.  We suggest 20 minutes as a starting place, as it takes a long time to get the hang of it.  Remember meditation is not like going to the gym, there is not an instant hit of enhanced spirituality, but you will in time see an increased spiritual awareness in your daily life.

Please find below a short mp3 of John Main himself explaining this approach to meditation.  If you have any queries or thoughts please do add comments.  If you have been coming along to the meditation group and also have thoughts and queries, please do add these to.

Click below to download the John Main MP3 Introduction to Meditation.

I don’t like talking about my own sinfulness to others. Not so much because of the guilt I might feel, but rather because it reminds me of how alienating it has too often felt to be seen and castigated as a sinner. I immediately remember phrases such as “living a sinful life”, the “slippery slope” and hearing about the saints/sinners dichotomy that date back to my years as an evangelical Christian. This continues to prevent me from being accountable.

Over the past few days, I have found that understanding sin as “missing the mark” is particularly useful.

I think everyone can identify with the experience of making choices that seem good and harmless, only to find out later that they are destructive, either to ourselves or to someone else. It is at these moments of our lives that the notion of “missing the mark” makes sense. We have tried to live right and make reasonable choices, but it seems that, at some point, we have gotten off track. We have missed the mark – we have missed the will of God.

From: Tim Muldoon (2004) , The Ignatian Workout. Loyola Press: Chicago. p. 86

Like many others, what I understood as sin was in fact failing to fulfil the expectations the Church and fellow Christians. As if they set the standards. Through suffering though, and as many others, I/we have come to the conclusion that it is not very wise to rely on those. But how do we know whether we have sinned?

Only by having a deep sense of God’s plan for us and through the practice of meditation does it become much clearer to us in which ways we have sinned. This draws more on the understanding in Eastern Christianity that what might be a sin for someone isn’t necessarily one for someone else. Again, how we sin cannot be separated from who we are – and who we should aim to be – and therefore no one can set the mark for us. No one else can fully know and hence decide whether we have sinned or not. There is no generic list of sins that can be applied. In many ways this also demands a lot of – I would even argue that it requires us to be in a constant state of – humility. At the end of the day we are probably the only ones who can truly know whether we have sinned or not.

Accountability then probably means sharing with others how we feel we have missed the mark. Those who then judge others effectively pass a judgement on something they neither know nor understand. They are fools. It would be nothing else than arrogance to judge someone on failing something that is truly difficult to achieve: not only to do God’s will but also also knowing what it is.

For those interested in going deeper with these reflections, I would suggest working through Tim Muldoon’s book, The Ignatian Workout (click here to see it on Amazon).

For sacred music aficionados who wish to take time to reflect, I recommend listening to Arvo Pärt – De Profundis.

Too often I have felt uncomfortable or unsure of what I was saying when professing the Creed. It makes me feel like my faith is being reduced to a series of bullet points that are irrelevant to whom I am and how I choose to live.Not that I want to be heretical or question the veracity of what is stated, but it does not mirror what I see as being my faith. Professing the Creed does not make me feel like I am a Christian. I don’t really relate. Rather, I feel labelled and it segregates me from others I profoundly love and who profoundly love me.

When I talk to others about my faith, about what I believe to be true, and about what kind of person I want to be, it is the Beatitudes that come to my mind. When I see others suffer, whether from poverty, because of abuse, or just because they do not get back what they have freely given to others, and yet see them carry on, moved by a higher spirit, a faith, a hope of what is to come; this is what I relate those narratives to:

³Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven

⁴Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted

⁵Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth

⁶Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness,

for they will be filled

⁷Blessed are the merciful, for they shall be shown mercy

⁸Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God

⁹Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the sons of God

¹⁰Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven

¹¹Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. ¹²Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

[Matthew 5:3-12]

These word have moved me very profoundly over the past weeks and I can only invite you to also meditate on them. I would particularly encourage you to listen to how they also inspired contemporary Estonian composer Arvo Pärt (Arvo Pärt – The Beatitudes). Please, do not just listen to it once but allow his musical interpretation to accompany you daily and help you further grasp the Beatitudes.