Speaker: Nancy Edwards
Please introduce yourself (just your first name is OK) and share your personal experiences of Christian Meditation.
Nancy Edwards: Hi, I'm Nancy Edwards, and I've been meditating with the WCCM for about three, four years now, and I just attended the John Main Conference..Seminar 2023 and I'd like to share with you my responses. How it how it made me feel. The John Main Seminar this year was was amazing. It was radically inclusive, to use a Quaker term for it and made me feel at times as if I were in the process of witnessing what might be, in fact, the next Vatican two. The two speakers that Father Laurence invited, Cynthia Bourgeault and Andrew Harvey can be seen as representative of what our society tends to either suppress, reject or ignore. One, a woman who is highly intelligent as well as being an ordained Episcopal priest and the other a highly emotional man, inviting us all to reconsider how we might use our bodies in the sacred sense as vessels and expression of Christ's love. Father Laurence, as is typical, embraced the goodness of both speakers in his usual natural, very lighthearted and holistic way, beautifully integrating what each had said and adding to it from his own personal depth of experience. So what has this meant to me personally? How is the Seminar 'New Wine, New Skins' affected and transformed me, inviting me to reach both outward and within? I believe the real transformation for me started on the first day of the opening. Both Cynthia and Andrew, like in the state of our world in climate crisis, are having passed the tipping point to the end time. All I could think of was our son and his wife, with their lives still in fruition and feeling helpless, absolutely helpless, that there was nothing I could possibly do to prevent the end from coming to them or anyone. I felt helpless and started sobbing uncontrollably. My husband, Sam, said, What is wrong with you? And I told him what I have just said. Then, in the same breath, I was infused with the realisation that transcended and transformed my sense of desperation with hope. I became aware, as if for the very first time that live or die, we have all already been saved by the love of Jesus. Not that we do not have to act in whatever ways we can to prevent disasters from happening but that our lives are eternally protected and secure in the love of Christ and blessed with the promise of eternal life. Yes, we are faced with the possibility of an Armageddon, But it is not the end. And it never will be the end. Because we have already been saved by the love of the God made-man Jesus, whose love extends to everyone.
