Fr Laurence Freeman: Does meditation make a difference to the world? Well, by extension, it must do, I suppose, if we are changing for the better, then we're probably a little nicer to people when they bump into us on the metro or at the airport or they get in our way or we are more ready to say sorry when we make mistakes. So presumably, we improve a little bit in our relationships to others. But is there an even deeper and more important way in which we can see how the contemplative experience changes the world? I've been thinking about this for a long time and I think maybe in a conversation I had with John Main many years ago when he spoke about contemplation as the foundation of civilization. And that took me by surprise and made me think about what contemplation meant. And indeed, what about our experience of civilization today?
