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   The Samaritan Simon Magus has given his name to the word “simony,” from the episode which follows today’s second reading, in which Simon offers the apostles money in exchange for the power to confer the holy spirit (Acts 8:18-24). But his place in Christian history is not limited to anything so trivial.

For Simon represents a Christian movement which emerging orthodoxy denounced as the synthesis of all heresies, but whose literature, discovered around 1945 at Nag Hammadi in Egypt, offers hope in our century for the faltering structures of Western religion. I am referring to Gnosticism.

Gnosticism is an understanding of religious knowledge as experiential and transformative and originating from within, rather than from the preached word which comes from without (Romans 10:14-17).

The imaginative and mythic forms of the introverted psyche have an attraction which draws many today, especially young people, to new age beliefs and practices. But these were already at home in Christianity, until Gnosticism was ruthlessly suppressed in the 2nd and 3rd centuries of our era.

The Gnostics and the orthodox had the same scripture, but they read it differently. Gnostic interpretation gave free rein to the inner promptings of the imagination. The text serves as a catalyst for the release of natural symbols arising out of the unconscious. By pointing to an experience which is beyond rational discourse, Gnostic interpretation of scripture forestalls any idolatry of the word—the perennial danger of religious orthodoxy.This free and unfettered reading of scripture also anticipates certain modern insights about the nature of language.

Last Monday evening I saw a TV broadcast entitled “The Quiet Mind” about the World Christian Meditation Community. The leader of the movement, Fr. Lawrence Freeman, O.S.B., was shown together with the Dalai Lama. As systems of thought, Christianity and Buddhism are so vastly different that rational dialogue cannot possibly bridge the gap. And yet the practice of silent meditation provides common ground for adherents of the two traditions.

The founder of the Christian Meditation Movement, Fr. John Main, O.S.B. learned the practice of silent meditation from a Hindu Swami while he was serving with the British Foreign Service in Malaysia. When he enterered the Benedictine novitiate, his novice master told him to stop meditating this way. However, Main later discovered that what he had learned from the Hindu Swami was the same way of meditating taught by the Desert Fathers and by John Cassian in particular.

Symbols and silence are what Simon Magus and the Dalai Lama have to offer us today. If we can learn to incorporate them into our lives, our Christian faith and practice will be greatly enriched.

July 10, 2005

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