The John Main Center
for Meditation and Interreligious Dialogue
at Georgetown University

Blessed Spring Semester 2023!

Please note that attendance at the JMC will continue to be opened only to current Georgetown students, faculty and staff.

Current Health Protocols will be followed, including:
At the John Main Center at Georgetown University - Masking is Optional but Welcome.
Please no food or drink allowed.
Sign-In required each time upon arrival for all personal and hosted meditation sessions. 

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Where is the JMC?

The JMC is located in Anne Marie Becraft Hall on the Main Campus near Dahlgren Quad across from New South at the corner of Old North Way and Library Walk.

We warmly welcome you all to enter into this present moment together in this new way of proceeding.

The door is open for you...  Maranatha!

Sending you Peace in it all, 

Lisa and the JMC Leadership Teams

My name is Kenzie Knight. I am the John Main Center for Meditation and Interreligious Dialogue’s first ever JMC Fellow for Christian Contemplation for 2022-2023.

As a John Main Center (JMC) student leader in addition to my previous role as one of the student coordinators for the Catholic Faith Communities (CFC), I was selected for this inaugural fellowship role which is generously sponsored by the Trust for the Meditation Process whose aim is to “renew contemplative Christianity, promote health and wholeness, and bring silence and stillness to a hectic world.”

During the Fall semester, I studied abroad as a senior majoring in Biology of Global Health at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland and explored ways of integrating the practice of meditation and contemplation with my vocational aspirations.

This fellowship experience also offers me the opportunity to grow in the formation and practice of contemplation in the Christian tradition and I look forward to sharing various forms of Christian contemplation and meditation with fellow Hoyas in the Spring semester.

My meditation experience began as a nervous first year student at Georgetown University. Feeling overwhelmed, I would find myself at the John Main Center for Meditation & Dialogue (JMC) seeking silence, simplicity, and stillness. At first, meditation was an escape from the hecticness of college. I was looking for a moment of rest in the midst of such a huge transition. What I did not realize at the time was the invitation to which God was calling me. 

Through my experience at the center and exploration of the teachings of John Main, Laurence Freeman, and many others, I learned that meditation is a call to prayer and to find rest in God. Meditation can be summarized for me in the phrase “mutual gazing,” as Fr. Martin Laird, O.S.A. beautifully expressed– reflecting the meeting between God and me. 

I have deepened my practice this fall as the JMC Fellow for Christian Contemplation for 2022-2023, which is generously sponsored by the Trust for the Meditation Process. My biggest observation has been the nonlinear nature of the practice. That is, I have noticed sometimes distractions are constant and at other times I can be attuned to God's presence so clearly. I sometimes experience both on the same day! 

I discovered that I have brought expectations of a perfect practice to meditation. I assumed my meditation practice would be a linear progress with distractions becoming less and less as I meditated more. But this has not been the case. I have noticed distractions are frequent still after years of practice. And I am learning to be okay with that -- that God is not asking me to be perfect but just to simply be. 

Even still, this nonlinearity can be frustrating and disheartening at times. So, I am learning how to sit with this frustration and my distractions in meditation, welcoming them as guests and not intruders, because accepting the presence of these feelings is as much a part of the process of the practice as finding stillness is. I remind myself of the words of Jesus: “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest.” The invitation of meditation is to find rest in the restlessness, to embrace the difficult nature of letting go. It is not about perfecting the practice but a way to be with the messiness of life. It is about reorienting the way we think about our relationship to God, ourselves, and others. 

Meditation is simply the invitation to meet God within us and recenter on that love – to sit in mutual gazing. No matter how the practice unfolds, God and you are there – and that is all that matters in the present moment.