The 43rd annual John Main Seminar began on Sept. 17 at American University’s Constitution Hall, with a series of talks by Father Laurence Freeman, a Benedictine monk who leads the World Community for Christian Meditation; Bishop Mariann Budde, the ordinary for the Episcopal Diocese of Washington; Tia Norman, leader of the contemplative Christian community Awakenings, Inc., and keynote speaker Tim Shriver, chairman of the Special Olympics and the nephew of President John F. Kennedy.
The seminar’s namesake, John Main, was an Irish Benedictine monk who popularized meditation based on a mantra, a short, repeated phrase, among Christians during the 1970s. 2026 marks the centenary of Main’s birth, a point acknowledged by multiple speakers.
The theme of this year’s seminar was “Healing the Breach: Finding Faith, Meaning, and Dignity in a Season of Contempt.”
Father Freeman, who has attended every John Main Seminar since the inaugural session in 1984, said that Washington, D.C., was an ideal location for the conference, noting the pertinence of “healing the breach” amid what he described as a “global wave of chaos and meltdown at all levels,” including in politics.
He recalled his first visit to Washington, in 1971, when he met Father Main and meditated for the first time. Father Main became his teacher, and Father Freeman took over the World Community for Christian Meditation after that priest’s death in 1982.
Father Main’s “seminal insight” was that “meditation creates a community of love,” Father Freeman said, adding that in an era of polarization, increasingly prevalent bigotry, and rapidly evolving artificial intelligence, meditation and contemplation are all the more important. Contemplation is for Father Freeman the “foundation of true civilization.”
In his keynote address, Shriver built on Father Freeman’s reflections on the importance of contemplation in our unstable social and political moment, and said that the inspiration for the motif of “healing the breach” came from Isaiah 58:12: “‘Repairer of the breach,’ they shall call you, ‘Restorer of ruined dwellings.’”
Shriver said that the root of exclusion and hatred – indeed, of the “breach” that defined the seminar – was the human tendency to make assumptions about other people and to assign often-inaccurate labels to them within seconds of meeting. The Scriptural antidote to this problem, Shriver contended, can be found in Genesis 1:26-27, in which God “created mankind in his image;” the spiritual antidote, meanwhile, is a regular practice of contemplation on one’s own inherent and infinite dignity as a bearer of that image.
To underscore his point, Shriver recounted a moment on a previous visit to Washington when, in a coffee shop in Adams Morgan, he had encountered a man he described as a stereotypical “cowboy.” The man approached him and asked if he had previously heard that he looked like a Kennedy. When Shriver replied in the affirmative, the man continued: “That must really put you off!”
While the audience erupted in hearty laughter, Shriver’s point was sober and serious: it is dangerous to jump to conclusions about other people’s interior lives based on their superficial characteristics. He argued that meditation helps people to overcome that temptation by slowing down their instinctive responses to new people or situations, thereby making space for a better recognition of God’s presence in others and in oneself.
If he had the power to define Catholic doctrine, Shriver joked, he would add an eighth deadly sin: failure to “look in the mirror and see the pure glory of God.”
“We are here to be illumined by each other,” Shriver said. He asked attendees of the conference to “invite the conditions conducive to peace by welcoming peace without conditions.”
Shriver also recognized Bishop Budde for her advocacy for mercy and compassion in public life, referring especially to her homily at the 2025 Inauguration Prayer Service, in which she directly urged President Donald Trump to govern with mercy. Shriver read several lines from Bishop Budde’s homily – including the well-known “In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now” – which prompted a round of applause for Bishop Budde from the audience.
In her own remarks, Bishop Budde echoed Shriver’s appeal to appreciate human dignity. “It takes absolutely zero creativity to be negative,” she said. “To be joyful, hopeful, and courageous is worthy of a human being.”
Bishop Budde brought up an insight she had heard in an interview with Father Greg Boyle, a Jesuit priest renowned for his ministry to gang members in Los Angeles. “I’ve never met an evil person, but I’ve met wounded people,” she recalled Father Boyle saying.
Embracing meditation in Father Main’s tradition, a form of prayer that intentionally seeks to avoid spiritual judgment, could help Christians to better recognize this dignity and goodness in others, she suggested.
“May we rise to it [this challenge] with all the original goodness God has given us,” Bishop Budde concluded.
Norman, for her part, referred to the concept of the “false self” developed by Henri Nouwen, a Dutch Catholic priest, in his book “The Way of the Heart.”
Norman said that the false self tells people that “I am what others think, say, or feel about me.” She appealed to the audience to let go of the tendency to judge, which comes from a projection of the insecurities fostered by one’s own false self. Contemplation helps people to ground themselves in their true identity as children of God, she said, and curiosity helps them to break the cycle of judgment.
The speakers agreed that if more people were to cultivate a contemplative spiritual practice, foregrounding a deep appreciation for the innate dignity of each human being and eschewing the temptation to make hasty judgments of others, it would redound to the benefit of the common good, including in the political world of Washington.
“Meditation resets us,” Father Freeman said. “Why should it not reset the world?”
