|
What
is Centering Prayer?
Centering Prayer is a method designed to encourage the development
of (quiet, imageless) contemplative prayer. It prepares one's
mind and heart to cooperate with receiving the gift of contemplation.
During the time of prayer we consent to God's presence and action
within. Outside the Centering Prayer time, our attention is
encouraged to move outward to discover God's presence everywhere.
Thus, the prayer is not an end in itself, but a beginning. It
is done for the sake of its fruits in one's life. It presupposes
some dedication to God and some elementary spiritual formation.
The major contributors to the beginnings of the Centering Prayer
movement were monks of St. Joseph's Abbey, Spencer, Massachusetts.
The first introductions to Centering Prayer were offered at
the monastery guesthouse during the mid 1970's. Fr. William
Meninger, OCSO, who was retreat master at the time, developed
the method of Centering Prayer based on the Medieval English
classic, The Cloud of Unknowing.
|
Fr.
Thomas Keating, OCSO, as abbot of Spencer, encouraged their
work and beginning in 1977, helped to develop a workshop for
training teachers of Centering Prayer.
St. Teresa of Avila said that all difficulties in prayer come
from one single flaw: praying as if God were absent.
All difficulties in daily life are probably the result of
living as if God were absent. The impression often is given
in catechetical or religious instruction that the self is
outside of God and God is outside of self. On the contrary,
God is totally present to us all the time: closer than thinking,
closer than breathing, closer than choosing, closer than consciousness
itself. God could not get any closer.
Creation is an ongoing event. It is not something that happened
only once. We emerge from our Source at every micro-moment
of time. The chief wound of the human condition is the monumental
illusion that God is absent. We have self-awareness. But without
the experience of union with God this self-reflection gives
rise to feelings of fear, guilt or acute loneliness. Because
the human heart is designed for limitless happiness, limitless
truth and limitless love, nothing less than that kind of fulfillment
can satisfy our innate longing.
We sit in silence for 20 to 30 minutes and open up to the
spiritual level of our awareness by disregarding the thoughts,
feelings and impressions that are passing along the surface
of our consciousness. Repeating a word of one or two syllables
- such as "God," "Abba," "Jesus" - serves to maintain or renew
our intention. The stream of consciousness constantly is flowing
by, like a river. On the surface of the river are all kinds
of particular ideas, memories, sense perceptions and emotions
that we might compare to boats. Indeed we are so dominated
by the awareness of all the boats that there is almost never
a moment when we see the river itself. But sometimes God reaches
up from within us and pulls us down into the divine presence.
Books on Centering Prayer by Abbot Thomas Keeting:
updated 07/14/04
|
|
|
