Prayer is a large umbrella. There are many kinds of prayer and many ways of expressing it. Fundamentally, it is a response to God's invitation to turn our minds and hearts to him. The classical formulas are that of Evagrius, which is the laying aside of thoughts; and that of St. John Damascene, which is conversation of the mind with God. By "mind" St. John means the spiritual faculties of intellect and will. Sometimes this interior movement needs to be expressed in words or concepts, but to be true prayer, it does not have to be expressed by words or concepts.

The Fathers of the Church and the great spiritual masters of the Christian tradition have elaborated on various levels and degrees of prayer. We may also think of prayer as a conversation with God, which deepens as one becomes more and more devoted to him. That deepening does not prevent us from expressing prayer spontaneously on every level of our being, from the spoken word of prayer to the simple movement of the will, which the Cloud of Unknowing calls a "gentle stirring of love."¹ This simple movement of the will is scarcely perceptible to our attention, but at the deepest level of our being, it unites us more intimately to the Holy Spirit than any other form of prayer. For, as St. John of the Cross teaches, the Spirit is the sole mover at that deep level of interior silence and works powerfully without our being aware of what is happening.² To arrive at that state of contemplative prayer, some preliminary activity is required.

Contemplative prayer can greatly benefit from some method of improving our capacity for interior silence. One reason for this is the nature of our cultural climate. In the West, the analytical approach to knowledge has been pushed to its utmost limits. It has produced wonderful advances in science. But when it comes to prayer and interior silence, Western man is somewhat embarrassed and ill at ease. He needs to cultivate his intuitive capacities. That is why some method conducive to contemplative prayer could put a little order into his efforts and hasten the result.

Make no mistake about it: there is no instantaneous contemplation. However, a method for overcoming our habitual inclination to rely too much on concepts in going to God during the time of prayer could be extremely helpful. One such method is suggested in the Cloud of Unknowing. St. John of the Cross suggests another when he describes the movement from discursive meditation to a more simplified and contemplative form of prayer.³ It is important to realize that in this movement God's action is more important than ours. Any method or technique is only a predisposition, a way of removing obstacles or of undoing habits of mind which are a hindrance to contemplation. Through this process we become better instruments, or, to use the Gospel image, soil that is better prepared to receive the seed of God's word. God's word is meant to take possession of all our faculties and to bring about our gradual transformation into Christ. Therefore, we act out of his world view and his consciousness, rather than out of our own narrow, ego-centered consciousness.

Eastern methods of developing interior silence seem to overlook certain stages of preparation which the Christian tradition has emphasized, namely, the practice of discursive meditation and affective prayer. Apart from any method, some people are overtaken spontaneously by the gift of God. He dwells within us and can reach up any time and pull us down to where he dwells in an encounter of deep interior silence and peace. He can also come forth and invade our everyday consciousness with his overwhelming presence. But normally he does not exercise these initiatives, or at least not very often. That is why methods or preparing the soil of the soul for the Word of God are normally necessary for intimate contact with him on a regular or continuous basis.

Those who have experienced the peace that emerges out of deep interior silence through some Eastern technique will be disinclined toward a conceptual form of prayer. They will ask, "What is wrong with what I am doing? If I make use of words or concepts, I feel that I am treating God as an object, while in my method of meditation, I seem to experience God at a much deeper level of my being." This is a nice problem to have. At the same time, from the perspective of integrating our entire human nature and giving it to God, we need to have contact with God in more than one way, even if we believe our one way is the best way. Contemplative prayer does, in fact, put all other forms of prayer in proper perspective.

The Christian tradition presents contemplation and the rest of interior silence as the result of much effort devoted to purifying the mind and heart and to replacing old habits of thinking and acting with new ones. This process generally takes a long time. However, we must not overdo this teaching. Paul exhorts us to take for granted that we have already received as a pure gift in baptism all that we need in order to attain salvation by virtue of Christ's passion, death, and resurrection. We have only to enter by faith into the kingdom that has already been established in the depth of our spirit and take possession of it.

Thus, if we truly give ourselves to God in faith and open our minds and hearts to him, we may begin to find him in the silence of the prayer of faith very quickly. The prayer of faith is an approach to God without concepts. It is to accept God as he is, in the way he presents himself to us in the scripture, impossible to contain in any concept, but not impossible to contact through the love of self-surrender. By means of the regular practice of the prayer of faith, the vestibule to contemplative prayer is gradually established. It is in that silence that the infused virtues and gifts of the Spirit are greatly strengthened and developed.

Suppose we as Christians have entered into an experience of interior silence through an Eastern meditative practice without any reflection on the Christian truths.

There will be an apparent dichotomy between the spiritual experience we have through one of these methods and the truths that we received on an abstract level when we were instructed in the Christian religion at Sunday school. We may wonder whether these two can be put together. Yet, if our background is in the Christian tradition, we need to put them together. Otherwise, they are going to keep rolling around in our psyche like bowling balls heading in opposite directions.

We should realize that in God's loving kindness and providence for us, he has given us a way of entering into interior silence and becoming acquainted with our own spiritual nature. That gives us a head start on many Christians, who even though they were instructed intellectually in the faith, have not really interiorized Christian values through a regular method of prayer and the practice of virtue.

It is important for those who have experienced this peace to realize that, at the very least, it is an experience of their own spiritual nature. Moreover, if they have been baptized, that is to say, sealed in a real but spiritual way by the grace of Christ, any kind of meditation that leads to interior silence easily becomes a prayer. When a Christian tries to extract one of the physical or psychic disciplines from an Eastern tradition and introduce it into his own religious practice, the question has to be asked: Can one graft a branch from one kind of fruit tree onto the trunk of another and expect to produce the same fruit as the new trunk? What actually happens is that the branch that is grafted onto the new trunk will indeed continue to bear fruit, but fruit of the kind from which it came. What effect will this grafting have on our growth as Christians?

Much work has to be done to make the similarities between the spiritualities of the East and Christianity understood, let alone available, to the average person. This will require not only an intensive study of the spiritual disciplines of other religious cultures, but also a firm grasp of one's own. A great deal of experience and dialogue is presupposed in order to understand correctly what the terms of another religious culture really mean, as well as what the long-range effects of a bodily discipline may be on the psyche of a person from a different culture.

On a modest level, however, there are some immediate benefits to be gained from certain disciplines of the East, even if they are separated from their conceptual background. For instance, the sitting posture of Zen Buddhism is unquestionably one of the most relaxed postures that has ever been discovered, and it has been proven to have a remarkably quieting effect upon the mind. There is no reason why this posture could not be incorporated into our Christian prayer without further concern. It is a posture which allows prayer to be prolonged without moving, a point that St. Ignatius singles out as important in the Spiritual Exercises.⁴ He presents a series of optional positions to the meditator, but he specifies one condition--that whatever posture is chosen, it is to be maintained without change throughout the whole meditation period.

It is not necessary to add the dimension of particular beliefs to benefit from a specific practice like Zen sitting. But a good understanding of the conceptual background of the practice is desirable, if that can be integrated into our Christian understanding, too.

In Zen Buddhism, the sitting position is based on the firm conviction that everyone possesses Buddha nature; that by sitting, the mind and the body will gradually be integrated; and that the reality of Buddha nature will eventually rise to full awareness once the mind is thoroughly quieted. This belief corresponds to the Christian teaching that the Holy Trinity dwells at the center of our spirit. Thus, a similar kind of conviction is presupposed by this posture, whether one is a Zen Buddhist or a Christian.

A thoroughgoing return to the sources of Christian spirituality could serve two important purposes: (1) to know more fully our own spiritual tradition so that we can renew it and re-express it in our time (this has to be the first step) and (2) to be challenged by the insights of Eastern spirituality, perhaps even to integrate them into our Christian tradition. And those who are steeped in the Christian tradition are the best qualified to make excursions into Eastern thought and practice.

While the disciplines of the East bring to the spiritual journey values which are complementary to the spiritual traditions of Christianity, especially the understanding of how the body enters into the spiritual journey, the Christian tradition also has much to offer to the East--above all, the conviction of God's unbounded love for each human being, which in turn summons us not only to respond to him, but to the needs of all humanity, both individual and social. The specific work of integrating the respective values of each tradition is waiting to be accomplished.

Meanwhile, many Christians have turned to the East today because the experience of the transcendent is lacking in the various denominations in which they were raised. Many have also turned away from their churches because an overly strict interpretation of its moral teachings was foisted upon them at a time when they were too young to understand them or to integrate them into the love of God. As a result, words associated with the Christian religion like faith, sin, and salvation, have overtones that many contemporary Christians cannot endure. From among these two categories of alienated Christians, significant numbers have been instructed in an Eastern meditation technique that has done them a lot of good. The technique succeeded in interesting them initially because it was presented in terminology that they were not reacting against. At some point, however, as a result of the more disciplined life which the technique required, they are sufficiently open to spiritual values to feel an attraction to return to the faith of their childhood. The experience of spiritual values brings them closer to Christ. If somebody could show them how the spiritual experience they found in their Eastern method of meditation corresponds to experiences which are normal for a Christian also, this would give them tremendous encouragement, and enable them to consider the possibility of continuing their spiritual journey in the framework of their early religious background.

Unfortunately, many people who have sought to return to their Christian roots have not been well received in their local parishes. Thus, they have felt rejected at the very moment when they were ready to return to the Church. Their enriching experience could have been easily articulated in terms of Christian spirituality. But they found no one to show them how to relate their Eastern experience to their Christian background.

________________
¹ William Johnston, ed., The Cloud of Unknowing (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1973). p. 48.
    Return to text

² St. John of the Cross, Living Flame of Love, trans. E. Allison Peers (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. 1971) Stanza III, 58.
    Return to text

³ St. John of the Cross, Living Flame of Love, Stanza III, 26-58.
    Return to text

⁴ The Spiritual Exercises of St. lgnatius, trans. Louis Puhl (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1951 ), First Week, Additions 4, p. 56.
    Return to text

______________
Excerpted from The Heart of the World by Fr. Thomas Keating

Visit the Book Store to obtain a copy.