Centering Prayer is a method of prayer that comes out of the Christian tradition, principally The Cloud of Unknowing, by an anonymous fourteenth-century author, and St. John of the Cross. It brings us into the presence of God and thus fosters the contemplative attitudes of listening and receptivity. It is not contemplation in the strict sense, which in Catholic tradition has always been regarded as a pure gift of the Spirit, but rather it is a preparation for contemplation by reducing the obstacles caused by the hyperactivity of our minds and of our lives.

The historical roots of Centering Prayer reach back to St. Joseph's Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts, where I was abbot from 1961 to 1981. This was during the time of the first wave of the renewal of religious life after the Second Vatican Council, when many questions were raised for the first time and interreligious dialogue was encouraged by the Holy See. Several of us at Spencer became acquainted with groups from other spiritual traditions who resided in our area. We invited several spiritual teachers from the Eastern religions as well as some ecumenically skilled Catholic theologians to visit and speak with us. Fr. Thomas Merton was still alive at this time and writing extensively about his researches and exchanges in interreligious dialogue. He was one of the most articulate pioneers from the Christian side in the dialogue among the world religions.

In a similar spirit we entertained a Zen master who wished to visit our monastery We invited him to speak to the community and later to give a sesshin (a week-long intensive retreat). For nine years after that, he held sesshins once or twice a year at a nearby retreat house. During those years I had the privilege of making several sesshins with him. On the occasion of his first sesshin held in our monastery, he put on the Cistercian habit and ate with us in the refectory. We have a picture of him on his seventieth birthday eating a piece of cake while sitting in the half lotus posture.

We also were exposed to the Hindu tradition through Transcendental Meditation. Paul Marechal, a former monk of Holy Cross Abbey in Berryville, Virginia, a daughter monastery of Spencer, had become a TM teacher and offered to instruct us in the practice. Many in the community wanted to experience it.

Exposure to these traditions, as well as conversations with visitors to our monastery who had benefited from them, naturally raised many questions in my mind as I tried to harmonize the wisdom of the East with the contemplative tradition of Christianity that I had been studying and trying to practice for thirty years.

The basic meditative practice of Benedictine and Cistercian monks is Lectio Divina, a way of reading the Scripture with a deepening prayerful attentiveness that moves toward contemplation. I had noticed over the years that the practice itself had become obscured because of the plethora of reading material now available under the general heading of Lectio Divina. The original practice had expanded from the attentive reading of Scripture or commentaries by the early Fathers of the Church to include spiritual reading in the broadest sense of the word. In the process, the emphasis had shifted from deepening one's prayer to intellectual stimulation. Meanwhile, prayer itself had become so rigidly dichotomized--discursive meditation, affective prayer, and the multiplication of devout aspirations--that the inherent tendency of Lectio Divina to move toward contemplation had been lost. Contemplation was regarded as an exceptional gift, not as the normal flowering of Lectio Divina and Christian prayer.

I was aware that the method of Lectio Divina in most instances was not doing the job of bringing people, even cloistered monks and nuns, to the contemplative states of prayer that St. Teresa describes in her writings: infused recollection, the prayer of quiet, the prayer of union, and the prayer of full union. All are deepening experiences of the presence of God.

I had entered the monastery to become a contemplative. I chose the hardest order I could find because in those days austerity of life was believed to be the necessary means of reaching contemplation. The Trappists were a good choice for such a project. They had a long tradition of penitential exercises that goes back to the monastic reform of LaTrappe in the seventeenth century. The reform was at least partially influenced by Jansenism, the very negative view of human nature and the body eventually condemned by the Holy See. Silence was the rule of the monastery; indeed, novices normally spoke only to the abbot and novice master for the first three years. There was little opportunity for conversation beyond those brief interviews. During those early years I had not the remotest idea of the history and the aspirations of the other monks. I didn't even know their family names.

Why were the young disciples of Eastern gurus, Zen roshis, and teachers of TM, who were coming to the abbey in the 1970s for dialogue, experiencing significant spiritual experiences without having gone through the penitential exercises that the Trappist order required? These young people manifested a great appreciation for the values of silence, solitude, and fidelity to a regular meditative practice. It was inspiring to meet young people who were putting in twenty to thirty minutes of meditation twice a day in spite of being in college or professional life, while active religious, priests, and cloistered monks and nuns seemed to have a hard time putting in a half hour of mental prayer a day.

I also became aware of the deep contemporary hunger for spirituality. In the wave of spiritual reawakening that the Second Vatican Council seems to have touched off, young people were going to India by the thousands from all over the world in search of spiritual teachers. Some spent several years there under horrendous physical conditions. They adapted to poverty, exposure, sickness, and bad food in order to satisfy their hunger for an authentic spiritual path.

My thought was, well, this is fine. I was not knocking the seriousness of Zen practice or denying that many people were benefiting from it as well as from other Eastern practices. But why were thousands of young people going to India every summer to find some form of spirituality when contemplative monasteries of men and women were plentiful right here in this country? This raised the further question, Why don't they come to visit us? Some did, but very few. What often impressed me in my conversations with those who did come was that they had never heard that there was such a thing as Christian spirituality. They had not heard about it in their parishes or Catholic schools if they had attended one. Consequently, it did not occur to them to look for a Christian form of contemplative prayer or to visit Catholic monasteries. When they heard that these existed, they were surprised, impressed, and somewhat curious.

Our monastery at Spencer served as a drawing card for some of them living in the New England area. They liked to come and talk about their practices and experiences. Many were having experiences very similar to what Christian tradition calls contemplation. Although I had studied the Christian tradition deeply and had tried to practice it, I had found that when I talked about it in conferences to the monastic community, many of the monks would be turned off. They didn't want to hear about contemplation. The priests who came to the guest house for retreats did not want to hear about it either. They had been trained in the seminary to think that contemplation belonged in cloisters and had no relation to what they were doing. If 

parish priests and professors in Catholic seminaries did not feel that contemplation was suitable for them or for their students, naturally lay folks did not either.

Not only was there a negative attitude toward contemplation prior to about 1975, but the word "contemplation" itself had become so ambiguous that the popular mind identified it with a lifestyle rather than with a form of prayer The term was generally limited to mean a special kind of lifestyle requiring an enormous amount of renunciation that the average person could not possibly envisage, either because one had no attraction or vocation for it, or because one's duties in the world made it impossible.

Sometime in the mid-1970s, I raised the following question in a conference to our monastic community: "Could we put the Christian tradition into a form that would be accessible to people in the active ministry today and to young people who have been instructed in an Eastern technique and might be inspired to return to their Christian roots if they knew there was something similar in the Christian tradition?" Having devoted my life to the pursuit of the Christian contemplative tradition and having developed a profound appreciation of its immense value, I grieved to see it completely ignored by people who were going to the East for what could be found right at home, if only it were properly presented.

When I raised this challenge to the community, Fr. William Meninger was inspired to take it seriously Basing himself on a fourteenth-century spiritual classic, The Cloud of Unknowing, he put together a method that he called the "Prayer of the Cloud" and started teaching it to priests in the retreat house. The response was so positive that he decided to put his conferences on audio tapes. Those tapes have sold over fifteen thousand copies and have been a take-off point for many people to use the simple form of prayer recommended by the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, in which a single word such as "God" or "Love" expresses one's "naked intent directed to God."

Continued  . . .

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Excerpted from Intimacy with God by Fr. Thomas Keating

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