In Centering Prayer, then, purity of intention is the primary focus of the practice. It is a matter of love. That is why it moves us away from our former dependence (conscious or unconscious) on thinking about God and on making acts of devotion to feel that we are doing something when we pray. The Spirit now has taken over our activity and prays in us. Our will is mingled with God's will in some mysterious way so that we have a sense of well-being or a conviction of being with God or in God. Sometimes sensible consolation overflows into the body, but it is not required for the fruits of this prayer. Centering Prayer becomes contemplation when the work of the Spirit absorbs our prayer and takes over. This can eventually be our habitual state of prayer, which is resting in God. We did not get to that state, of course, by our own efforts.

But let us return to the original objection based on the tradition that says, "Well, you folks may have a good method of contemplation, but the tradition has consistently warned that we should not start out at that point. What do you say to that?"

That is a significant objection. We are being accused of starting the cure for bad Lectio Divina before we have incurred the disease. I am convinced that one can begin Lectio at any one of the four stages--reading, reflecting, responding, or resting. In fact, some are better off beginning with resting in God precisely because of our cultural conditioning. Lectio is a dynamic process; that's why we emphasize its nature as relationship. The relationship quality of Centering Prayer implies all four levels. If one does not have the first three stages of Lectio worked into one's psyche, Centering Prayer will gently attract the practitioner to go back and fill in the space. Centering Prayer will lead one back to the earlier stages of Lectio because they are an integral part of the whole organic process. We will want to know how we got where we are. This is not just theory. The Contemplative Outreach network contains many witnesses to this statement's practical validity From an initial access point in Centering Prayer, these people have been moved to a fuller engagement with the whole Christian contemplative and scriptural tradition.

Centering Prayer fits well into the tradition of Lectio. But it fits in at a special place and serves a special purpose. One bishop told me that all his other devotional practices were enhanced when he began practicing Centering Prayer every day. For the first time he understood why he was doing them and how they fit into the organic development of his spiritual life. In fact, Centering Prayer is Lectio in the broad sense of the word. We are just beginning at a place that has not normally been recommended up until now, but we are doing so for good reasons and are getting good results. The tradition of Lectio Divina has always taught that we can go from one level to another even in the same period of prayer. Every one of the stages is enhanced if we have accessed the final one. If we could persuade people to start Centering Prayer, especially intellectuals who are not likely to experience contemplation without first disciplining their compulsion to reflect, all of the things that they do will become better. Their daily prayer will be more interactive, their reflections will have the unction of the Holy Spirit, and their conversation will touch other people's hearts much more than before. We are talking here about love. This is also what distinguishes Centering Prayer from Eastern methods. Eastern methods are primarily concerned with awareness. Centering Prayer is concerned with divine love.

The late Fr. Dan O'Hanlon, a distinguished Jesuit and authority in interreligious dialogue, writes, "I made the discovery, through contact with Asian practice, that one can move toward the goal of prayer beyond words and concepts without necessarily beginning with words and concepts." That, I think, is a challenge and an insight from the East that we should seriously take to heart.

The Eastern traditions put greater emphasis on what the self can do and hence contain the innate hazard of identifying the true self with God. The Christian tradition, on the other hand, recognizes God is present but distinct from the true self. In other words, our uniqueness remains and becomes the vehicle for the divine expression, which was why we were created: to share by grace in the oneness of the Father and the Son.

Centering Prayer comes out of the Christian tradition and supports all the traditional devotions by illuminating their source. Thus it becomes the foundation for a much more fruitful apostolate and of relationships that are truly unselfish with other people, the cosmos, the earth, ourselves, and the Trinity In other words, Centering Prayer is the Trinity living the divine life within us. It is eminently a Trinitarian prayer and implies the Incarnation, the Divine Indwelling, the Mystical Body of Christ, the Seven Gifts of the Spirit--the great dogmatic teachings that are generally regarded by theologians as the most important principles relating to the spiritual journey.

In teaching Centering Prayer, we do not normally say much about these principles at first because the introductory workshops and initial follow-up are not a theological course. Later on, however, we need to show how Centering Prayer, under other names and forms, has been expressed in the tradition. "How-to" methods have been clearly delineated in earlier ages. Centering Prayer is a re-expression, in a form adapted to our time, of the apophatic tradition that was initially developed by the Desert Fathers and reported by Cassian, but has its roots much earlier. It is already adumbrated in St. Paul. What the Desert Fathers did was to practice continuous prayer long enough to realize that to persevere required a method. One method they followed to get to the inner chamber was the repetition of a particular scriptural verse such as "O God, come to my assistance." This is described by Cassian in Conference Ten and corresponds to the practice we call in Contemplative Outreach the Active Prayer Sentence. This is basically a practice to stay in direct contact with God in every activity all day long (see my Invitation to Love, p. 133, and Open Mind, Open Heart, p. 133).

Another practice, one that comes even closer to the method of Centering Prayer, is described by Abba Isaac in Cassian's Ninth Conference. "We need to be especially careful," Abba Isaac begins: "The gospel precept instructs us to go into our room and to shut the door so that we may pray to our Father." Liturgists may have a hard time with that text, but it might be a consolation to them to reflect that in light of the doctrine of the Communion of Saints and the Mystical Body, whether one is alone or with others, every genuine prayer is liturgy "We pray in our rooms, " continues the Abba, "when we withdraw our hearts completely from the tumult and noise of our thoughts and worries and secretly and intimately offer our prayer to the Lord. We pray with the door shut when, without opening our mouths and in perfect silence, we offer our petitions to the one who pays no attention to words but who looks hard at our hearts." This fourth-century Desert Father's teaching foreshadows the magna carta of the apophatic tradition that is found in chapter 5 of the Mystical Theology of the sixth-century Syrian monk Denis known for centuries as St. Dionysius the Areopagite and more recently as Pseudo-Dionysius.

The original monks intuited that a structured lifestyle was not enough for growth in prayer. There had to be added an interior practice. All through the Christian contemplative tradition we are reminded of the invitation of the gospel, "Go into your room and shut the door!"

Centering Prayer is heir to that school of prayer. It is based primarily on The Cloud of Unknowing, but I have incorporated elements in our presentation of Centering Prayer that resonate with other Christian spiritual classics. I have drawn from St. Francis DeSales and St. Jane de Chantal the idea of the gentleness with which to return to the sacred word. This emphasis is missing in the Cloud. I lean heavily on the teaching of St. John of the Cross in The Living Flame of Love (stanza 3, vv. 26-59), where he describes the transition from discursive meditation to contemplation.

Throughout the centuries the apophatic tradition has been treated with more or less discretion, sometimes going too far one way, sometimes too far in the opposite direction. We cannot undiscriminatingly trust any of the spiritual masters. Each is conditioned by his or her times and culture, at least in some degree. Looking at the tradition, we have to know how to read the Fathers and to bring them into critical relationship with later writers and with modern psychology, exercising a certain caution regarding the exhortations of writers who did not have that knowledge. Now that we have the knowledge, it has to be used. It is knowledge that most people in our day understand, but it must be taught in such a way as not to offer merely a self-help program.

If people go to the trouble of coming to an introductory workshop, they must have been inspired by something. Sometimes it is curiosity or the hope of finding a suitable group to pray or talk with. It seems to me that it may also be the Spirit at work. If people are not ready for the practice, they will just give it up when they go home. If they are ready, they will continue to walk the path and Contemplative Outreach will continue to grow. The charism is only ten years old; no organization can prove itself in that short a time. But at least we have witnessed some encouraging signs.

Contemplative Outreach as a network is primarily a process. This process listens to the needs of the people who are growing in contemplative experience and tries to respond appropriately to them as we continue our pilgrimage into the unknown.

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Excerpted from Intimacy with God by Fr. Thomas Keating

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