Cynthia Bourgeault, Thomas Keating: Centering Prayer
“God can be held fast and loved by means of love, but by thought never.” The Cloud of Unknowing, introductory commentary and translation by Ira Progoff (New York: Delta Books, 1957), 72.
Thomas Keating
In Centering Prayer, we select a sacred word as the symbol of our willingness to surrender to the presence of God.
We sit comfortably with closed eyes in silence and then introduce the sacred word.
Whenever thoughts return, we silently speak the sacred word.
At the end of the prayer period, we remain silent with eyes closed for a few minutes.
Thomas Keating suggests practicing Centering Prayer for twenty minutes twice a day.
Is Centering Prayer a simply letting go of one thought after another? That can certainly be our subjective experience of the practice, and this is exactly the frustration we sometimes encounter during Centering Prayer and Lectio Divina.
Keating tells the story of a nun who tries out her first twenty-minute experience of Centering Prayer and then laments, “Father Thomas, I’m such a failure at this prayer. In twenty minutes, I’ve had ten thousand thoughts!”
“How lovely,” responds Keating. “Ten thousand opportunities to return to God.”
Keating emphasizes that Centering Prayer is indeed a pathway of return to God, and this may be what the writer of Cloud of the Unknowing was trying to tell us.1
We also need to remember that the benefit of Centering Prayer is usually not during the prayer time, but later in the day or week when we feel God’s presence where or when we need it or never knew it before. It is expressed best in several of the 12 step Promises, “We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us.”2
1Adapted from Cynthia Bourgeault, The Heart of Centering Prayer: Nondual Christianity in Theory and Practice (Shambhala: 2016), 14, 28-29, 120, 123. From Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation, February 11, 2017 with Cynthia Bourgeault as guest writer.
2Big Book of Alcoholic Anonymous, pp. 83-84.
Joanna joannaseibert.com