Centering Prayer

In past newsletters, we have explored a very special kind of prayer known as monologistic prayer.  This is a family of meditative exercises that has been developed within Christianity over the course of its 2,000-year history.  Then, in weeks 20 and 27, we explored the Jesus Prayer as one of the very first examples of this special way of connecting with God.  With the Jesus Prayer, you open yourself to the presence of God, move your attention into the region of your heart, and from your heart say the words of the Jesus Prayer.  This is a repetitive prayer and was developed as a way of following Paul’s injunction in 1 Thessalonians, to pray without ceasing.

Over the centuries, prayerful Christians have developed other forms of monologistic prayer – forms that seemed more in keeping with the tenor of their times.  This is exactly how Centering Prayer came into being.

In the mid-1970s, monks at the Cistercian abbey of St. Joseph in Spencer, Massachusetts, began to talk together about the spiritual poverty of our times.  They viewed with concern the exodus of sincere spiritual seekers within Christendom who were unable to connect with their own contemplative tradition.  They wanted to find a way to make the riches of the contemplative life available to the lay person who could not spend a life in the monastery.  The result of their conversations is Centering Prayer, a contemporary revision of an earlier monologistic prayer, a technique that was first presented in the fourteenth century, in The Cloud of Unknowing.  

Because the development of Centering Prayer is contemporaneous, we have insight into how it was created and why.  This takes away the aura of “specialness” that surrounds many of the earlier forms of monologistic prayer.  We see, by talking with the originators of Centering Prayer, what they were trying to address and how the prayer seemed to develop stage by stage.

Responding to an invitation from Father Thomas Keating, abbot of the monastery in Spencer, Father William Meninger developed the initial form of Centering Prayer and taught it within the walls of the monastery.  Father Basil Pennington then began to offer classes outside the monastery, altering the prayer to fit in this 

new environment.  In 1981, Father Keating 'retired' as abbot at St. Joseph's and began to teach Centering Prayer full time to the spiritually hungry.  The practice was codified in 1984, with the publication of Open Mind, Open Heart.   

Like the Jesus Prayer, this form of prayer is not for the discursive intellect, and is not meant to be a forum for the creation of visual imagery or other forms of 'thinking.'  Rather, it is a technique that enables us to see what lies beneath the busyness of the modern mind.  It rests on the notion that, deep in our hearts, God is always with us.

The Theological Basis for Centering Prayer

Centering Prayer rests on a much more developed and sophisticated theological and psychological base than does the technique of The Cloud.  Centering Prayer focuses on the incarnation of God:  that God is always and everywhere present to us.  Father Keating has given us a thoroughly developed understanding of the Pauline teaching of "casting off the deeds of darkness and putting on the armor of light."  He not only explains the theology, he also incorporates contemporary psychological understandings as well.  As a result of these deeper understandings of the inner workings of the human mind, the authors of Centering Prayer revised several elements in the prayer technique.  

The basic theological underpinning on which Centering Prayer rests is that God is always with us.  We find this understanding in the Scriptures of both the Old and New Testaments.  In the Old Testament, we hear in the book of First Kings that Elijah finds God in the "still small voice within."  The stories of the prophets are filled with references to God being present, right in the midst of the people of Israel.  This God, while being Wholly Other, is also the burning bush right in front of Moses.  Not only is this God right here, He is named in the book of Isaiah, "Emmanuel", which means "God with us."   

In the New Testament, the incarnate aspect of God finds its fulfillment in the person of Jesus, God's Son, sent to redeem His people.  Jesus, himself, reaffirms this at crucial points in His ministry.  In the gospel of John, Christ states "I am the good shepherd."  The shepherd stands with his sheep; that is the nature of shepherding.  A bit later in the gospel of John, our Lord says, "I am the vine, you are the branches."  In case we didn't understand the inseparable nature of the shepherd with the sheep, Christ gives us an elaboration of this notion with His vine image.  There is no place in the vine where you can clearly say that the vine stops and the branches begin.  Not only is God with us, He is indistinguishable from us except in the most general of generalizations.  And at the very end of His incarnate time, in the last words of the book of Matthew, Jesus says, "know that I will be with you always, even to the end of time."  

The understanding which has come down to us through the Church, is that we are grafted onto Jesus by means of our baptism.  Jesus, then, is always present in the soul of the one baptized.  This theological understanding has been verified experientially by those who have devoted themselves to drawing closer to God.  Generations of Christian contemplatives, those who have traveled the spiritual path before us, have indicated that Christ lives in the soul, and the soul is found in our hearts.  Not the physical organ, but in our spiritual center which is located in the same general vicinity.

Perhaps the most dramatic example of this grafting and the transformation it can bring is found in the story of Saul of Tarsus, at the very beginning of the Christian era.  Saul, the persecutor of Christians, the apostle who never knew Jesus in the flesh, was utterly transformed by his encounter with the risen Christ.  Jesus even gave him a new name, Paul, to mark this transformation.

While much is made of his visionary experience on the road to Damascus, little attention is given to the quiet, yet more profound part of Paul's journey.  Over the course of his remaining years, Paul changed and matured spiritually.  As he gained knowledge of God's indwelling Presence, his connection with the Christ strengthened immeasurably.  He was able to write from prison in Rome, just before his execution, "nothing can separate me from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord."  He is writing here, not from faith.  His is not a strong hope in Christ.  He writes like a man who knows.  He knows that nothing can separate him from the Lord because that has been his daily experience in prayer.  Paul has 'seen' and 'felt' and 'listened to' the Christ who dwells in his heart.

This is the close connection with Christ that we all long for.  The basic understanding, which forms the foundation of Centering Prayer, is that God is already present with us, in our center.  We are already redeemed; we are already participating in the Divine.  We are already one with God, our Savior.  There is nothing we need to do to come to our Redeemer.   

We don't feel like this, though.  These assertions of closeness to God run counter to our felt experience.  Our felt experience of separation, however, is fundamentally untrue.  Our felt experience is a result of our dissociation – our disconnection from our true self.  The authors of Centering Prayer reiterate the same message that all the deepest mystics of the Church have given us: there is no fundamental separation between God and her people.  There is no abyss to cross, no journey that is necessary.  What we hear from our spiritual Fathers and Mothers is something radically different.  What they say is this:  "God is closer to you than you are to your very self."

Our Felt Separation.  Two thousand years ago, St. Paul struggled with the same profound sense of separation that we struggle with today.  He complained, "I do the things that I don't want to do, and I don't do the things I want to do.  What is wrong with me?"  

Modern psychological investigators have addressed the same phenomena using different language.  D.H. Winnecott uses the terms true self and false self to describe these experiences.  Father Keating has adopted these terms to explain the apparent contradictions within the human psyche.  From this perspective, each of us creates a false self – a socially adapted ego – in response to the pressures of growing up.  We learn very early that some parts of ourselves are not acceptable.  Boys learn that it is not acceptable to show emotions, such as crying.  Girls learn that it is not acceptable to be rowdy and loud.  As our egos develop, we often cut off these parts of ourselves because they are not socially acceptable.

The false self is our response to social pressure.  None of us develops 'naturally.'  That is, none of us is ever allowed to be just as we are.  Rather, the human infant undergoes a constant process of shaping and conditioning, during which we learn to be acceptable to others.  This socialization process is crucial for us if we are to get along with one another in groups.  However, it is achieved at a high cost.  Our Lord indicates that, to return to our true nature and to return home to God, we must become like little children. 

In addition to pruning away parts of ourselves, our socialization in childhood also entails the creation of a variety of emotional programs, many of which are dysfunctional.  As a culture, we are finally waking up to the social devastation in which we dwell.  As a clinical psychologist, I saw the horrid effect of these old emotional programs every day.  I saw women who were sexually abused as children internalize this abuse and seek out men who abuse them as adults.  I saw children who grew up with abusive parents develop clusters of dysfunctional personality traits that are the perfect complement to their early abuse.

So you see, our socialization literally programs us for unhappiness.  This happens in two ways:  1) by the pruning process of socialization, and 2) by the creation of dysfunctional emotional programs, which then act to 'control' the choices we make in our lives.  All of this is absolutely contrary to the words of our Creator!  

After creation, God looked at her work and said that it was good.  Indeed, it was very good.  We act, however, as if parts of that creation were not good and have to be cut off.  We have left that centered, balanced place where we are in tune with the Divine, with nature, with one another, and with our deepest selves.  We are like Esau; we have sold our birthright for next to nothing, for a mess of pottage.  We have abandoned our true self, created by God, and exchanged it for a maladaptive false self.

Father Keating rightly recognized that the meditation process is a direct attack upon this construct of the false self.  During meditation, we attempt to focus and concentrate our attention.  This is a process radically different from anything else we do.  Instead of being plugged into the old programming of the false self –  instead of listening to the thoughts and feelings that are governed by this old programming – we disengage from it.  We simply rest our attention in God.  

From the perspective of the false self, we are unaware of how to access the true self.  We simply cannot see it.  We are not even sure that it exists at the start.  We take its existence on faith and begin our attempt to shed our old skin.  Because we don't know how to get to the true self, we can't do anything other than unplug from the old.  Most attempts to do something to get away from this false self are actually directed by that same false self.  We cannot use it as a tool to cut itself.  

All that we can do is to disengage our attention from the old, sinful person and from the false self.  As we know from our experience in meditation, even this is incredibly difficult.  We rest our attention in God, and moments later, we become aware that we are once again wrapped up in our thinking.  So, once more, even in meditation, we find ourselves following the dictates of the ego, the false self.  Eventually, however, the false self will run out of fuel and die.  Then the true self, which has been obscured within our deepest interior, will emerge.  When the true self emerges, we become aware of our deep connection with God and with all of her Creation.

This description of the destruction of the old self and the emergence of the true self that God creates is taken from experience.  It is not something made up or imagined.  We first hear of this process in the letters of St. Paul.  Paul, through much prayer over many years, accomplished this process within himself.  With this perspective in mind, the lives of the saints become much clearer.  From this perspective, we see that the variety of disciplines that they used were attempts to disengage from the ego, the false self.  

It is only from this perspective that certain passages of the gospels make any sense.  Central to all the gospels is Jesus' command that we should love one another, even to the extent of loving our enemy.  From the perspective of the false self, however, we cannot love our enemy.  Our enemy, by definition, is one whom we hate.  Only from the perspective of the true self – the self which knows that it is deeply interconnected with all beings – can one have an enemy and love that enemy!

From this understanding of the deep psychological dynamics that are involved in our journey toward God, our Center, we begin to see why certain things are the way they are.  Because our false self readily adjusts to every social situation, we see this falseness played out in every church community.  From this perspective, we see that a conscious decision to choose Christ is not enough to lead a Christian life.  Any conscious decision, including those related to the spiritual life, does not really touch the deep unconscious programming of the false self.  These decisions, well-intentioned though they may be, are regularly subverted by the false self.  It is only through engagement in the regular disciplines of deep prayer and meditation that we can break free of the ego’s control over our lives.  The nondiscursive meditations, such as Centering Prayer, draw us into the realm of God's grace.  As we spend time in meditation, these ego–derived programs are gradually drained of their energy and finally discarded.

Thus, the deep forms of prayer function as a kind of divine therapy.  Father Keating states that the process of meditation and contemplative prayer allows our old emotional programs to come to the surface, where their energy can be discharged.  

In our meditation, at this point, there is a reduction of interior dialogue.  This reduction removes the constant reinforcers of the false self system.  This quieting of the thoughts, the gross movements of the mind, allows the more subtle attributes to be seen.  Ultimately, we disengage even from these.  The energy that previously fueled the false self is withdrawn.  As this occurs, the false self shrivels and the true self emerges.  Finally, we realize that this true self has been in union with God all along.  We simply could not be aware of this union from the perspective of the false self.

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I hope you have found this newsletter helpful in understanding what happens during the spiritual journey.  We are embarked upon this fascinating expedition into the dark unknown – the unknown that exists within each of us.  We are promised riches beyond all imagining if we persevere to the end.  As with the story of the Prodigal Son, God promises to throw us a party when we finally find our way back home.  So keep up with your meditation, even (or perhaps especially) when your meditations seem dry or pointless.  You know when that happens that your false self is fighting for its very existence – you have pressed it to the edge.  

God bless you in your inner work.  Next week, we will learn how to do Centering Prayer.

With love,

P.S.  Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class.  If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web.  If you have an interest, please write me at [email protected]. 

Humility as a Tool  → Letting go → Fear → Openness →  Acceptance & Growth

If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible:  The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇

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Please Note: These newsletters are meant to be read in order.