About this time our community was asked by the Religious Committee of the Major Superiors of Men of the United States to help them with their prayer. By the early 1970s the intense social activism that had dominated the previous decade had lost some of its fascination. After the Second Vatican Council many priests and religious had rushed into ghettos without being adequately prepared for the burdens of such a ministry. They burned out, ending up in some cases doing less in the service of others than they would have if they had stayed where they were. With the best of intentions they had taken on ministries that required a depth of inner resources they just did not have.

Major superiors of religious orders were also experiencing the wear and tear of the profound upheavals in religious life following the Second Vatican Council. The committee approached Fr. Basil Pennington, another monk of Spencer, who was well known to the Religious Conference of Men through meetings he attended on canon law, for some practical assistance. We asked ourselves how and in what form we might present the method of prayer based on The Cloud of Unknowing that Fr William Meninger was teaching to priests in the guest house.

Fr. Basil gave the first retreat to a group of provincials, both men and women, of various religious congregations at a large retreat house in Connecticut. It was they who suggested the term "Centering Prayer" to describe the practice. The term may have come from their reading of Thomas Merton, who had used this term in his writings.

Beginning in 1976, Fr. Basil started teaching Centering Prayer in the form of introductory workshops in Spencer's guest house, first to priests and then to other people who wanted to come. After a couple of years, we realized that we could not accommodate all the people who wanted to attend and set about devising an advanced workshop that we hoped would enable the participants to become teachers of this method so that it could be offered elsewhere. The advanced workshop called for a session of four periods of prayer of twenty minutes each with a five-to-ten minute silent walk between the periods. Some people in the community, as well as visitors coming to the guest house, complained that it was spooky seeing people walking around the guesthouse like "zombies." When I resigned as abbot in the fall of 1981, Spencer dropped the workshops and went back to the former nondirective style of retreat.

I headed for St. Benedict's Monastery, our foundation in Snowmass, Colorado, with no intention of teaching Centering Prayer. But in May 1982, I was asked by the assistant pastor in Aspen to offer a presentation on prayer once a week for four consecutive weeks. A small mention of the event was put in the parish bulletin and, to our surprise, about eighty people showed up. After that, I gave several retreats in Trappist and Benedictine monasteries, in which I gradually developed the material for the Spiritual Journey video tape series, which was filmed in the late fall of 1986.

In the summer of 1982 I paid a visit to the Lama Foundation in New Mexico, an ecumenical community of spiritual seekers. Ram Dass happened to be there giving a workshop at the time, and I spoke to the group at his invitation. At least half of them were Catholics and a significant percentage were Jews; the rest were a sprinkling of other aligned and nonaligned persons. I was struck by these numbers and wondered, "Where are these Catholics coming from?" Many of them were disaffected from the religion of their youth because of the legalistic and over-moralistic teaching that many had received in their local parishes and Catholic schools; they now felt spiritually enriched by their experiences in Buddhism and Hinduisrn.

At Lama they were pleased with my respect for Eastern religions, as most of them had not previously met a priest who was sympathetic with their experience. Catholics also found me sympathetic to the problems they had encountered with their early upbringing. During the first couple of years in my new home in Colorado, I visited several Eastern communities, where I continued to find the same percentages of Catholics. The bitterness and indignation of these former Catholics was often directed at me as a priest, so much so that I felt a little like a garbage man on a collecting expedition. At the time, clearly, the Church was not projecting an image of spirituality, at least not in a way that ordinary persons could perceive it.

Lama invited me to offer a program at its Intensive Studies Center in August 1983, and I accepted. For some time I had wanted to put together a Christian contemplative retreat that would be comparable to a Zen sesshin, with a significant amount of time spent in silent meditation, an experiment that had not been done before in the Christian tradition as far as I was aware. It is true that three or four hours of meditation are prescribed in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius on an enclosed thirty-day retreat, but it is highly programmed with regard to the subjects on which one is to reflect and the visualizations one is to use. I was curious to learn what effect long periods of nonprogrammed prayer every day for two weeks might have on ordinary Catholics.

It turned out to be a watershed experience. I chose a two-week retreat because I thought it might take twice as long for us to do what is done in a Zen sesshin in a week. I also did not want to overwhelm the participants, so we did only five hours of contemplative prayer each day I also presented the material that later appeared on the Spiritual Journey video tapes, with an introduction to Lectio Divina and, of course, instruction in the practice of Centering Prayer. Silence was observed throughout the day, and time for discussion was provided in the evenings.

This retreat took place under very primitive conditions. The shock effect of no hot water, no indoor plumbing, no electric lights, and no phone unless one hiked half a mile drew the twelve participants out of their usual routines, to say the least, and bonded them tightly together. Half of the participants at that original Lama retreat are now pillars of the Contemplative Outreach network. They include Gail Fitzpatrick-Hopler, Fr. Carl Arico, Fr. Bill Sheehan, and Mary Mrozowski, who later, with David Frenette, founded Chrysalis House, a contemplative live-in lay community in Warwick, New York. Pat Johnson and Mary Ann Matheson were members of the Lama Community at the time, serving the workshops given there at the Foundation. They now staff the monthly Intensive Workshops at the monastery in Snowmass. The experience at Lama convinced me that the Christian contemplative tradition was alive and well and could be communicated in a workshop with dramatic effects for the grounding of a personal contemplative practice.

In November 1983, Gus Reininger, while on retreat at St. Benedict's, broached with me the idea of forming an organization that would teach Centering Prayer in parishes. As an experiment, I agreed to conduct a parish workshop that Gus and his wife Gale quickly organized for December 1983 at St. Ignatius Loyola Church in New York City Subsequent workshops followed that spring and summer conducted by myself, Fr. Basil Pennington, and Fr. Carl Arico. Over 175 parishioners attended these events, and thanks to this warm response and the support of the pastor, the late Victor Yanitelli, S.J., our instinct that Centering Prayer had a place in parish life was verified.

Meanwhile, Ed Bednar, working at the Thomas Merton Center at Columbia University under the direction of Columbia chaplain Rev. Paul Dinter, expressed to me his interest in forming a network of contemplatives. This seemed a good complement to the unfolding experiment centered at St. Ignatius. Ed and Gus had exploratory meetings with a number of religious figures from the metropolitan New York area--Fr. David Toolan, S.J., Fr. james Lopresti, S.J., Br. David Stendal-Rast, O.S.B., Fr. Daniel Berrigan, S.J., Fr. Paul Dinter, Fr. Carl Arico, and others. The shared enthusiasm generated by these meetings resulted in an organization we christened Contemplative Outreach. Our goals, ambitious at that time, were to offer Centering Prayer in parish and diocesan contexts, to train facilitators and teachers, and to develop materials. Thanks to the support of Cardinal John O'Connor and Bishop Joseph O'Keefe, we were able to secure two foundation grants to fund a pilot program for the archdiocese of New York. Contemplative Outreach's first Centering Prayer event was a workshop at Holy Trinity Church attended by more than 350 persons, from which sprung additional workshops and support groups in a number of other parishes. Along with this effort we coordinated already existing support groups, founded by Mary Mrozowski, in New Jersey and Long Island. Contemplative Outreach was underway.

A small group, constituting a board for Contemplative Outreach, began meeting regularly at the Merton Center to coordinate the various support activities, adopt a mission statement, and chart a course for the future. First Ed Bednar and then Mary Mrozowski served as temporary executive directors. Gail Fitzpatrick-Hopler became our first full-time executive director.

In the original vision statement of Contemplative Outreach we identified ourselves as "a network of faith communities committed to the process and transmission of Christian transformation." In service of that vision and the thousands of people who are dedicated to Christian contemplation, Contemplative Outreach now sponsors workshops and retreats that encourage extensive formation in the Christian journey and the experience of Centering Prayer. In addition to the ten-day Intensive Retreats, Advanced and Post-Intensive Retreats have been developed to deepen the process.

A Formation for Contemplative Outreach Service Workshop is held several times a year to provide for intensive study of the essentials of Centering Prayer and the Christian journey, and Contemplative Issues Workshops provide opportunities to discuss questions that arise as people's experience of the journey unfolds. Our vision statement concludes with the affirmation, "It is Christ who empowers us to live the contemplative dimension of the Gospel in everyday life." It is this affirmation that has allowed us to evolve to where we are now, and it is the place out of which all new growth will come.

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Excerpted from Intimacy with God by Fr. Thomas Keating

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