The vision of Contemplative Outreach is this: "How can we serve the Church and the broader Christian community, by making the rich Christian contemplative tradition available in our day with the kind of language, inspiration, and support system that will enable contemporary people to pursue the journey to the end?" In developing this support system, I turned for a conceptual background to certain psychological paradigms because I think that very few seekers are going to start the spiritual journey today by reading the spiritual classics. I wonder if any would have started Centering Prayer if I had not put it into a psychological frame of reference that they could identify with. I don't think the study of the old classics is the way to start. How many people can extrapolate a practical method of prayer from reading two or three hundred spiritual classics, most of them with a very different vocabulary and reference points from our own? The Christian tradition has always been somewhat limited in methodology. There is a lot of excellent material on original sin and the Fall and the terrible state we are in as a result of the seven capital sins. There is also quite a bit of exuberant literature on the transforming union and its joys, but there is not much that says how you get from one place to the other.

This is where I received some inspiration from the East. The Eastern masters began arriving in America in great numbers after World War II saying, "Here is our method of contemplative prayer [they called it meditation]. Where is yours?" To which we had virtually nothing to reply We did not have any kind of method comparable to their concrete and detailed instructions. Even the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius were in a pretty sorry state in those days, offering various useful visualizations, good in themselves, but in no way capable of moving one to the more refined levels of faith or to the contemplative state. The Jesuits have done much in recent decades to recover Ignatius's original inspiration and method. Centering Prayer was developed to offer Christians access to the richness of our own contemplative tradition. And by the early 1980s, it was clear that this method was going to meet a very real hunger. People were responding in increasing numbers and their lives as well as their prayer were being transformed.

Anyone who does any kind of serious prayer practice needs to have a conceptual background to deepen and integrate the practice. I knew that this need would be in great demand rather soon if people kept doing Centering Prayer. In working up the material that eventually became the Spiritual Journey video tape series, I tried to bring the Christian contemplative tradition into dialogue with contemporary science, especially developmental psychology, anthropology, and physics. I did not expect at first that anybody would be interested in it--certainly not lay persons. But I soon found out that lay persons were much more interested than the average priest or religious. I also became aware that people of other Christian denominations were interested too because they did not have a contemplative focus in their own denomination and were beginning to feel the need of something more experiential than sermons and theology. Even some priests and bishops were beginning to question whether the way to reconvert or evangelize people was to start with the liturgy or with catechetical instruction. Some kind of prayer experience looked like a more promising way to begin, something that would get people out of their heads.

The term "meditation" means for people exposed to Eastern methods what we Christians mean by contemplation, that is, a way of disregarding the usual flow of thoughts for a certain period of time. From a physiological/ psychological point of view, that is really the essence of any form of Eastern meditation. As Carlos Castaneda put it in a classic phrase, "Stop the interior dialogue." That is a most useful discipline to prepare the mind for contemplative prayer. The process of committing oneself to the divine guidance is not a "hands-on" feeling; quite the contrary, it is the courage to proceed without any divine "hands-on," that is, to move into the dark nights where the real journey takes place and without which one does not normally reach the Promised Land.

Our organization is definitely not a form of lay monastic life. I deliberately rejected that paradigm because I knew as soon as we used the term "monastic," the average citizen would be back into the institutionalized view of contemplation, which is for cloistered people only. Most secular priests have the same concept. I remember a priest saying that in the seminary he attended, when the professor of spiritual theology came to the place where the text referred to contemplation, he said, "We won't go into that stuff here. That's for the boys up at Spencer." As if contemplation had nothing to do with persons in the active ministry! That was the universal mind-set we were dealing with until around 1975. One could not talk about contemplation even to cloistered people without some getting up and leaving or with most becoming very nervous. The rank and file were taught that contemplation is only for mystics and saints. In actual fact, contemplation is not the reward of a virtuous life; it is a necessity for a virtuous life. We will be waiting a long time for priests, and for the lay people who are now assuming many of the duties of priests, to be capable of spiritual guidance. It cannot be looked upon as just another of their many professional competencies. They have to be touched or enlightened by the fact that we do not make ourselves spiritual directors but commit, submit, and surrender ourselves to the journey without the props we would like to have to feel secure. In fact, the letting go of security is something we have to agree to as a condition for the journey. Without having accepted the trip into the unknown, one is really not a candidate for contemplation because that is what is presupposed. God has to lead us into a place that involves a complete reversal of our prepackaged values, a complete undoing of all our carefully laid plans, and a lot of letting go of our preconceived ideas.

Motivation is everything in the spiritual journey. God, I think, cares less about a change of lifestyle or ideal circumstances than about our attitude toward what we are doing. Our motivation can be inspired by the false self system dressed up in religious or spiritual garb. This letting go into the unknown, this submitting to the unloading process, is an essential step into the mystery of our own unconscious. Hidden there is not only our whole life's history, especially the emotional wounds of early childhood buried in the warehouse of our bodies, but also the positive elements of our potential for growth in faith, hope, and divine love, and where the Divine Indwelling is also present. We must gradually recover the conviction, not just the feeling, of the Divine Indwelling, the realization that God--Father, Son, and Holy Spirit--is living in us. This is the heart of the spiritual journey, to which Centering Prayer is totally in service.

I am often asked to clarify the relationship between Centering Prayer and Lectio Divina. Centering Prayer is not a part of the method of Lectio Divina. It is rather a distinct method of prayer that emerges out of the same tradition. It is closely related to Lectio Divina, but not so much in its method as in the developing relationship with Christ that Lectio Divina implies and fosters.

One of the practical consequences of Centering Prayer is overcoming the obstacles to the full development of Lectio Divina in our time because people are enculturated to oppose its spontaneous movement toward contemplative prayer. Some people have bright minds and are intellectually geared to endless reflection. This is not to say that some reflection on the truths of faith is not necessary. The problem with Lectio is how to get from simplified affective prayer to contemplation? I became increasingly convinced that Centering Prayer or some such method was normally necessary for people of our time to reach contemplation through the practice of Lectio.

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Excerpted from Intimacy with God by Fr. Thomas Keating

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