In our time there is a predominant enculturation in the two things that are most inimical to proceeding from discursive meditation to interior silence. The first is hyperactivity--thinking that we have to do something in, prayer to please God. The second is overconceptualization a special hazard for those who are highly educated, and even more so for those who are highly trained theologically. They have gradually absorbed the idea that thinking about God is praying. It isn't. Centering Prayer is a way of enabling people of our time to get over these two major cultural obstacles to their development in prayer. In Lectio we are supposed to reflect, respond, and then in some mysterious fashion rest in God.

There is no common teaching in our time as to how one moves from discursive meditation to resting in God. In fact, until very recently this movement was specifically discouraged. For centuries in Jesuit communities for fear of a privatized mysticism one had to stick to discursive meditation. The historical result of this mentality is not surprising: contemplation became institutionalized and hence available only in certain highly structured circumstances, which were not remotely accessible to lay persons or even to those in the active ministry, not to mention busy monks and nuns in cloisters. But without the experience of resting in God, all the capital sins can flourish without one actually being aware of the fact. One may think one is doing great things for God if one gets into parochial work or teaching, but the seven capital sins, the results of the emotional programs for happiness in the unconscious, are there in concrete form and, unless confronted, will lead to burn-out or pharisaism, the occupational hazards of religious people.

This is the reason why I say one can't do the spiritual life nowadays without some working knowledge of one's own psychology. Unless one develops a healthy self-identity, the psychological resources for the journey are lacking. People who have been injured in early childhood and do not have a strong ego because they were oppressed or abused do not have a self to give to God. They do not have a self to relate either to God or to anybody else. When they hear advice like "humble yourself," or "keep your eyes always cast down," or "never question authority," they fall right into step because that is what they really like to do. They don't want to take responsibility for themselves and the damage that was done to them in early life. They prefer external obedience to inner transformation. But without personal responsibility for our emotional life, however wounded it is, the journey will never really get off the ground. Our conscious life has to be our starting point, of course, but the biggest problem is our unconscious motivation. Both have to be changed.

Centering Prayer creates the atmosphere in which that change can begin to take place. Some people will perceive that this practice is going to cause changes in them and back off. People who are prepsychotic and in a depression should do it only under professional guidance because Centering Prayer makes one vulnerable to the unconscious. One needs to have a sufficiently strong ego or self-identity to be able to deal with painful emotional material when it comes up.

A trip into the unconscious is a passage into the great unknown. One of the reasons we recommend limiting Centering Prayer to two periods a day is that with such a gentle exposure to the unconscious, the passage will take several years, unless some previous form of deep meditation has loosened up some stuff that might surface fairly soon. Apart from the latter consideration, people normally have plenty of time to grasp the conceptual background of the practice so that when the unconscious begins to unload and they get in touch with childhood traumas and instinctual drives, they will have the capacity to handle them. The experience will still be painful, but it will not blow them away.

To emphasize a most important point: Centering Prayer is both a relationship and a method to foster that relationship at the same time. It is tucked into the relational dynamic of Lectio Divina, although we can't exactly affirm that it is a part of Lectio or that it emerges from Lectio. It is also a method designed to reduce the obstacles to contemplation, especially overactivity, overdependence on one's thought, and excessive preoccupation with oneself and one's acts. The method itself is a discipline to enable the developing relationship with Jesus to reach its term in union with God. You have only to talk to people whose prayer is basically visualization or discursive meditation to realize you are on a different plane. No one understands contemplative prayer without some experience of it.

Centering Prayer relates to Lectio Divina as a discipline designed to correct what hinders or prevents us from moving from simplified affective prayer into contemplation. This does not mean that if we practice Centering Prayer, we never do anything else. We simply do Lectio and other forms of prayer at another time.

Now the delicate question arises, Can we begin a life of prayer with Centering Prayer? Tradition says that we should normally begin with discursive meditation and that we should not move beyond affective prayer unless we know God is calling us to contemplation. But nobody explains what that really means, or how we are to know when God is calling us. The usual signs given by St. John of the Cross are not easy to verify in concrete cases. We may go to a spiritual director who is supposed to help us discern, but he or she really may not know either. My question is why do we need to know?

Let us take another look at the continuum in Diagram 1. The action of the Holy Spirit is directed toward us from one end and our efforts to pray are directed or open to the Spirit from the other end. According to the Roman Catholic faith, we cannot even desire to pray without the grace of the Holy Spirit. In this sense, every prayer is inspired by the Spirit. We say that the Spirit gradually takes over our prayer and that Centering Prayer is in the service of that project. But remember, "gradually" is our category, not God's. Conversion, or metanoia, is always presented in Scripture as a unified action, a recognition that stops us dead in our tracks and turns our lives in a different direction. If, under the prompting of the Spirit, a chronic alcoholic can realize that his life is unmanageable and turn it over to God, why is it so hard to imagine a person, even an "inexperienced" Christian, being moved by the contemplative gifts of wisdom, understanding, and knowledge while praying? It is not that hard for God.

To return to the continuum we spoke of above, I quote St. Augustine: "We move spiritually not by our feet, but by our desires." As the desire for union with God manifests itself both in daily life and in prayer, at some point we have reduced our activity to what is called simplified affective prayer, that is, to a word, a couple of words, a gesture, or a generalized image--not a visualization--that involves the spiritual sense of sight. We may come to a point in the use of the sacred word (which is simply a gesture of our intention, hence an expression of love) when it drops out of consciousness, and we are more or less aware of a general sense of peace, or of being grasped by God, or of just being restful and quiet. What has happened is that the intentionality renewed again and again by returning to the sacred word has become a habit and repeats itself. When the sacred word drops away, we enter into a no-man's/no woman's land in which the action of the Spirit meets the very simplified activity of renewing our intention by means of the sacred symbol. Then we have contemplation in the strict sense of the word. Until then, the Centering Prayer practice is really "acquired contemplation," a discipline of not dialoguing with the mind, or if the mind keeps thinking, of paying no attention to it. If the attraction of the dialogue becomes absorbing, we return to the sacred word to renew the purity of our original intention, which was to spend this time of prayer with God and to open and surrender to God.

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Excerpted from Intimacy with God by Fr. Thomas Keating

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