Will and Intention in Contemplative Prayer

By Father Thomas Keating
Reprinted from the Fall 1993 Contemplative Outreach Newsletter

Part I

    Centering Prayer is not contemplation in the strict sense of the word but a method of practice to facilitate the beginning of contemplation. Contemplation is basically the predominance of the Gifts of the Spirit over our own activity during the time of prayer. At the same time, it gradually works itself into daily life through the active gifts of the Spirit: counsel, prudence, fortitude and knowledge.

    In the Centering Prayer practice our activity has a part but it is a very disciplined one. It begins by being minimal, and finishes by being almost imperceptible. Centering Prayer is probably the most receptive of the practices designed to facilitate the growth of contemplation.

    Think of a continuum in which our activity at one end consists of a practice such as Centering Prayer. Centering Prayer is not a concentrative practice. It is not an exercise of attention. It is an exercise of intention. It is our will, our faculty of choice, that we are cultivating. The will is also our faculty of spiritual love, which is a choice. It may be accompanied by sentiments of love but does not require them. Divine love is not a feeling. It is a disposition or attitude of on-going self-surrender and concern, as God has for us and every living thing.

    In our practice w e begin by choosing an activity which is a traditional practice to access the spiritual level of our being. This movement takes place under the influence of the Holy Spirit who is present to us all the time through the Divine Indwelling. As the influence of the Spirit increases, we might imagine it as coming toward us on the continuum. It might be better to say that we are awakening to this Divine presence and action within us and consenting to it.

    Note that Centering Prayer is an acceptance not only of God's presence, but also of God's action. What we are experiencing needs to be understood in the context of this movement of the Spirit which is primarily therapeutic. Why? Because we are sick! If we think we are well, and experience this activity which is definitely medicinal, it may cause great surprise. Some medications can be painful, not because that is the desire of the doctor, but because our illness is such that it needs a serious remedy.

    During this prayer, the will is developing the habit of surrender to God's presence and action. Meanwhile the Spirit's influence is also increasing and at some point, one enters a no-man's or a no-woman's land where one doesn't know which activity is predominating.

    All prayer is a gift of the Spirit but in the beginning the Spirit works through our ordinary faculties which we exercise through discursive meditation and affective prayer, spiritual reading, the sacraments, other devotions, and the practice of virtue. All of these practices are increasing our capacity to respond with sensitivity to the movements of the Spirit. At some point there is an interaction in which sometimes one's own gentle activity predominates, and at other times the Spirit's activity predominates.

    In this latter experience we may encounter what St. Teresa of Avila describes in The Interior Castle as the states of prayer, which she calls the prayer of quiet, union, and full union. They are levels of absorption of the faculties that are perceived by the one who receives them as the activity of the Divine presence. In those situations we are more or less aware of God's action. The Divine action can be just as present, however, at an even more intimate level which the various faculties cannot interpret.

    Just because one receives the spiritual consolation of the prayer of quiet or is completely absorbed in God in the prayer of union, doesn't mean one is a saint. It may mean that we are so sick that we need special attention. So don't get puffed up by such things! On the other hand, we don't resist them either because we may need them. In deep therapy, the first thing one has to do in order to be healed is to experience transference with the therapist. This is a mysterious emotional process in which one identifies with the therapist and transfers to that person one's relationship with authority figures from early life. Then the therapist can reflect back the acceptance one might not have felt as a child. It can heal the emotional privation of thinking of oneself as unlovable. We need the experience of another person fully accepting us on the emotional level. Otherwise it is difficult to have a full self-identity or as the psychologists call it, a strong ego, a valuable asset for the spiritual journey. It is this fully developed self, with all the wounds still remaining from early childhood, that we offer to God. Some people have been so deprived that they have an emotional conviction not only of being unlovable but even of being a mistake. This is the source of the disease of self-hatred that is epidemic in our culture. This has to be healed in some degree for the spiritual journey to develop because the spiritual journey is the surrender of a self, a self-identity. If we don't have a sense of a self or self-identity, we don't know what to give.

    The affirmation of spiritual consolations and periods of peace of refreshment, are a kind of transference with God. God then reflects back the acceptance and affirmation that our parents may have denied us in early childhood because of their own wounds from early life. If we can get over our self-hatred and the wounds of early childhood, we will make a tremendous contribution to the next generation. Unfortunately parents don't usually find this out until the children are grown up. But please don't have guilt feelings on this point because the same thing as been going on since Adam and Eve. That is the human condition. It is accepting our failures. working with the, and trying to grow out of them, that is important. This down-to-earth process is an important aspect of the spiritual journey. Modern psychological discoveries can be helpful in our understanding of what the human condition really is from a diagnostic perspective. It is a pathology.

    As the Spirit becomes predominant in our prayer, the use of the sacred word or sacred symbol during the time of Centering Prayer becomes less and less necessary. However, as long as we find that we are attracted to thoughts or feeling going by on the level of our memory or imagination during prayer, we freely make use of the sacred word, not to push the thoughts away, but to reaffirm our original intention of consenting to the presence of God.

Continued next week.