The Jesuit Guide To (Almost) Everything - James Martin [74]
Harvey Egan, S.J., a professor of theology at Boston College, noted in The New Dictionary of Catholic Spirituality (Michael Downey, ed.) that this tradition is rooted in both the Old and New Testaments. In the Book of Exodus, God dwells in “thick darkness” (20:21) and appears to Moses as a “cloud” (34:5). Moses cannot see God’s face when God passes, which is another way of expressing the divine “otherness.” St. Thomas Aquinas said that one can only know that God is, not what God is. The best known writer on this stance is the (still anonymous) author of the fourteenth-century work The Cloud of Unknowing, who speaks more of what God is not, rather than what God is.
The other stream is kataphatic prayer, which comes from the Greek word kataphatikos, meaning “positive.” This tradition seeks to experience God in creation and makes overt use of images, concepts, words, and symbols in prayer. Kataphatic prayer is more “content rich.” The theology here is that we can begin to know God through all of creation.
This method is also firmly rooted in Scripture. The Old Testament stresses that God can be understood through his visible works—that is, the natural world. In Christian theology this is made even more explicit: God is known as a person. As Jesus says in the Gospel of John (14:9), “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” And Aquinas—now arguing for the opposing side—says that although God is ultimately unknowable, we can seek God through the things that are “known to us.”
St. Thomas might be accused of a certain duplicity—arguing both sides of the argument. But he’s right in both cases: God can be known through his works (kataphatic) but not known fully (apophatic). Both approaches are authentic. Both have been used by believers over the millennia. Moreover, many find themselves using these two different approaches at different times in their lives.
You’ve probably guessed where I’m going: Ignatian contemplation, with its emphasis on the imagination, fits squarely in the kataphatic tradition. So does lectio divina.
Centering prayer, a practice that seeks to find God at the center of one’s being without the intentional use of images, is closer to the content-free way. In a recent conversation, Father Egan said plainly, “Centering prayer is apophatic.”
As a result, centering prayer is not often associated with Ignatian spirituality. Instead most people align it with Zen Buddhism or yoga. But there are clear echoes of centering prayer in the Spiritual Exercises.
At one point in the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius talks about the “Third Method of Praying,” which he describes as done “according to rhythmic measures.” You take a single word (he suggests words from the Our Father) and concentrate on the word while breathing in and out. “This is done in such a manner that one word of the prayer is said between one breath and another,” he writes. This Ignatian practice is remarkably similar to Zen prayer as well as to the more contemporary centering prayer.
But before going any further with comparisons, let’s talk about what centering prayer is (rather than, apophatically, what it is not) and how it fits in with the Ignatian way.
Bear Me Away
Jesuits pray in many ways. Sometimes they compose their own prayers. Here is one from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955), the French paleontologist and theologian, asking for the grace to age well.
When the signs of age begin to mark my body
(and still more when they touch my mind);
when the ill that is to diminish me or carry me off
strikes from without or is born within me;
when the painful moment comes
in which I suddenly awaken
to the fact that I am ill or growing old;
and above all at that last moment
when I feel I am losing hold of myself
and am absolutely passive within the hands
of the great unknown