The Jesuit Guide To (Almost) Everything - James Martin [75]
in all those dark moments, O God,
grant that I may understand that it is you
(provided only my faith is strong enough)
who are painfully parting the fibers of my being
in order to penetrate to the very marrow
of my substance and bear me away within yourself.
The three men most responsible for introducing centering prayer into contemporary Christian circles in the English-speaking world are John Main, M. Basil Pennington, and Thomas Keating. Main was an English Benedictine monk. Pennington was, and Keating is, an American Trappist monk, like Thomas Merton. Pennington wrote that the term centering prayer was inspired by Merton’s use of similar phrases in his writings.
Pennington and Keating wrote a brief book called Finding Grace at the Center along with Thomas E. Clarke, S.J. Before his death in 2005, Father Clarke, a quiet and gentle priest, resided at a small retreat house in a rural area north of New York City. He offers a concise introduction to the method: “Our theme is the center” he wrote, “the place of meeting of the human spirit and the divine Spirit, and, in that meeting, the place where the Christian at prayer meets the whole of reality, divine and human, persons and things, time and space, nature and history, evil and good.”
Who can do that? I thought when I first read his words. But Tom’s point is simple. Centering prayer is a move toward your center, where you encounter God. But it’s not simple navel-gazing, nor is it simply about God and you alone. For any encounter with God will lead you to the rest of creation.
God is within us and . . . we are in Him, and . . . this presence of God is a great motive of respect, confidence, love, joy, fervor.
— St. Claude La Colombière, S.J. (1641–1682)
This simple framework may strike many people as suspicious. Initially, I was more suspicious of centering prayer than I had been about imaginative prayer. If Ignatian contemplation sounded ridiculous, meeting God within you sounded arrogant. Who was I to say that God dwelt within me? Some Christians also think centering prayer is suspect because it’s “dangerously” close to Zen Buddhism and other Eastern practices. (The misguided idea that Christians couldn’t learn anything from Eastern spiritualities was a great source of consternation for Thomas Merton.)
But the more I read about centering prayer, the more foolish my objections seemed—for the idea of God’s dwelling within us is a foundational Christian belief. For one thing, most believers recognize conscience as the voice of God within. For another, multiple images of the indwelling God appear in the New Testament and in the early church. St. Paul said one’s body is a “temple of the Holy Spirit,” one place where God resides. St. Augustine wrote that God is intimior intimo meo: closer to me than I am to myself.
Centering prayer moves us to our center, where God dwells, waiting to meet us.
Three Steps
Father Pennington’s essay in Finding God at the Center breaks down centering prayer into three steps.
One: At the beginning of the prayer we take a minute or two to quiet down and then move in faith and love to God dwelling in our depths; and at the end of the prayer we take several minutes to come out, mentally praying the Our Father.
“Faith,” Father Pennington points out, “is fundamental for this prayer, as for any prayer.” Moving to the center, you trust that you’re moving toward the God who is intimior intimo meo.
Two: After resting for a bit in the Presence in faith-full love, we take up a single, simple word that expresses our response and begin to let it repeat itself within.
In other words, you find a mantra or prayer word such as “love,” “mercy,” or “God” to help you focus. Don’t concentrate on the meaning of the word. Rather, let the word anchor you in the presence of God. As the author of The Cloud of Unknowing says, “It is best when this word is wholly interior without a definite thought or actual sound.”
Three: Whenever in the course of prayer we become aware of anything else, we simply gently return to the prayer