Centering Prayer
Her greatest gift was her willingness to consent to God’s presence and action in her life.
—Thomas Keating, Mary, the Mother of God
CAC Faculty Emerita Cynthia Bourgeault has spent decades teaching the practice of Centering Prayer. She shares:
For over forty years now, the following four guidelines have successfully introduced tens of thousands of people worldwide to Centering Prayer:
- Choose a sacred word as the symbol of your intention to consent to God’s presence and action within.
- Sitting comfortably and with eyes closed, settle briefly and silently introduce the sacred word as the symbol of your consent to God’s presence and action within.
- When engaged with your thoughts [including body sensations, feelings, images, and reflections], return ever-so-gently to the sacred word.
- At the end of the prayer period, remain in silence with eyes closed for a couple of minutes. [1]
Father Thomas Keating suggests praying for twenty minutes twice a day.
So are we really saying that in Centering Prayer you meditate by simply letting go of one thought after another? That can certainly be our subjective experience of the practice, and this is exactly the frustration expressed by an early practitioner. In one of the very earliest training workshops led by Keating himself, a nun tried out her first twenty-minute taste of Centering Prayer and then lamented, “Oh, Father Thomas, I’m such a failure at this prayer. In twenty minutes I’ve had ten thousand thoughts!”
“How lovely,” responded Keating, without missing a beat. “Ten thousand opportunities to return to God.”
This simple story captures the essence of Centering Prayer. It is quintessentially a pathway of return in which every time the mind is released from engagement with a specific idea or impression, we move from a smaller and more constricted consciousness into that open, diffuse awareness in which our presence to divine reality makes itself known along a whole different pathway of perception.
That’s what the anonymous author of the fourteenth-century spiritual classic The Cloud of Unknowing may have had in mind when he wrote, “God may be reached and held close by means of love, but by means of thought never.” [2] “Love” is this author’s pet word for that open, diffuse awareness which gradually allows another and deeper way of knowing to pervade one’s entire being.
Out of my own four decades of experience in Centering Prayer, I believe that this “love” indeed has nothing to do with emotions or feelings in the usual sense. It is rather the author’s nearest equivalent term to describe what we would nowadays call nondual perception anchored in the heart.
And he is indeed correct in calling it “love” because the energetic bandwidth in which the heart works is intimacy, the capacity to perceive things from the inside by coming into sympathetic resonance with them. Imagine! Centuries ahead of his time, the author is groping for metaphors to describe an entirely different mode of perceptivity.
Don’t Spit Out the Wine
On not being lukewarm
| MARK LONGHURSTMAR 23 |
I’m good-weird, my family tells me. I’ve explained to our boys that weird can be a positive trait, rather than an adjective of uncertainty used to reject something or someone. They turned my description back on me, and I ham it up and act the part. I sing at random moments. I make up incomprehensible raps in the car, which always ends in family giggling. I’m obsessed with books, and my wife and the boys understand that they are super nerdy books, like commentaries on the book of Revelation. I’m convinced that the more we live into God’s True Self in us, the more “good-weird” we become. The more we seek God, the more we become who we are.
I know your works; you are neither cold nor hot. I wish that you were either cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about to vomit you out of my mouth. —Revelation 3:15–16
In this section of the book of Revelation, John of Patmos has been writing letters to churches across Asia Minor (or ancient Turkey). Here he writes to a well-off Roman administrative center called Laodicea. To be more accurate, John of Patmos has been writing in the voice of the Cosmic Christ speaking to angels of seven churches, who are intended to receive the message on behalf of the congregations. (Check out the section “Make Sense of Angels Like a Scientist” in my book The Holy Ordinary to dive more deeply into the good-weirdness of angels). The message Christ has for the Laodiceans is graphic and challenging, needed in their time and ours, and it boils down to this: Be different! Be “good-weird” from the surrounding culture! Stand up for something!
The hot or cold liquid imagery is taken from banqueting practices of the time. I grew up listening to an evangelical praise song that asked God to “Light the Fire Again,” presuming that becoming hot for God was the goal. Christ here seems to think either hot or cold is advantageous; what matters is, at all costs, not to be lukewarm. Apparently, this magisterial commentary tells me, a well-off banquet host in Roman imperial cities would have hot and cold water available to mix with wine. You wanted to keep guests happy, and giving them options to fix their drinks was one way. Surely there would be guests who went overboard and vomited due to excessive food and drink; the image here, though, is Christ as a disgusted banquet-attendee throwing up after drinking lukewarm wine. Neither hot nor cold.
“I know your works” is one of the phrases that the Cosmic Christ repeats to multiple congregations. To the Jesus-followers in another ancient city named Thyatira, Christ says, “I know your works—your love, faith, service, and patient endurance” (Romans 2:19; “patient endurance” is best translated as nonviolent resistance). This gives us a sense of what Christ is looking for: love and devotion to God and other people, faith that this reality and the power of empire are not ultimate, service to those most in need, and firm nonviolent resistance that knows larger power and love still guide us, even when appearances are to the contrary.
The problem seems to be the Laodiceans privileged complacency: “For you say, “I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing” (Revelation 3:17). Wealth, fullness, and distance from those most suffering breed lukewarm hearts. If someone is white, wealthy, and seemingly self-sufficient, it becomes easy to ignore the struggles of immigrants, transgender individuals, and those advocating for Palestinian rights in an increasingly repressive United States.
But the entry fee to God’s banquet is powerlessness. It’s the first step of the twelve: “We admitted that we were powerless over ____ (fill in the blank), that our lives had become unmanageable.” It’s humiliating to admit it, but addictive patterns are universal to the human condition. Call it sin or woundedness, but we are all looking for gratification, comfort, control, and esteem, and many of us will go to great lengths to secure them. Or we will live in terror that it will all be taken away. Some identify as people in recovery, but those in recovery are simply harbingers of our authentic state. We need help. We can’t do it alone. Our accomplishments, bank accounts, and friends are not enough. The spiritual journey is recovery.
Once we are empty, we can begin to feast. Christ knocks on the door, John writes, “if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me” (3:20). Our pregnant emptiness will result in “good-weird” works that set us apart from dominant systems. We may grow our own food in simplicity, hug trees in our love for nature, befriend immigrants, help feed people who are hungry, protest harmful federal funding cuts, refuse to see Palestinians as less than human, or simply read authors such as James Baldwin or Louise Erdrich for the first time. We may publish our thoughts, like me, on a Substack, or share them through a sermon, poem, or a song. We may shut off devices and turn off our social media accounts, for a day, a week, or a year. We may sing, pray, shout, or weep to God because our hearts are anything but lukewarm.
The wine is good. We dare not spit it out!
