Thomas Keating, Cynthia Bourgeault: Centering Prayer

Thomas Keating, Cynthia Bourgeault: Centering Prayer

“God can be held fast and loved by means of love, but by thought never.” —The Cloud of Unknowing, Ira Progoff, tr. (Delta Books, 1957).

In Centering Prayer, we select a sacred word as the symbol of our willingness to surrender to the presence of God. We sit comfortably with closed eyes in silence and then introduce the sacred word. Whenever thoughts return, we silently speak the sacred word. At the end of the prayer period, we remain silent with eyes closed for a few minutes.

Thomas Keating suggests practicing Centering Prayer for twenty minutes twice a day. Is Centering Prayer a simple letting go of one thought after another? That can certainly be our subjective experience of the practice; and this is exactly the frustration we sometimes encounter during Centering Prayer and Lectio Divina.

Keating tells the story of a nun who tries out her first twenty-minute experience of Centering Prayer and then laments, “Father Thomas, I’m such a failure at this prayer. In twenty minutes, I’ve had ten thousand thoughts!” “How lovely,” responded Keating. “Ten thousand opportunities to return to God.”

Keating emphasizes that Centering Prayer is indeed a pathway of return to God, and this may be what the writer of The Cloud of Unknowing was trying to tell us.1 We also need to remember that the benefit of Centering Prayer does not always come during the prayer time, but sometimes later in the day or week, when we feel God’s presence in the moment as we never knew it before. This truth is expressed best in several of the promises in The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous: “We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us.”2

1Adapted from Cynthia Bourgeault, The Heart of Centering Prayer: Nondual Christianity in Theory and Practice (Shambhala, 2016), pp. 14, 28-29, 120, 123. From Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation, February 11, 2017, Cynthia Bourgeault, guest writer.

2The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous (Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc., 4th ed., 2001), pp. 83-84.

Joanna. Joannaseibert.com

Purchase a copy of A Spiritual Rx for Lent and Easter from me, joannaseibert@me.com, from Wordsworth Books in Little Rock, or from Amazon.

Scripture: Ignatian Exercises

Scripture: Ignatian Exercises

“Take a passage from scripture that you enjoy. Ignatius invites you to enter into the scene by ‘composing the place,’ by imagining yourself in the story with as much detail as you can muster.” —James Martin in The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything (HarperOne, 2010).

Ignatius practiced spirituality by taking his students and himself deep into the story of Scripture in their imagination, and sometimes literally. We start with the senses: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling. As we live inside the story, Ignatius asks us to pay attention to what insights might come. Soon, in our imaginary journey, we can travel in time and find ourselves back in the Scripture itself, with more profound understanding than when we were just intellectualizing the story in our head.

At the front of the refectory at the College of Preachers at the National Cathedral, in stained glass, was written: “If you do not dramatize the message, they will not listen.” You can see this from many angles; but what it came to mean to me was that my job as preacher was to help those in the congregation “experience” the Scripture—usually the Gospel, as Ignatius is asking us to do. My experience was I could do this best by taking myself and all who would like to make a journey into the story; become one of the characters; feel Jesus’ feelings; know his hopes and fears, his frustrations, his loves, his passions, his humanness. This is also good advice to give to spiritual friends whose study of Scripture has become stale.

I was first exposed to the Ignatian exercises and this method of studying Scripture in a small purple book, The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius in the Image Classics series. I now know there are so many more. A priest I work with, Michael McCain, recommended this one by James Martin.

It is hard to become dry when we actually go into a story in Scripture and become a part of it. We will hear voices we have never heard before.

Joanna. Joannaseibert.com

Purchase a copy of A Spiritual RX for Lent and Easter from me, joannaseibert@me.com, from Wordsworth Books in Little Rock, or from Amazon.

De Mello: Ignatian Exercises and More

De Mello: Ignatian Exercises and More

“This is the spirit in which we embark upon Ignatian contemplations. Through the simple childlike use of our fantasy we attain a truth far beyond fantasy, the truth of mystery, the truth of the mystics.” —Anthony de Mello in Sadhana: A Way to God (Image Books, 1978).

De Mello offers many awareness exercises enabling us to know and feel the presence of Christ, especially in prayer. In one exercise, we imagine that Jesus is sitting in an empty chair beside us. He reminds us that we can start our prayer in our head. But our prayers will become stale and dry if we do not move to our senses and heart—out of a place of thinking and talking into a place of feeling, sensing, loving, and intuiting.

De Mello suggests Ignatian contemplation to help us become a part of a scene from Christ’s life, in order to enhance our reading of Scripture and our prayer life. He reminds us of others who experienced God using Ignatian contemplation. Francis of Assisi in contemplation took Jesus down from the cross and knew his Lord was no longer dead. Teresa of Avila felt closest to Christ when she was present with him as he agonized in the garden. Ignatius of Loyola became a servant accompanying Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem.

Learning how to enter into the truth of the mystics can transform our own experience of living in God’s presence.

Joanna. joannaseibert.com

Purchase a copy of a Spiritual Rx for Lent and Easter from me joannaseibert@me.com, Wordsworth Books in Little Rock or on Amazon. Proceeds go for Hurricane relief in the Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast.