Centering Prayer - Preparation for Contemplation

 Fr. Thomas Keating

 

In last night's Centering Prayer book study group, someone noted that in the introduction to Fr. Thomas Keating's book Open Mind, Open Heart, there is a statement to the effect that centering prayer is not contemplation. She wondered what that meant, what the difference is between centering prayer and contemplation. What a great question! And, it's important, because this is a book study in a liberal protestant church. Most of us do not have the pre-Reformation history or an understanding of levels of union with God. Fr. Keating's statement, quoted below, might or might not be more familiar to a Roman Catholic  or even to those who have read or worked with Caroline Myss's book on St Teresa of Avila, Entering the Castle: An Inner Path to God and Your Soul.

"For the sake of clarity, it seems best to reserve the term centering prayer for the specific method described in this book of awakening to the gift of contemplation, and to reserve the term contemplative prayer for its full development under the direct inspiration of the Spirit."

 Keating goes on to discuss how centering prayer helps us to achieve, "an every deeper union with the living Christ and the practical caring for others that flows from this relationship." Yet, as he notes, "the state of prayer that John of the Cross describes as 'infused contemplation' has come to be generally accepted by subsequent spiritual authors as the definitive meaning (of contemplative prayer)." The term 'infused contemplation' means a degree of union with God that is a divine gift, not able to be acquired by human endeavor.

Brother Wayne Teasdale, a Catholic lay monk and interspiritual practitioner, in a Bulletin of the Monastic Interreligious Dialogue, described infused contemplation this way:

When God takes over, however, it quickly becomes “infused contemplation,” in which the Divine is doing everything, and the soul is simply making itself more and more receptive to God’s action. Everything then becomes quite effortless for such a person. St. John of the Cross identifies infused contemplation with the Presence of God Himself, and His Presence stirs up love in the soul. In these eloquently simple words, he defines contemplation as “nothing else than a secret and peaceful and loving inflow of God which, if not hampered, fires the soul in the spirit of love . . . .”