Centering Prayer: Like Being With a Friend

Thomas Keating advocates 'centering prayer' as a prayer of the heart. He recommends one or two daily periods in which we wait quietly in God's presence, perhaps repeating a 'sacred word,' and let go of our thoughts, neither holding on to them nor struggling with them.

As a student at Yale in the early 1940's, Keating experienced a religious conversion while reading Thomas Aquinas's Catena Aurea, a line-by-line exposition of the four gospels. He realized that union with the divine is not only possible but available to all.

"That insight," says the 74-year-old Trappist monk, "was the seed that has continued to grow all through my life."

"Centering prayer is not so much an exercise of attention as intention...

Releasing any distractions caused by thoughts or emotions, the practitioner simply "waits for God." Beyond words, emotions, and thoughts, centering prayer is, says Keating, like "two friends sitting in silence, just being in each other's presence."

Centering prayer helps non-monastics achieve that very same goal through the discipline of quieting thoughts and feelings in order to experience the presence of God.

Centering prayer is not a way of turning on the presence of God.

Rather it is a way of saying, 'Here I am'...

I have found it helpful both at the beginning and at the ending of

a day to spend a few minutes in this find of quietness, saying

"My soul waits for the Lord," or "Be still and know that I am God."

I suppose it is like a gentle knocking on God's door to say, "I am here, waiting."

---Leighton Ford, The Attentive Life