For the past several months, I’ve been reading a lot about a form of prayer that is variously called contemplative prayer, centering prayer, the prayer of quiet, or the prayer of the heart. There are many of you out there who also know about this prayer form. The last three terms I’ve listed above are all subsets of “contemplative prayer”; they’re not all identical because they can have some differences in method among them, but they all refer to the type of prayer in which a person sits in quiet, with eyes closed, and listens for God “at the center.” 

Rather than talking at God and assuming that real communion with God is impossible — and thus never listening for God — contemplative prayer is silent, and begins simply with letting oneself feel a pure love for God. If we begin this way, sitting in quiet, with our minds quiet and not following a thousand distractions, and open ourselves up to the love of God, we can feel that love meeting us and emerging right from our center. It grows from our center because that is where God is, waiting for us within — in the “interior castle” inside ourselves, as Teresa of Avila put it. 

This is not some complicated technique reserved for the spiritually adept. It’s open to everyone who is willing to let go — just some, not all, of the time — of the often unfulfilling practice of praying at God, and simply focus on love. Without experiencing such love of God (which Christ repeatedly told us to do), we become cut off from what God might want to do with us, and our spirits don’t have a chance of getting clear of the weeds. As others have said, God is a rich wellspring within us; we just have to go to that well and start drawing water from it.

There have been many people who have written about their experiences with this quiet form of prayer. They span from the early desert Fathers in the first few hundred years after Christ, to the Christians of the medieval period (such as St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila, and the anonymous English author of The Cloud of Unknowing), right up to the present day. Just in the last forty years or so, thanks to the writings of Thomas Merton, M. Basil Pennington, and Thomas Keating, this prayer form has spread again on the wind, across citizens of many different countries and across Christian denominations; it’s even practiced by some Jews and Muslims, with a slightly different orientation. 

Here is a very helpful and accessible passage on exactly what this prayer of quiet is, from Finding Grace at the Center: The Beginning of Centering Prayer. It’s a collection of simple essays by M. Basil Pennington and Thomas Keating, who helped bring fresh knowledge of this fundamental prayer to the modern population of anyone wanting to experience more fulfilling, more communing, more productive prayer:

“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…We move in faith to God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, dwelling in creative love in the depths of our being. This is the whole essence of the prayer. ‘Center all your attention and desire on Him and let this be the sole concern of your mind and heart’ (Cloud of Unknowing, ch. 3). Faith moving towards its Object in hope and love—this is the whole of the theological, the Christian life…In a movement of faith that includes hope and love, we go to the center and turn ourselves over to God in a simple “being there”…That is what St. Paul was talking about when he said, ‘We do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit Himself prays for us…’ (Romans 8:26).”

What does this kind of prayer produce? Judging by my own experience (which seems to be similar to what I’ve read in the experience of others), it produces a greater love and an increased peace that had formerly been inaccessible, even unthought of. We find ourselves thinking less about ourselves and more about others. We want to increase our charity and concern to include those outside the circle of people we know very well, especially the needy, no matter who the needy may be or whether we’ve ever met them. 

We find that this feeling of new love, unlocked and watered by God, spreads out on its own accord to include others — even those we don’t know very well, and eventually even those we don’t like particularly well — and gives a measure of interior peace we didn’t have before. It’s certainly not yet a perfect peace and not yet a perfect love; if we can get to that rare point, it would be from doing this prayer for years, even a lifetime. But it’s an ongoing, unfolding, productive process. It doesn’t make us perfect; it makes us better.

© 2013 Elizabeth Keck