The practice of Centering Prayer

More than fifteen years ago, a good friend in seminary gave me a book, Finding Grace at the Center, that introduced me to the Christian practice of centering prayer.  This practice was different from anything I had ever done.  The styles of prayer to which I had thus far been exposed were very WORDY.  (Presbyterians are often inclined to rely heavily on our words, whether we're talking with other people or talking with God!)

Centering prayer, in contrast, was primarily about silence.  It is about developing our taste and our appetite for silence.

Initially, all of this silence was strange.  It was unnerving.  But I had to admit that it was also restful, in a very deep way.


The essence of the Centering Prayer practice is simply to sit with God for a period of time.  (20 minutes is ordinarily recommended as a good amount of time.)  That's all.  You're not saying anything to God, you're not asking God for anything, you're simply being with God, releasing your grip on life for this period of prayer.  If this seems simple, it is.  Thomas Merton said, “Contemplative prayer has to be always very simple, confined to the simplest of acts.”

As we begin to practice silence, what often happens, rather quickly, is that a whole variety of thoughts begin to crowd into your mind, while you're trying to simply be with God.  (It turns out that our minds don't want to let go of their grip so easily.)  These thoughts can range from the serious to the trivial.  "Why am I just sitting here?  This isn't getting anything done."  "I need to get some milk at the grocery store later today."  "I'm so worried about my family member."  "I'm really nailing this spiritual practice."  (Be particularly careful about this last one!) A whole variety of thoughts can crowd into your mind, to distract you from the simple presence of being with God.

Centering prayer encourages you, not to beat up on yourself for having these thoughts, but simply to let those thoughts go.  Let them go, as if you are sitting in a stream, and your thoughts float up to you in the water.  You just let them go so that they float on away, down the stream.  You don't beat yourself up for getting distracted so easily.  You just keep returning to being with God.  Return and return and return.  What we are doing in this practice is training ourselves to simply be with God.

Centering prayer encourages the use of a "sacred word," which you can use when you realize that your attention is being drawn away.  Some examples of "sacred words" are: love, Jesus, God, now, peace, yes, grace, or others.  Choose a word that speaks to you of God's mercy and God's presence and God's love for you.  Let that word be your sacred word.  When you find your mind wandering, say your sacred word to yourself, and allow the word to bring you back to being with God.  There's nothing magic about the word; the word is just a vehicle to bring you back to God.  Being with God is the main thing, not the word.

When we spend this kind of time with God in silence, what we begin to find is a deep and precious intimacy with God.  This becomes not just an intimacy that we have heard about from others, but one that we have experienced for ourselves. As we cultivate our capacity to simply be with God - without needing an agenda, without needing words, without needing to prove anything to God - we will move beyond knowing things about God, to actually knowing God.

If you want to read more about Centering Prayer, you may want to check out writings by Thomas Keating, Cynthia Bourgeault, and Richard Rohr; these three writers have helped me the most.  St. Ignatius Loyola Parish in NYC also offers this succinct summary of the practice. 

Getting Reacquainted with the Trinity

These days, one of the many things that is fascinating about life in the Church is that there seems to be a resurgence in interest in the Christian doctrine of the Trinity - the belief that God is best understood as three-in-one, one-in-three. For a while, it has seemed that the Trinity was one of those concepts that Christians were supposed to believe but didn't need to understand, and didn't really need to think much about.  After all, we said, "it's a mystery.  Don't bother."  So people sort of nodded their heads and said, "Oh sure, I believe in the Trinity, but I'm pretty confused by it, and I don't really know what it means, except that I think it has something to do with a shamrock.  But it certainly doesn't have anything to do with my daily life."  (No one really said exactly that, but that was sort of what we meant.)

Recently, however, it seems to me that the doctrine of the Trinity is being re-discovered, and a number of writers are writing about how Trinitarian thought is (a) central to understanding Christianity, (b) profoundly important in how we think of human beings as being made "in the image of God," and (c) profoundly important in its implications for how we think of the church and the world.  My own sense is that we are re-discovering the "three-ness" of God, while not giving up for a second on God's "one-ness."  God is one and three, not either-or.

One way that I have thought about the impact of our understanding of God comes from the biblical claim that we are created in the image of God (see Genesis 1:26-27).  If that is the case, then it matters enormously what we understand God to be like.  The way we think about God will shape the way we think about ourselves, since we are made in the image of God.  If, on the one hand, we think of God as a purely isolated, completely independent deity, then we may think that we should be like that, too, since we are made in the image of God.  We may think that we will be most fully ourselves when we, too, are completely independent and apart from others.  The goal of life would then be to be fully autonomous and not dependent on anyone else, because that is how we think of God.  We might expect to find a highly individualistic society among people who thought of God as completely independent from everything else and isolated in divine being.  We might also expect to find cultural icons like "the Marlboro man," who is lone, rugged, and doesn't need anybody else.

If, however, God is a Trinitarian fellowship of three divine, equal persons in complete unity with each other, who fully share themselves with each other, who adore each other, and are in complete unity with one another, then that offers quite a different model of how humans should live.  Then the goal of life would not be isolated independence, but rather to live in full communion with others, even as the Father, Son, and the Spirit live in full communion with each other. We would be most fully ourselves, not when we are all by ourselves, but when we are engaged with, and connected to, other people.


What questions does Trinitarian thought raise for you?

Intimacy with God

I've been thinking some more about the topic of my post yesterday, "Lean into the Difficulty."  Something has been gnawing at me, and I think I've put my finger on it.

First, I continue to believe that it is enormously important how we choose to deal with the inevitable frustrations that arise in our lives.   I also continue to believe that the practice of moving towards those difficulties -- rather than trying to run away or hide from them -- is a good move to make.  We can "move towards our frustrations" in a variety of ways, including "breathing in" our frustration, and then "breathing it out" in a spirit of release and letting go.

But something was gnawing at me about the practice, and I think it's this:  Even this practice of moving towards our difficulties can become driven by our overriding desire to make our troubles GO AWAY.  That is, we may engage in this practice -- not because we want to be more present, or because we want to engage the difficulties of our lives with courage -- but because we want our problems to go away, and we think this may be a technique to make that happen.

If that's the case, then our primary mission will continue to be: "MAKE THE PAIN GO AWAY."  Not "love your neighbor" or "live for God," but "Make the pain go away."  We will be acting on the belief that "I can only be happy when my problems go away."  Happiness and joy then become this very tenuous enterprise, in which our happiness is controlled by things outside of us, over which we have very little control.  We put ourselves at the mercy of things that are outside of us, and it will be very hard for us to live in joy.  

 It is one thing to apply our energies to resolve problems.  It is an entirely different thing to expect and need our lives to be problem-free.  When we expect our lives to be free of problems, we set ourselves up for a lot of suffering.

This realization struck me as I was reading Father Thomas Keating's book, Divine Therapy and Addiction (for more on Fr. Keating and his magnificent work, click here or here), where he writes, "true happiness is ... intimacy with God."  If Fr. Keating is right, then true happiness does not consist in achieving a problem-free life ... or in achieving absolute safety and security ... or in getting approval from everyone you meet ... or in making everything go your way.  True happiness comes from an intimate relationship with God, the Ultimate Reality of the universe.

When we cultivate such a relationship, we can experience happiness and deep contentment, even when things are not going our way.  I think this is the deepest meaning of the word "freedom."  Then, we can move towards our difficulties, not because  it is a technique that can help us get rid of our problems, but because we want to be fully present in our lives, rather than running from our lives.

The question, then, is not, "How can I get rid of each of my problems?"  The question is, "How can I cultivate an intimate life with God in the midst of my daily life?"  That strikes me as a much better question...

Lean Into the Difficulty

With some regularity, things happen in our lives that cause us frustration or anxiety or fear.  It's like that whether we're on the highway, or in the workplace, or on the playground.  Life's just like that.  A really important question for those of us on the spiritual journey is, "What do we do with our feelings of frustration, anxiety, upset, or fear?"

If you're anything like me, when some kind of discomfort or anxiety or pain shows up in your life, one of your first thoughts may be, "I've got to make this bad feeling GO AWAY!"  Some of us go into "fight" mode, and we try to force the bad feeling to go away.  Others of us shift into "flight" mode, and we try to run far away from the bad feelings.  Others of us adopt the "freeze" stance, and we think that maybe, if we just stay still and keep our heads down, the trouble will magically go away.  Still others of us go into "I've-got-to-get-my-mind-off-this-any-way-I-can" mode, and we try to distract or deaden ourselves to the pain.

When we find ourselves feeling discomfort or upset or any kind of inner pain, it is easy to think that our primary mission at that point is to MAKE THE PAIN GO AWAY any way we can.  But this creates a problem.  The problem is that we can spend our entire lives running away from pain and difficulty and trouble. 
Now before I go further, let me be clear that I am not saying that pain is good.  Not at all.  Anxiety is not good.  Fear is not lovely.  Discomfort is not beautiful.

But what I am saying is that in each of our lives, pain and frustration are unavoidable.  "Life is difficult," as Scott Peck writes in The Road Less Traveled.  Hurt and frustration and discomfort come to all of us.  When we are feeling anxious or upset or frustrated, we may wish that we weren't feeling that way.  But the reality is that we are.  And reality cannot just be wished away.  Reality must be engaged as it is.

Instead of running away from the pain, we can consciously choose to "lean into the sharp points."  Accept the reality that we are troubled.  Lean into the discomfort that person at work is causing you.  Don't run away from the difficulties in our lives, but lean into them.  Some teachers refer to this as "leaning into the sharp points."  One of my own practices is to breathe in the discomfort -- literally, breathe it in, and then breathe out and begin to let it go.  Then if you need to, breathe it in again.  (I usually have to do this breathing exercise multiple times before the discomfort begins to loosen up.  But eventually, it does loosen up.)  In general, we move towards the uneasiness we are feeling, rather than run away from it.

By moving towards the difficulty and leaning into the sharp points of our lives, we begin to relate to these experiences differently.  Instead of being dreaded foes that we must banish from our lives IMMEDIATELY!!!, they can become part of our life experience that may be part of our personal growth.  Instead of living in fear of them, we can relate to them with assertiveness and courage and mercy.

Have you discovered helpful, constructive ways to deal with the frustrations and the discomforts in your life?

Beyond Binary Thinking

The other day I heard someone described as a "humanitarian capitalist."  The phrase caught my attention.  The phrase contains two ideas - "humanitarian" and "capitalist" - that often do not go together.  "Humanitarians" are often thought to be people with "bleeding hearts" who want to take care of people.  "Capitalists," on the other hand, are often thought of as market-oriented people, who are aggressive and relentless in their pursuit of economic profit.  The two concepts can seem to be at odds with each other.  But this expression -- "humanitarian capitalist" -- puts them together.

This is an example of what I call "moving beyond binary thinking."  Our culture tends to thrive on binary/either-or thinking.  Black/white, good/evil, Republican/Democrat, pro-choice/pro-life, Yankees/Red Sox, rich/poor, clean/unclean, and on and on.  We fall into this kind of thinking because it is easy.  It is easy to know where you stand, and it is easy to know who's in and who's out, who's good and who's bad, who is safe and who is dangerous.  You divide people up into camps, and then you treat them accordingly.

The major problem is that binary/either-or thinking does not strengthen community with each other.  All we do is fight with, or avoid, people with whom we disagree.

A more unifying approach is to hold opposites together.  You take two things that seem to be in opposition to each other - two things that seem to be at opposite ends of the spectrum - and hold them together to see what new, creative thing comes forth.

Here's an example that I'm working with right now:  being an assertive listener.  Ordinarily, we keep these two things - "assertive" and "listener" - separate.  Many of us are either one or the other.  Some of us are good at being assertive.  We make our points, we know what we want, we are goal-oriented, we go after things.  Others of us are good listeners.  We sympathize with people, we can put ourselves in their shoes, we can imagine things from someone else's point of view, we make room for others to speak.  The 'Golden Goal' is to do both things at the same time.  Putting the two concepts together - being an "assertive listener" - evokes the image of being (1) deeply engaged in a conversation, (2) available, open and present to what the other person is saying, but also (3) willing to share one's own ideas and best thinking.  Assertive listening.

What other examples have you seen of unifying behaviors that bring opposites together in a fruitful, constructive way, rather than driving people apart?

Green with envy, UNTIL...

You may know the feeling.  One day, you notice that your next-door neighbor has a fancier car than you.  Or you notice that your friend just got the newest model of the iPhone.  Or you're talking to someone whose house is bigger than yours.  Then there's that guy at work who seems to have a more peaceful life than yours.  Or that woman in your book group who just seems to know more than you.  Or that person at school whom everyone likes and who is more popular than you, or cooler than you.

Maybe it doesn't happen all the time, but every now and then you notice ways that other people have more than you, or are better than you at something, or seem to have an easier time with life.

You notice these things, and almost in spite of yourself, envy creeps into your life.  You find yourself feeling jealous.  You wish you had what they had.  You start comparing your life with their life, and your life comes up short.  And on top of everything else, if you've ever been taught, "Thou shalt not be jealous," then you start feeling badly about yourself for feeling jealous.  Geesh.

If jealousy ever creeps into your life, I want to introduce you to Psalm 73, because it was written for all of us who ever get jealous.  (And if you never have trouble with jealousy or envy, then I want to talk with you and find out your secret!!)  Pretty much right in the middle of the book of Psalms is #73.  The fact that Psalm 73 is close to the center of the Psalms may indicate that our ancestors in the faith realized that jealousy is not a peripheral issue; it can be central for us at times.

Jealousy is not a pretty feeling.  We may think it's not a "Christian" feeling.  But it sure is a human feeling, and Christians can feel jealous, just like anyone else.  So whether we like it or not, we need to learn how to deal with it.

At this point, I'd invite you to get out your Bible and turn to Psalm 73.  Or if you want to look at Psalm 73 on-line, you can go here.  Either way, go ahead, we'll wait for you to turn to it. ...

"I was envious of the arrogant; I saw the prosperity of the wicked," the psalmist writes in verse 3.  "They have no pain; their bodies are sound and sleek.  They are not in trouble as others are."  You can tell that the psalmist has been watching "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous."  These are the people who go out to glamorous parties, and they always look spectacular.  They're always smiling, their teeth are perfect, their skin glows with a perfect tan, they've got gazillions of dollars, and everyone wants to be close to them.  They're so lucky!!

In contrast, the psalmist has spent lots of time trying to do the right thing, but it hasn't paid off.  "All in vain I have kept my heart clean and washed my hands in innocence.  For all day long I have been plagued" (vs. 13-14).  Do you ever feel like you try to do the right thing, try to live a faithful life, but then you look around and other people -- who are not nearly as worried about doing the right thing -- are getting way ahead?  If you're like me, when you see this sort of thing, you think, "AAAAAARRRRGGGGGHHHH."

Well, that's what the psalmist thought, too, and thinking about this "seemed to me a wearisome task" (v. 16).  The psalmist just couldn't make sense of it.  It was driving the psalmist crazy.

"UNTIL I went into the sanctuary of God" (verse 17).  Verse 17 is the verse that changes everything for this psalm.  Things didn't make sense until the psalmist brought his jealousy to God.  Things didn't make sense until the psalmist carried her envy into the presence of God. 

"Then I perceived their end."  Once the psalmist came intentionally and consciously into God's presence, the psalmist was able to perceive that the rich and famous may not be all that happy.  Their lives may, in fact, be empty on the inside.  Their lives may be crushed by the weight of their stardom and all of those flashbulbs going off every time they go outside.  Their lives may not be so enviable after all.  They may need your prayers more than they need your envy or your contempt.

Even our "local" jealousies can be put into perspective when we bring them before God.  Your slightly older iPhone may be working just fine.  You may not be able to recite all the details that your fellow book-club member knows, but you can share what you do know, and you can be thankful and appreciative of how much she knows.  You can realize that other people have their life to live, and you are only asked to live your life, and to be faithful with what you have.  The psalmist writes, "Nevertheless I am continually with you; you hold my right hand....There is nothing on earth that I desire other than you." (vs. 23, 25).

Jealousy and envy can exert a huge amount of pressure on us.  They can make us feel badly about ourselves, they can make us think we're not worth a whole lot, and they can cause us to overlook and ignore the beautiful things that are in our lives right now.  They can make us feel badly UNTIL we "go into the sanctuary," which is biblical language for turning to God in prayer.  Prayer and worship are the primary spiritual practices that keep us properly oriented towards God.  And when we re-orient ourselves towards God, jealousy and envy can dissolve away.  And we can feel our faces becoming a little less green...