Centring prayer[1]

            We now stand at the doorway of pure contemplation. Centring prayer is nothing more nor less than one method of entering into contemplation.

Contemplation can be summed up as meditation with a change of focus. In contemplation, instead of focusing on your breath, you are focusing on the presence of God within you. But a word needs to be said about the presence of God. We have all had experiences of God and we all know some things about Him through our study of the Scriptures. But all of that together is not God as He is. God as He is cannot be known or experienced. This is because He is so much more than anything we can conceive. As He says of Himself: “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:9). And to experience Him in His fullness would be to die. Again, as God says of Himself: “[Y]ou cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live” (Exodus 33:20).

“How can you know something that you can’t know?” you may be wondering. That is an excellent question. If you are thinking of knowing in the sense of having words to explain your experience, or an emotional sense of what is going on, or a supernatural manifestation of some kind, then you can’t know God in His fullness in any of those ways. He would overwhelm your senses and body and you would die. But, if you change your understanding of what it means to “know”, and think in terms of deep calling to deep (Psalm 42:7), in other words, of God bypassing your conscious mind and your physical senses and communing directly with your spirit, then you can now Him directly. After all, you are already one with Him in spirit if you are a true believer (1 Corinthians 6:17): “But he who unites himself with the Lord is one with him in spirit.” So, if you cultivate that reality, you can come to know God as He is in your spirit.

This means two things. One is that your focus in contemplation has no content, nothing your mind can grab onto specifically. Rather, “focusing” on the presence of God is not so much fixing an idea in your mind as having the intention of holding yourself open to God as He is. Secondly, as wonderful as it is to have experiences of God, in contemplation they are neither sought nor held onto if they come because you are seeking something far more valuable than an experience of God. You are seeking to know God as He is.

At this point, everything may sound very theological and overwhelming. How would you cultivate a relationship with God in your spirit? It’s actually very simple, although challenging because it goes against our natural grain, and it takes us a while to break old habits and learn new ones. All you need to do is take daily time in silence to direct your attention to God’s presence and let go of everything else. In other words, you’re still setting aside 30 minutes a day, but now you’re contemplating instead of meditating or instead of doing some of each, as in lectio divina.

As you probably experienced when you started meditating, letting go is a hard discipline. One of the first experiences most people have when they begin to sit in silence is being bombarded with thoughts and sometimes emotions. It can feel like hard work to continually let go of everything that rambles into your consciousness that isn’t your focus. Nothing changes about that in contemplation. The main challenge is still to let go of everything that isn’t the focus. Except now your focus has no content. Breathing as the focus of meditation was tangible. You could feel it, focus on it, observe it. But you can’t feel the presence of God as He is, you can’t observe it, you can’t even form a mental picture to help you focus. You are basically focusing on something unknown. That is why it is perhaps more helpful to think of your focus, not as the presence of God, but your intention to be in the presence of God. What actually being there is, you refuse to think about; you let those thoughts go.

Contemplatives recognize that holding this kind of focus in the face of a barrage of thoughts can be very difficult. So they have devised a help. That help is to think of a word that for you symbolizes your intent to consent to God’s presence and action within you. Common among such words are: God, Lord, Jesus, mercy, grace, Abba, shalom, Father. This word is not a mantra or any kind of magical incantation that makes anything happen. Its value is that, when you realize that your mind has wandered from your focus, you say your word in your mind, and that breaks your train of wandering thought and brings it back to your intention of being in the presence of God.

Having found your word, here are the steps of centring prayer:

(1)        Choose a time and a place where you can spend 30 minutes in relatively undisturbed peace and quiet, and where you can remain alert and not fall asleep.

(2)        It is a good idea to close your eyes because we tend to think what we see. Or, if leaving your eyes open helps you to remain alert, then leave them unfocused on some plain surface like a bare wall or the floor.

(3)        If you set a timer (without too loud a bell), you won’t be distracted by wondering when your time is up. If your timer is noisy, try stuffing it under a pillow.

(4)        Find a comfortable position where you won’t be distracted by bodily protest at remaining still for the next 30 minutes.

(5)        Silently say your centring word or simply turn your gaze inward to God. What you are doing in either case is consenting to God’s presence and action within you.

(6)        Maintain your focus.

(7)        When thoughts intrude, ever so gently let them go and, using the centring word if you find it useful, return to the focus. “Thoughts” include even experiences of God’s presence. You can appreciate those later. But for now, let them go. Besides, in spiritual experience it only takes the moment God imparts something for you to have it in its fullness. “Appreciating” what he’s given usually means trying to translate it into understandable language and ideas. That is not needed in order for you to have full possession of what He has given. Your translating it can wait. Even if you forget when you come to take the time to “appreciate” that special moment, you still have all that God intended you to have, so not to worry.

(8)        At the end of your time of contemplation, take a couple of minutes to begin thinking thoughts again and becoming aware of the world around you before opening your eyes and rejoining the exterior world.

            If centring prayer is a doorway to contemplation, how do you know when you’ve gone through the doorway? How do you know when you’ve begun contemplating? First, a correction to that question. We tend to think of contemplation as something that we do. Actually, all we do is make ourselves available: that is centring prayer. It is up to God to draw us into His presence (that is contemplation). In other words, if we want to be accurate, it is God who contemplates, not us. Contemplation is a gift of grace. Of course, it is a gift that God freely gives because this is why he sought us and saved us in the first place - to have an intimate relationship with us, just as He had with Adam and Eve before they sinned. But if you bear in mind that, once you open yourself to God and wait on Him, continually letting go of thoughts that want to take you away from the place where He dwells within you, and that anything that happens beyond that is 1,000% by grace and –1,000% because of anything we do, then you will avoid some common pitfalls like judging how “you’re” doing, wrestling with thoughts (which attaches you to them) instead of letting thoughts go, getting frustrated at exterior noises or other kinds of unavoidable distractions, and other of those “I need to make this happen” kinds of behaviours, which actually pull you out of the place you want to be rather than helping you to get there.

            When God draws you into his presence (contemplation), you may have your first hint of that when you notice that thoughts are going by but you are not attracted to any of them. This is the prayer of quiet. Then you may realize that you have no thoughts. Of course, that realization is a thought, so, whereas your exterior thoughts are indeed receding, it is not strictly true that you have no thoughts. But then all thoughts may disappear and the next thing you know, you’re wondering where you’ve been and how much time has gone by. At the point of no thoughts, you are at the deepest you can go. You are in a state of pure being with God. There is no sense of time because time is a measure of things going by and, in this place, nothing is going by - you just are, and so is God.

            How long can you remain here? For many, especially at the beginning, this experience may happen for just a moment. But that is all it takes for God to impart to you what He wants to share. Length of time means nothing to Him because He is outside time (2 Peter 3:8)[2] - and so are you. Or you may spend longer. But, if you’ve left that place of intimacy with God and your time isn’t up, you can always return to centring prayer and see if God will again draw you in.

            Some people wonder if, because they are not thinking at their conscious level, the devil might jump them. Your conscious thinking is actually still going on. You are simply not aware of what is happening at the conscious level because you are dropping into your spirit. This is the place where God dwells. This is what the Bible calls the Holy of Holies of God (1 Corinthians 6:19).[3] It is very doubtful that the devil can get you there. He stands a better chance when you’re not there, but operating out of your conscious mind where some of your thinking is stinking and a possible foothold for the enemy.

            Remember, you only get to this place by grace. You cannot get here on your own. If God has drawn you here, rest assured that you are safe. Psalm 27:5 says: “For in the day of trouble he will keep me safe in his dwelling; he will hide me in the shelter of his tabernacle and set me high upon a rock. Where is God’s dwelling and tabernacle today? Within believers:

John 14:23
Jesus replied, "If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.

1 Corinthians 6:19
Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God?

This is a very safe place to be.

            But this is not the end. As Thomas Keating says:[4]

            The union established during prayer has to be integrated with the rest of reality. The presence of God should become a kind of fourth dimension to all of life. Our three-dimensional world is not the real world because the most important dimension is missing; namely, that from which everything that exists is emerging and returning in each micro-cosmic moment of time.[5] It is like adding a sound track to a silent movie. The picture is the same, but the sound track makes it more alive. The contemplative state is established when contemplative prayer moves from being an experience or series of experiences to an abiding state of consciousness. The contemplative state enables one to rest and act at the same time because one is rooted in the source of both rest and action. 

EXERCISES

Days 70 to 76

Take 30 minutes a day to practise centring prayer/contemplation as outlined in this article.