What Should We Think of Centering Prayer?
Silence and Spiritual Experience
I settled into my seat and tried to get comfortable. It’s one thing to sit in a conference room listening to a lecture. It’s quite another to sit there and try to have a spiritual experience. But this was a retreat on centering prayer, so experience was the goal.
To get started, the leader had us sit still and quiet for 20 minutes, instructing us to empty our minds. Each person chose a “sacred word” to use whenever our mind began to drift. Repeating it would guide us back to an empty, centered place. We were told to let go of our thoughts, treating them like boats floating by on a river.
So, there I sat, trying to let go of my thoughts, then hoping my stomach would quit growling, then remembering to let go, then wondering if I was properly centering, then remembering to let go…
Before attending this retreat, I had read some books and articles on centering prayer. I had even practiced it for several months. I wanted to be generous, because I love contemplative spirituality. At the same time, I wondered whether centered prayer aligned with Scripture. Books about spiritual practices can be vague, so I came to the retreat seeking a definitive introduction to the practice.
Like any meditative practice, centering prayer can make us more thoughtful people. One writer says it can help us become observers of our thoughts rather than victims of them. Centering prayer can slow us down and encourage us to live more intentionally. Who doesn’t need that? There is nothing wrong, of course, with quieting our minds. But that’s not why I had come to this retreat. I questioned whether a practice should belong to the Christian contemplative tradition if it takes away the object of contemplation. Put simply: is centering prayer… prayer?
What Is Centering Prayer?
Tomas Keating is considered the father of centering prayer. In the 1970s, he pieced together different elements from various spiritual traditions and repackaged them for the modern age. Others, such as Richard Rohr, picked up the practice, and it’s become part of today’s renaissance of contemplative spirituality. In fact, if you search for contemplative prayer on the internet, centering prayer will likely be the only option you find. There aren’t just books and retreats, but also online prayer groups and spiritual directors who teach the practice.
All you need for centering prayer is your sacred word, a good place to sit, and an empty mind. Imagine your “prayer closet” as a physical place in your heart. During discursive prayer, you go there to talk with God. Centering prayer teaches you to simply open the door of that closet and let God in. Contemplative spirituality has always found value in stillness and silence, but centering prayer goes further. It teaches us to turn away from our perceptions and intentions.
In centering prayer, you don’t talk to God, love him, or even think about him. Focusing on God requires thought, which centering prayer tries to go beyond. As Martin Laird says, “The thinking mind dominates awareness with clenching fists that constantly search for something to grasp.” Centering prayer wants to open those clenched fists, and treats even pious thoughts as distractions. Thomas Keating was famous for saying that “If Mary appears to you, tell her you are busy.”
The Object of Contemplation
Revelation 4 pictures God’s throne and the living creatures who contemplate him. They are the ultimate contemplatives, whose minds are filled with God’s glory. And, because they see and experience God, they erupt in continual praise. Isaiah saw that scene, and was overcome with his own sin (Isa. 6:1–7). Ezekiel saw it and collapsed as though dead (Ezek. 1:4–28).
With both the heavenly creatures and the prophets, the key to their experience wasn’t an empty mind, but their encounter with the One who sat on the throne. Their experiences were responses, which were the result of a personal interaction. That’s what has always differentiated Christian forms of contemplation from things like Eastern mysticism. Christians have someone to contemplate.
Jean Gerson, a French mystic, describes having “experiential knowledge of God attained through the union of spiritual affection with him.” The puritan Thomas Watson, meanwhile, compares Christian meditation to artists meditating on a painting. He “views the [portrait] . . he observes the symmetry and proportion, he minds every shadow and color.” Regardless of the tradition, Christians mostly agree that the quality of our contemplation is based on the God we contemplate.
Similarly, Paul taught us to be suspicious of a spiritual method that undermines our conscious experience of God.
For if I pray in a tongue, my spirit prays but my mind is unfruitful. What am I to do? I will pray with my spirit, but I will pray with my mind also; I will sing praise with my spirit, but I will sing with my mind also. (1 Cor. 14:14–15)
It feels “spiritual” to empty our minds, just like it’s probably exhilarating to pray in a mystical tongue, but those practices should never disconnect our hearts and minds from our Lord.
The Western Church has sometimes put too much confidence in rational religion, and reduced the mysteries of God to things we can comprehend. That’s what centering prayer is reacting against. Yet that’s the fault of our hubris, not a shortcoming of prayer. Can you imagine Isaiah or Ezekiel trying to empty their minds while they were in the presence of God? They would have been fools. And every believer who prays, encounters that same presence.
Silence and Spiritual Experience
Advocates for centering prayer often refer to Psalm 131, because it’s the prayer of someone who decides that they can pray better by not talking. But the psalmist didn’t practice centering prayer. His heart was content because it was enveloped in the love and presence of God (131:2). Our minds can be full even when our mouths are shut, and that is contemplative prayer. It’s not subtracting our perception of God; it’s enjoying him.
Centering prayer confuses this spiritual silence with thoughtlessness. Throughout Scripture we find silence is part of the spiritual experience. The most famous instance is Psalm 46:10. It is similar to Exodus 14:14, where God reveals his power and we have only to be still and silent. Psalm 62:1 introduces the practice of silence as a form of waiting: “For God alone my soul waits in silence; from him comes my salvation.” Meanwhile, Psalm 123:2 pictures someone doing more watching than talking.
The common theme in all these passages is what centering prayer leaves out. Christian silence is never empty, never mindless. It’s expectant. Christian contemplation clings to God, waits for him, and enjoys him. Any spiritual technique that directs us away from connecting to God should not be considered prayer. It’s biblical to be still and silent in the presence of God, but the whole point of contemplation is to meet him.