Cynthia Bourgeault - The Heart of Centering Prayer: Nondual Christianity in Theory and Practice

Its been more than a decade now since I wrote Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening.Christian contemplative tradition in which it is ensconced. Some of you may have encountered portions of this material before; I doubt that any of you have encountered all of it or put the pieces together in the way that I am about to do here.

While these talks and essays were originally developed in a variety of formats and presentational styles, they all step off from the common underlying assumption that Centering Prayer is a distinctive method of meditation with its own way of getting there. While this assertion may seem obvious to those of you actually practicing the prayer, I find that it continues to be significantly underappreciated by those merely commenting on it, whether from a scientific, theological, or interspiritual perspective. Again and again, in the spate of new materials emerging from all these quarters, I encounter the assumption that there is what you might call a standard model of meditation, and that Centering Prayer simply happens to be the Christian packaging of it. The radical import of Thomas Keatings oft quoted dictum that Centering Prayer is done not with attention but with intention generally fails to register.

So my first task in this book will be to bring some consideration to the method of Centering Prayernot so much from the why of the method as from the how of it, or what actually happens when youre doing the practice. And here, in contrast to what most people assume to be the standard model of meditation, Centering Prayer does indeed seem to be playing by a whole different set of rules. Rather than engaging the powers of focused attention (on the breath, a mantra), it seems to be more interested in cultivating two qualities that essentially involve the release of attention (or perhaps, more accurately, its reconfiguration). The first of these qualities has been extensively described in the Orthodox branch of Christianity under the name of attention of the heart (although of course without any awareness of its relevance for Centering Prayer). The second, to the best of my knowledge, has never been specifically identified in the Christian tradition at all, although it has been accurately and even comprehensively described, as we will see in part three of this book. A Tibetan Buddhist would have no difficulty spotting it as objectless awareness.

Both of these capacities are well known within any comprehensive taxonomy of meditation. But in the Eastern traditions, they are generally assumed to be advanced capacities, accessed only after a conscious voluntary attention has been well established. What makes Centering Prayer so charmingly disconcerting is that it leads off with these capacities, essentially turning traditional meditation pedagogy on its head. This was largely the innovation of Father Thomas Keating, principal architect of Centering Prayer and my own mentor in the practice for more than thirty years now. Whether his intuition on this point proves in the long run to be a stroke of genius or an ill-advised shortcut is for me one of the more interesting questions still out there to be addressed. As my presentation unfolds, I think you will come to see how I feel about this and why.