Contemplative Thought For Living
An article a week for spiritual growth
by Fr. Thomas Keating
The Psychological Experience of Centering Prayer
The communication of God, as it gets stronger, is like a sword that goes to the division of soul and spirit. The divine communication requires adequate preparation of the body, mind, and spirit. At some point divine love, for which interior silence is the perfect seedbed, begins to express itself spontaneously in daily life. It perceives God in other people, in events, in nature, in our interior states. It is as though the short interview we had with the Divine Therapist is continued throughout the day.
In short, the Divine Therapist joins us in daily life. He points out, as Jesus did to his disciples, the various aspects of our false self and our mixed motivation. We begin to recognize our attachment to the symbols of security and survival, power and control, affection and esteem in our environment or culture. He points out to us when these are exaggerated, just as he did for Martha. Daily life is where the action is. Prayer, in a sense, is a preparation for action, a perspective from which we can interpret the events of our life as part of the healing process rather than try to manipulate them. Daily life becomes contemplative service, God in us serving God in others. No longer living under the influence or domination of our false selves, we begin to live under the direct influence of the Spirit. We manifest the infinite goodness and tenderness of God.
The whole of life becomes contemplative as a result of the evacuation or dismantling of the obstacles to the action of the Spirit. Whatever prayer practice we started out with has now become, as a result of the infusion of the Seven Gifts of the Spirit, the prayer of the Spirit. As Paul says, "The Spirit intercedes for us with unspeakable groaning" (Rom. 8:26). We do not normally know during prayer what the Spirit is requesting; we simply consent to it.
Our psychological experience or the particular content of prayer is not important. Doing it faithfully with the right intention is. Thus, without going through the stages of exuberant mysticism that Teresa of Avila describes, we can arrive by the hidden ladder of pure faith at the same place. And that place is the transforming union.
Then the permanent awareness of God's presence in a nonjudgmental way accompanies us in all we do. This abiding awareness of God's presence becomes a part of all reality, especially our reality. It adds a fourth dimension to our three-dimensional world. We watch the action of God within us and around us. We become who we really are at the deepest level, what God is--unconditional love--the total gift of self.
We must not think we are going to experience the liberating process in exactly the same way that John of the Cross did. He had a special ministry that required that his liberation process be hastened. God can put someone through the dark nights in a short time--a few years. For most of us, it is going to take longer.
Now that people live longer, there may be a wonderful flowering of contemplative prayer among senior citizens. Death used to cut short the spiritual journey for a lot of people before they even heard of some of the states described above. In a few years, however, many will be living past a hundred. The last twenty to thirty years of life will provide an enormous potential for contemplative growth. All the stages of the great mystics of past times will be available.
Disciplines for Daily Life
A method of preparing for prayer is like one wing of a bird. If you want to fly, you need the other wing, and that consists of practices for daily life that maintain the alertness to the divine presence that we have discovered in prayer. The spiritual journey is a series of movements into the presence of God at ever-deeper levels. To an established daily practice of contemplative prayer, we need to add appropriate disciplines for daily life. At first, we advise two twenty to thirty minute periods of prayer each day. That is asking a lot of someone living in contemporary society. Questions arise like these: "Where am I going to find the time to spend twenty or thirty minutes every morning and afternoon in prayer? I've got to earn a living, I have a mortgage to pay off, children to bring up and put through school. I can scarcely find an hour to be with my kids each day." The temptation is great to say, "Since I can't enter a monastery, contemplative prayer is not for me." Actually, many people have found that contemplative prayer puts a certain order into their lives. As their minds became clearer and less cluttered, they are better able to choose their priorities. By giving time to contemplative prayer they actually have more time, because they stop doing things that before were useless or unnecessary. John of the Cross has this challenging saying, "If you find that you are working so much that you don't have enough time for your regular time of prayer, just double it!"
There are many traditional practices for daily life. I have suggested a few in two of my books, Open Mind, Open Heart, and, more fully, in Intimacy With God. In earlier chapters Lectio Divina was discussed as a means of supporting and nourishing the conceptual background of contemplative prayer.
Another excellent practice is called Guard of the Heart. It is a watchfulness that notices when we lose our sense of peace. We lose peace whenever one of the emotional programs for happiness is frustrated. Then grief, anger, aversion, discouragement, and other afflictive emotions go off. Once afflictive emotions go off, the imagination provides prerecorded tapes that arise of themselves and reinforce the intensity of the emotion. The two are like the wheels of an old clock with interlocking teeth. If one wheel turns, the other has to turn. Accordingly, if you experience a strong emotion, in a second or two you will find yourself with a commentary that is appropriate to it. If someone insults you, before you know it you may find yourself thinking, "How can they do this to me? What can I do to get even?"
Commentaries like these increase the intensity of the original emotion. Soon we find ourselves on an emotional binge that may last a day, a week, and for some people, the rest of their lives. If we learn to let go of afflictive emotions as promptly as they arise, we will enjoy a more durable peace of mind. While Centering Prayer helps us to do that, accompanying practices for daily life help us to do it even more.
Sometimes we may notice a pattern of getting upset in particular circumstances. We can then sleuth back and identify what the particular emotional program for happiness in the unconscious probably is. If you don't have time to go through that process, it may be simpler just to use another practice we call an Active Prayer Sentence. It is like the Jesus prayer, a prayer that you say over and over again until it says itself. John Cassian affirms that the monks of the desert used to sit in their cells weaving baskets saying constantly, "Oh God, come to my assistance. Oh Lord, make haste to help me." Perhaps the more mature monks would just say "Help."
Here is an example of how the Active Prayer Sentence works. Mary Mrozowski was a founder of the Contemplative Outreach spiritual network. During the last year of her life she was noticeably and almost uninterruptedly joyful. That should have been a sign to us that she was ripening for heaven. She died suddenly while giving spiritual counseling. The first time I met Mary, she had driven all the way from Long Island to join our first intensive retreat at Lama, New Mexico. It took her three or four days during which time she said her active prayer sentence nonstop. She continued doing this as a daily practice. One day as she was driving down a road near her home on Long Island, she noticed a youngster on a bicycle ahead of her and at the same time a car coming from behind at a fast clip. The driver, in a hurry and wanting to pass, did not see the bicyclist. He kept honking the horn, meaning, "Get out of the way!" She hesitated to move over lest she hit the youngster. Finally, the man accelerated his car and zoomed around her. Rolling down the window, he yelled obscenities at her and spat right in her face--barely missing her new spring hat. Of course, her emotional programs began to go off, followed at once by a set of prerecorded commentaries: "How can someone do such a thing?" "All men are beasts." Actually, I don't know just what her commentaries were. In any case, as hurt feelings and angry commentaries began to arise, her Active Prayer Sentence rose up along with them and erased them. Into that space the Holy Spirit rushed, saying, "Forgive the guy!" She obeyed and immediately felt as though someone had just given her a bouquet of roses. She drove off down the road in a state of spiritual exultation.
Here is another suggestion. If you have to commute for an hour a day, put a tape deck in your car. In the course of a year you might assimilate more information than if you had completed a graduate program. You could educate yourself, or at the very least, take care of the need for a broad conceptual background for your contemplative practice. And practicing Guard of the Heart at the same time would take care of your emotional frustrations.
In addition, a retreat once a year would deepen your daily practice, especially if the retreat is long enough, like five or preferably eight full days. If that is not possible because of your situation and responsibilities, take a retreat day once a month, preferably along with others doing the same kind of prayer practice. The support of similarly minded people helps to persevere in prayer in difficult times.
In any case, whatever effort you put into remaining in God's presence in everyday life will favorably affect your prayer and help you to advance in interior silence. The movement into interior silence tends to transmute all your activities into contemplative service.
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