CENTERING PRAYER FOR EVERYONE
With Readings, Instructions, and Programs
for Home and Group Practice
Introduction
Contemplative prayer is a way of saying yes to God’s transformative presence. In contemplative practice, we create inner space in which to hear God’s voice calling us into new ways of being and seeing.
This guide focuses on five contemplative prayer practices that use silence, spiritual reading, visual imagery, the body in movement, and the voice to draw the practitioner closer to God. Centering prayer is a form of silent, wordless meditation, similar to Zen meditation but which derives from the Christian tradition. Lectio divina is a way of listening to a reading with the ear of the heart, also from the Christian tradition. Lectio’s visual cousin, visio divina, is a form of divine seeing in which we prayerfully invite God to speak to our hearts as we look at an image. In walking meditation, we move through space while remaining fully present, bringing meditation into action. Chanting the Psalms is a simple practice of singing prayers from Judeo-Christian scripture that derives from and is an important part of the Christian monastic tradition. These five practices complement each other and can very effectively be used together, as the programs in this book illustrate.
This book represents a particular approach to contemplative prayer, simple, inclusive, grounded in prayerful ritual and silence. By collecting in one volume everything needed to learn these five practices, including concise instructions, readings, and programs, it is meant to inspire beginners to enter the practices immediately and empower more experienced practitioners to start and facilitate groups.
The practices in this book come primarily from the Christian tradition, yet there are many people who are drawn to contemplative prayer who are not certain where they stand in relation to Christianity. This book uses inclusive language that welcomes everyone to these practices, whatever their beliefs. Many meditators who practice in Buddhist or mindfulness traditions that do not mention God nevertheless regularly experience the sacred in their meditation and these people are often very excited to discover in centering prayer a silent meditation practice that intentionally focuses on deepening relationship with God.
This is the book that I wish I’d had at the beginning of my faith journey. It describes the contemplative practices I’ve found most essential and compiles readings I’ve turned to again and again. It invites the reader into the contemplative world where you can be intimate with God even when your faith has no name.
My Faith Journey
I was raised an Episcopalian and attended seminary in my forties with the intention of becoming an Episcopal priest. When I realized I had a particular interest in those who have trouble making their way into churches, unsure where they belong, I let go of my plans for the priesthood and instead became a spiritual director. While I remain a Christian, I have learned an enormous amount about my faith by exploring the Buddhist and Hindu traditions. I am sensitive to the discomforts that many people have around Christianity and I try to find language that will invite people into contemplative prayer without setting off too many alarm bells. I present these practices in a spirit of openness that they may be used by anyone who feels drawn to them.
As a young person I longed to live by Jesus’s commandment, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” But how could I become such a loving person? Listening to sermons and reading the Bible never seemed to bring me any closer. Christian dogma often sounded judgmental and exclusionary, and the history of the church suggested that Christianity might sometimes lead away from love rather than towards it.
Centering prayer derives from the Christian tradition and has its roots in Christian scripture and classic Christian texts like The Cloud of Unknowing, but as a silent form of meditation it can provide a method of prayer for anyone who would like to sit in silence with a divine presence, even if they are not quite sure what they believe. Most people are surprised to learn that Christianity has its own form of silent meditation. Centering prayer feels almost like a secret, and Christians who have turned to other traditions for silent meditation are sometimes a bit indignant to discover that such a helpful and spiritually nourishing practice is not more widely known. In centering prayer I seemed to find a piece that had been missing from Christianity. Jesus asks, “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye when you don’t notice the log in your own eye?” This practice began to teach me to see myself more clearly and honestly. Sitting in silence I felt myself being transformed by the sacred in ways I didn’t yet understand and that sometimes startled me. At my first week-long silent retreat, I never spoke to most of my fellow retreatants, yet after meditating with them for a week I felt a closeness with them that made it clear that speech is not necessary to develop intimacy. When I had to leave the retreat before it was over, saying my good-byes in silence, my comrades and I touched each other’s faces with gentle, eloquent gestures, like tender animals. I learned there that my quietness and introversion are not necessarily barriers to intimacy, that I have my own way of becoming close to people that does not always require chit-chat or a knowledge of someone’s life story.
How This Book Came into Being
This book arose out of twelve years experience leading a contemplative prayer group at Grace Church Brooklyn Heights in Brooklyn, New York. Grace Church practices radical welcome as part of its mission and from the beginning we have tried to make our group welcoming and inclusive.
While some contemplative prayer groups take on a format that is somewhat like a class, with instruction and discussion, over time our group has developed into a simple worship service with a focus on silence. While a more conversational gathering can foster a more traditional sense of community, in our group we trust that silence and contemplative practice will connect us. Our regular participants and many of those who visit the group feel a sense of deep communion in the silence.
Several years ago two members of our group, Jim Connell and David James, stepped forward to co-facilitate with me and we began to rotate leadership on a weekly basis. It was at this point that I felt our group really come into its own. Jim suggested that we create a printed program to help newcomers follow along more easily, and this program with its similarities to and differences from that of a Sunday morning church service underlined the liturgical flavor of our group. As the three co-leaders selected readings for the group, we noticed that in spite of our different backgrounds we had shared tastes and a kind of canon developed of our favorite, most frequently used passages for lectio divina and chanting the Psalms. While I had begun the group in a traditional vein by using scripture passages for lectio divina, the practice of sacred reading, increasingly I have turned to poems and passages from the spiritual classics and other spiritual books and Jim and David join me in being drawn to a variety of types of spiritual readings. I began to use our printed program and canon of passages more and more as I visited other groups to teach centering prayer, lectio divina, and visio divina and realized that we had developed a template that might be useful to others.
Contemplative Prayer Is Real Prayer
Contemplative prayer is real prayer, based on Jesus’s words in Matthew’s Gospel, “Whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.” Praying in silence can be deeply transformative and fruitful, one of the most intimate ways to enter into relationship with God. The silence of contemplative prayer invites us to rest in the presence of God, where we may have a sense of having arrived home. There are people who long for God yet don’t find what they’re looking for in sermons and church services and in contemplative prayer finally arrive at their own true way to pray.
Worship based around contemplative prayer is real worship. Contemplative prayer does not necessarily need to be separate from regular church worship, off in the church basement. I hope this book will provide inspiration for those who would like to incorporate silence and contemplative prayer into worship and ritual. Why should this traditional way of praying, advocated by Jesus and practiced in monasteries for centuries, be consigned to the margins of the church? Because contemplative prayer has not historically been at the center of church life, we might have a sense that it is not proper prayer. As increasing numbers of people experience its transformational power, it is time for this to change.
The Episcopal church for centuries has used The Book of Common Prayer as the center of its worship. First published in 1549, The Book of Common Prayer contains morning and evening prayer services in numerous versions for a number of occasions; all the Psalms; and services for special occasions such as marriages and funerals. It is also commonly used for home worship. I grew up steeped in its rituals and when I describe Centering Prayer for Everyone to Episcopalian friends, it seems natural to them that I have created a kind of Book of Common Prayer for contemplatives. Yet many of my Episcopalian friends, including clergy, observe that the worship services in The Book of Common Prayer are extremely wordy, with almost no periods of silence. The programs in Centering Prayer for Everyone offer a respite from wordiness, dogma, and hierarchy, allowing for less mediation by a leader or clergy person and more direct prayer between the participant and God.
How to Use This Book
Please feel free to flip through this book and go straight to the chapters that attract you most. Perhaps there is one chapter that is very alive for you right now and the rest can be set aside for later. This book is designed to be as practical and accessible as possible and if you feel drawn to explore some of the practices, programs, or readings right away, don’t let the other chapters hold you back.
Before exploring the contemplative practices described in Part I, it may be helpful to take a moment to think about why we might want to go to all the trouble of learning these practices and devoting our time to them. The chapter “Who Is God for You?” looks at how our ideas about God may help or hinder us in our practice and how important it is to spend a few moments at the beginning of our prayer time to connect with our sense of who God is for us right now. When we allow ourselves to feel our real feelings about God and admit how little we know about God’s unknowable being, then our living sense of God’s presence acts as a source of power, charging up our practice and our lives with motivation and energy.
Part I—A Concise Guide to Contemplative Practice
This section compiles the material that will be most helpful for newcomers to contemplative practice, providing concise instructions for centering prayer, lectio divina, visio divina, and chanting, which are deeply rooted in the Christian tradition, and for walking meditation, which is more closely associated with Buddhism. As a wordless practice, walking meditation can be used in any tradition to bring meditation into embodied action and provide a meditative way of stretching the body between periods of sitting meditation.
The chapter “Intuition and Following the Centering Prayer Guidelines” examines our sense of struggle in centering prayer practice and the way our practice may deepen into effortlessness as we develop a new relationship to the centering prayer guidelines and our thoughts.
“A Concise Guide to Chanting and the Psalms” examines not only how to chant a psalm in a simple manner but also why the Psalms are worth chanting. Full of poetry, joy, praise, and lament, the Psalms are rich with complicated and sometimes difficult God imagery that challenges us to go deeper in our understanding of God and the emotions we bring to our prayer.
While this book provides many resources for group practice, it can also be used by those who would like to practice contemplative prayer alone. A beginner might start by exploring a single practice and eventually add others. “Suggestions for Contemplative Home Practice” offers tips, including how to choose a place and time to meditate, how to set realistic goals, and how to avoid becoming discouraged. Those who are interested in a full prayer service for home use may consult the “Program for Contemplative Home Practice” in Part III and adapt it as appropriate. A contemplative practice is a home that can be carried anywhere, like the shell of a snail. The practices in this book can help you create sacred space wherever you go, connecting you with the community of all who pray, even when they are not in the room with you.
“The Need for Community” offers a brief examination of why community is important and how to find suitable, welcoming community that challenges and supports you.
Talking about prayer and the inner life is a new experience for many people and requires an attention to our speech similar to the kind of attention we bring to contemplative prayer. “Guidelines for Sharing in a Contemplative Group” examines the contemplative practice of speaking in a group and provides clear guidelines for spiritual discourse that can help us to honor the nature of what is being said as we talk about the inner life.
Part II—A Concise Guide to Contemplative Leadership
Many people feel that in order to be qualified to lead a contemplative prayer group they need to become an expert in the practices they will be leading. While experience can be beneficial, you can trust the silence itself to be the teacher. Experienced practitioners in the group may provide guidance and answer questions, yet the humility of the practitioners can be just as valuable. The longing for the divine felt by the participants in the group is holy and will do much to lead the group where it needs to go. The chapters “What Does It Mean to Be a Contemplative Leader?” and “Starting a Contemplative Prayer Group” offer encouragement to those who would like to lead a contemplative group. “Planning and Leading a Contemplative Quiet Day” provides inspiration and detailed, practical guidance for those who would like to offer a more extended period of contemplative experience.
I have offered centering prayer, lectio divina, visio divina, and chanting extensively in a video conference format, for which these practices are easily adapted. “Contemplative Prayer in a Digital Context” explores the advantages of this format for those who are having trouble finding a group nearby or who can’t leave their homes easily. Even those who are technophobic and are able to attend a regular group may find this digital experience surprisingly moving if they give it a try.
Part III—Programs for Contemplative Prayer Services
If you are approaching this book with thoughts of beginning or enriching a contemplative group, the programs in this section provide easy-to-use templates that can be adapted in many ways. The “Program for a Regular Meeting,” which in our experience lasts about an hour, is based on the one that has evolved over our twelve years of experience at Grace Church Brooklyn Heights. “Using the Contemplative Prayer Programs” outlines the details of this program plus three others, one incorporating visio divina, one designed for individual use at home, and one intended for digital groups. Perhaps these program formats are useful to you just as they are, or perhaps you prefer to use them as a point of departure for the group you envision. “Other Variations on the Program” offers outlines for a more talkative group, with time explicitly carved out for a discussion afterwards; a group incorporating an instructional video; a group integrating periods of music; and a program that might be used in the twelve-step tradition with centering prayer as an eleventh-step practice.
Part IV—Readings and Resources
Lectio divina is a traditional way of reading a passage of Judeo-Christian scripture with the ear of the heart. This book includes some traditional scripture passages for use in lectio divina. Once you experience the types and lengths of passages that work well it is not difficult to go to the Bible to find more passages that will suit you and your group. Other kinds of spiritual passages are provided in this volume as well. Even in a group in which all the members identify as Christian there are many ways of being faithful, and if you are trying to create a welcoming, inclusive space, other kinds of spiritual writing and voices may have something important to offer. As we draw closer to a God who grows ever fuller in our understanding and imagination, our faith can include our doubts and questions, our longing and our seeking, and passages from different contemplative perspectives and traditions can help to express the fullness of our faith. The ways in which scripture and other kinds of readings make us uncomfortable can help us to stretch and grow as we clarify what we believe.
There are many books that offer more extensive instruction in these practices. Some of these are listed and described in the “Resources” section. Your understanding of these practices can continue to deepen over a lifetime. Yet at the same time these practices are very simple and cannot really be done wrong. My hope is that these concise instructions and practical suggestions in one simple volume will encourage newcomers to plunge right in, referring to more detailed sources of instruction as needed. When seeking deeper relationship with God, there is no substitute for your own experience of prayer. You can trust that the presence of the sacred will be with you as you explore and open to these practices.
Listen to Lindsay reading the Introduction to Centering Prayer for Everyone.