Paths to Contemplation - 20

The rationale for the two forms of Centering Prayer

Fr. Keating himself says that the form of Centering Prayer that he teaches is based on an anonymous 14th century English work “The Cloud of Unknowing.”  This latter text is firmly within the Way of Darkness described in Chapter 3.

God cannot be known through natural human capabilities.  If we are to know God, this knowledge must come outside of anything that can be sensed, felt with the emotions, or created by, or contained in, our minds.  Indeed, since those objects or concepts we can know through our natural faculties cannot be God, such objects or concepts, as well as the way we come to know them, can be a hindrance in coming to the genuine experience of God.  If we cling to what we can know by ourselves, we will hinder God in God’s action to bring us to a more direct experience of Godself.  We must, therefore, empty ourselves of all such natural impressions and create an emptiness that God can fill.   God is encountered in the “cloud of unknowing” which we enter after passing through the “cloud of forgetting.”

The sacred word in Fr. Keating’s Centering Prayer is to help us remain in the emptiness and darkness in the hope of experiencing God there.    It is, one might say, a gentle guardian at the gates of the darkness in which we place ourselves to engage in this form of Centering Prayer.  The sacred phrase, or mantra, of Dom Lawrence Freeman’s Centering Prayer, however, is not used for this purpose.

Phrases repeated over and over again can have a calming effect, somewhat like counting sheep to fall asleep.  There is, of course, also power in sacred words and phrases, remembering St. Paul’s statement that no one can say “Jesus is Lord” except with the help of the Holy Spirit.  Saying a mantra over and over with the intention of accepting God’s invitation to come to union with God in love and to open ourselves to God can have the effect of focusing the mind on God and bringing us to a state of quiet resting in God.  The mantra itself is, in effect, a petition to God to take control and allow us to enter a deeper relationship with him.