Reception and Debate

Centering prayer spread widely through retreats, books and the network of contemplative outreach that grew up around Keating, and it has been taken up by many Christians, Catholic and Protestant, seeking a disciplined form of silent prayer. Its promoters present it as a recovery of the church's own contemplative heritage, continuous with lectio divina, the desert fathers and the apophatic mystics, rather than as an import from outside Christianity.

The method has also drawn criticism from within the church. Some traditional and conservative Catholic voices have argued that its emptying of thought and its resemblance to Eastern meditation techniques risk detaching prayer from the explicit content of Christian faith and reducing it to a technique, and debate continues over how far centering prayer stands in genuine continuity with classical Christian contemplation and how far it reflects a modern, partly cross-cultural reworking of it. The disagreement is itself instructive, marking the fault line between image-based and imageless approaches to prayer that runs through the whole Christian mystical tradition.