Centering prayer

Centering prayer is a method of silent Christian contemplative prayer developed in the 1970s by American Trappist monks, chiefly Thomas Keating, William Meninger and Basil Pennington, as a way of making the church's ancient contemplative tradition accessible to ordinary people. Its method is deliberately simple: the practitioner chooses a short "sacred word" as the symbol of a consent to God's presence and action, sits in silence, and, whenever they notice themselves engaged with a thought, gently returns to the sacred word, letting it re-express their consent and letting the thought go. The prayer is not concentration on the word, nor a search for any experience, but a resting in silent openness to God beneath the flow of thought.

Its framers drew explicitly on the medieval English mystical text "The Cloud of Unknowing," which counsels the reader to reach toward God through a "cloud of unknowing" and to beat against it with a single short word, letting all thoughts and images fall away. Centering prayer adapts this apophatic tradition, the approach to God by way of emptiness and unknowing rather than image and concept, into a repeatable modern method.

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.