c. 1996 Religion News Service

(RNS)-After working with the homeless and drug addicted for several years, Mike Little felt overwhelmed by frustration and cynicism. Then he learned about”centering prayer,”a modern method of tapping into the ancient Christian tradition of contemplation.

Now, twice a day for 20 minutes, Little sits in silence, closes his eyes and meditates as he seeks to commune with God beyond words, thoughts or emotions. The experience has rejuvenated him personally and given him new energy to work with the needy.”It basically saved my life,”said Little, 35, of Washington, D.C.”The practice of letting go has played over into my life where I feel I can handle just about anything. I find it almost a miracle really. I don’t know how it works, I just know it does.” Centering prayer also appears to be working for tens of thousands of other Christians.

The method was developed in the 1970s by the Rev. Thomas Keating and other monks in the Roman Catholic Trappist monastic order. They sought to make the rich contemplative traditions of Christianity accessible to the public outside the cloister.

Keating and other Trappists developed the concept when they saw that many lay people, seeking a deeper spirituality, turned to Eastern meditative traditions such as yoga, transcendental meditation and Zen. While he says he respects those practices, Keating believes their popularity resulted from the West’s neglect of its similar traditions.”We wanted to provide a Christian alternative in the marketplace for those who were in need of a greater spirituality than was available in most Catholic parishes,”said Keating, of St. Benedict’s Monastery in Snowmass, Colo.

Today, Catholics as well as many Protestants, such as Little, use the method. While it is impossible to quantify the extent of the practice, some 30,000 subscribers receive a newsletter from Contemplative Outreach Ltd., a Butler, N.J.-based organization founded to spread the teachings of centering prayer. Some 35,000 of Keating’s books have been sold in the last two years, according to Continuum Publishing Co. of New York.

Keating said centering prayer is a method designed to help people recover the tradition of contemplative prayer, which was central to Christian spirituality for the first 1,600 years but lost favor amid growing rationalism in the West and a backlash against excessive mystical movements in the Counter-Reformation.”Centering prayer is a discipline designed to reduce the obstacles to contemplative prayer. Its modest packaging appeals to the contemporary attraction for how-to methods,”Keating wrote in his seminal 1986 book,”Open Mind, Open Heart.” The method is indeed simple. A participant sits quietly for 20 minutes, twice a day, and attempts to meditate without words. Since participants, especially beginners, find their minds racing when they sit in silence, Keating recommends repeating a”sacred word”such as”Jesus”or”love.”Unlike a mantra, however, this word is only repeated occasionally to refocus the mind when distracted.

While spoken prayers, such as liturgical readings or petitions on behalf of others, have their place, the goal of centering prayer is to commune with God beyond words, Keating said.”God speaks through the prophets, but he speaks better in silence,”he said.

Monica Freeman, 55, a sculptor from St. Petersburg, Fla., learned about centering prayer in the early 1980s when her prayer life was in crisis. Eager to experience the richness of contemplative prayer, she began reading about Zen but did not want to leave the Catholic Church. She yearned for the spirituality of the 16th-century Catholic mystics of her native Spain.”John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila were people who were alive for me when I was a child,”she said.”Then I always looked for that and couldn’t find it.” She attended a retreat led by Keating, where he taught”all that John of the Cross teaches, that God is silent, it’s beyond words, beyond emotions,”Freeman said.”This was what I was looking for.” Freeman’s husband and her children, then in their teens, began practicing centering prayer as well, which she credits with helping to keep the family together amid stresses such as job losses and common teen-age anxieties. Freeman, now active in Contemplative Outreach Ltd., teaches workshops on centering prayer to others.

Sharon Peelor, 47, of Hyde Park, N.Y., also found that centering prayer helped her recover her Catholic faith.

About 20 years ago, she had left the church and began to have powerful spiritual sensations while practicing yoga.”I just felt like I was one with the universe,”she said.”It was such an intense experience that I was wondering what really happened.” Her yoga teacher told her she had moved beyond the teacher’s ability to guide her. Feeling at an impasse, Peelor stopped doing yoga. A couple years later, after she resumed going to church, she attended a retreat led by Keating where she first learned about the method. Now she meditates twice a day.”It’s become a hunger, a need,”she said.

Ann Curley, 52, a school secretary from New York City, learned about the method at a workshop for divorced and separated Catholics in 1984.

She gradually began centering prayer over the years while her three children were growing up. Now, with more time, she practices it twice a day.”It’s given me a place to bring the world’s problems, to get another view of them, a view that’s not of this world,”she said.

Like many others, Curley meets with a support group once a week, where members listen to teachings, read a Scripture and meditate in silence.

The centering prayer concept has not only reached lay people but also priests and members of religious orders which, unlike the contemplation-oriented Trappists, emphasize active ministries in the church.

(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM)

Sister Angela Reames, 63, of Dover, N.J., a member of the Religious of Christian Doctrine order, found that centering prayer was the missing piece in her prayer life. She still regularly prays the daily liturgies and follows the teachings of St. Ignatius of Loyola, who recommended meditating on Scripture passages by imagining oneself as an actual participant in the narrative. But Reames felt these answered only part of her spiritual needs.

Centering prayer is”what I’ve been looking for as far as my prayer life,”said Reames, who oversees catechism instructors.

(END OPTIONAL TRIM)

In addition to its spiritual dimension, centering prayer has profound psychological effects. Meditation, Keating said,”gradually opens the unconscious to the divine therapy,”in which God heals childhood memories that affect one’s thoughts and decisions.

Florence Ma, 44, a Protestant from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, turned to centering prayer for healing”things in the past that I wasn’t even conscious of. … I reached a point where I couldn’t go forward anymore without dealing with myself.” Ma and a friend found Keating’s”Open Mind, Open Heart”at a Kuala Lumpur bookstore two years ago and patterned their prayer life on its recommendations. But using the method took some practice.”When there were times we were wondering what was happening, we would look at the book,”she recalled with a chuckle.”We could see this is what was happening, so we would say, `OK, it’s OK to be feeling this.'” Ma takes part in a centering prayer support group in Princeton Junction, N.J., where she and her husband and three children are living temporarily.

She echoes Keating’s teaching that the psychological and spiritual effects of centering prayer are interwoven.”To know God, you need to know yourself,”she said.

The Catholic Church does not have an official position on centering prayer. But the church recommends that any spiritual activity be undertaken with prudence and with the guidance of a spiritual director, said Msgr. Francis J. Maniscalco, spokesman for the U.S. Catholic Conference in Washington.

Little formal research has been done on centering prayer, and academics’ views are mixed.

The approach is grounded”very well in Scripture and the whole Christian spiritual tradition,”said the Rev. James Wiseman, chairman of the theology department at Catholic University of America, who has studied and taught on Christian meditation.

But the Rev. Mitchell Pacwa, a biblical scholar at the University of Dallas, called for psychological studies of those who do centering prayer. He cited research that reported depression and other side-effects among long-term practitioners of other forms of meditation.

And he contends that centering prayer is not merely an alternative to Eastern meditation but is in some ways a replication of it. He said Keating’s teaching that one should try to empty one’s mind of thought during meditation”is just not from Christianity, certainly not from Catholic spirituality.” Keating says centering prayer differs from transcendental meditation because it does not use a continuous mantra and it involves prayer to a personal God. In”Open Mind, Open Heart,”he calls for”letting go of every thought during the time of prayer.” This approach is important to communing with God”not in a thought, not in a feeling, not in experience, but God as he is in himself, and since we don’t know what that is, it’s God as mystery,”Keating said in a recent television interview on”The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.”(STORY CAN END HERE. OPTIONAL TRIM FOLLOWS)

The rush of memories during meditation may also be highly disturbing, notes E. Mark Stern, professor emeritus of psychology at Iona College in New Rochelle, N.Y., who has long studied the interaction of psychology and religion.”As early memories do appear, some people are stronger in being able to process them, and some people are just overwhelmed by them,”he said.

For the latter group, merely confronting the memories is not sufficient; Stern recommends talking through the memories with a psychotherapist.

With that caveat, Stern strongly supported centering prayer. More than a relaxation exercise, he said, it empowers the participant to better serve God and others.”It’s not detached from a Christian ethic. It’s not just a matter of meditating for the idea for one’s own personal ego,”he said.”It’s meant as an amplification, being able to make oneself more available.”

MJP END SMITH