Centering Prayer – I’m not so academic with it

Contemplative Outreach sends out a quote every morning to folks who follow on Twitter, mostly from Fr. Thomas Keating. Some days it’s just basics of how contemplative prayer works. (as much as will fit in 150 characters.)

Todays was:

This is where I stumble on the chapter-and-verse of the whole Contemplative Prayer concept. I’m not sure I have buy-in on the psychoanalytic part of what Keating teaches. It’s interesting going through all those developmental phases in the early intro, and when we get to the discussion of the false self, suddently the concept (for me) melts into the academic, and I lose sight of the main purpose: maintaining a relationship throught prayer with God. (This for me is the theological equivalent of “paralysis by analysis” that I preach against in business settings.)

I’m just an Old School pray-er from way back and I’ve always found “what I need” in prayer. Once I hit on centering prayer  multiply that by a hundred. For me, it’s totally about the prayer process, and not the analytics behind it.

Once I learned that there is good AND bad as far as the emotions that can come up, the impatience that comes on those days when you sit and can’t do anything but make a grocery list, then I settled in. A lot of bad stuff came up too – and releasing into that stream of prayer taught me to forgive others AND myself, with grace. (I never really knew the understanding of having to do X “with grace” until I had to do it!)

I’m still hanging in there even if I don’t have a firm agreement on this false self stuff, because it gets in the way of my prayers. I try not to “cheat” and listen to music in my head while I sit, but some times a hymn will pop in and it’s just like it’s either to teach me something that day, or maybe God just wanted to sit a while and listen with me. I let it go and if it goes it goes and if it stays it stays… if it stays, then it’s just there as part of the prayer.

I’ve always liked the idea of any type of prayer (even communal prayer from a book) as conversation with the 3-in-1 as if he were right there in a chair beside me. (Of course to do that completely, one has to be able to Speak the words as if exhortation from the book with Belief, and not just recite!) I found centering prayer is the best, most intimate for me because there is no energy or time wasted making up words. No need for a “performance” and saying things in the correct order. You start in the middle and end in another middle with no greetings and no Amens.

Just the way our life with God should be!

Love, Peace, and Prayers…