Adapted from a talk at a Christian-Buddhist workshop at Providence Zen Center in January, 1991.
I'd like to address the practice of centering prayer as a form of contemplative prayer. I'll begin with something that Zen Master Seung Sahn said, that the basis of all religion is the phrase contained in Psalm 46: "Be still, and know that I am God." Sounds very simple; actually, it's a lifetime project.
When we hear the phrase "centering prayer," people naturally think, "find your center." But where is your center?
It's not something you can find, so to speak. It's more intuitive than that. I know, afterwards, when I've been acting in a centered way, when I've been behaving out of that center. Other times I know very well I'm acting like a perfect airhead, when the internal chatter is covering over all of reality. In the West we tend to practice religion from the ears up: very cerebral, sort of like the rock group Talking Heads. We have a lot of words about God and relatively little experience of God. In the words of one old priest, who used to smoke regular cigarettes and was offered a filtered cigarette, "Bah! That's like kissing a girl through a plate glass window. You get the idea, but not the effect." Ideas-about and experience-of are two entirely different realms.
When we live from up here, the rest of the body dangles from that center of consciousness and gets ignored. We don't have that much of a body consciousness until you sit down to practice and your legs say, "Guess who's here?" A certain wisdom comes right back up from the body. The Orthodox Christians locate the spirit in the top third of the heart. While practicing the Jesus prayer they stare down at the heart, the top third, the part we fill in with cholesterol. That's where they'd say your soul is. In Oriental tradition, the center is the nerve-knot about two inches below your navel; literally, your physical center. If you were to stand me up, measure me, and find the halfway point, you'd see that's just about where it is. But if I were to say, "My center is right here in my head," you'd say, "You don't know how to measure too well." I wouldn't know how to live too well, either!
Finding one's center in centering prayer is done in God. It's not just a project we do. Otherwise, it's simply narcissism, navel-gazing. I'm reminded of the parakeet we had in the monastery laundry room. It spent a considerable amount of time chattering away at a mirror, thinking it was another parakeet. Unfortunately, I suspect that a number of people pray that way, too: a long dialogue with oneself. "Be still, and know that I am God." It's very easy mistakenly to think, "Oh, if I'm still, then I'll know God." God is unknowable. We can have an experience, but not conceptual knowledge.
Where did this all come from, this kind of practice that has come to be called "centering prayer"? A monk named John Cassian traveled to various monasteries in the East, talking to people about their spiritual practice, gaining bits of wisdom. When he returned to his monastery, he taught what is sometimes called "monologistic prayer," from two Greek words meaning "one word." What he did was simply teach a phrase from the Psalms: "O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me." Repeat that continually, he said, and you will be in the presence of God.
As a matter of fact, in Christian tradition, there is nowhere you can be that you are not in the presence of God. I remember a voice in the back of a chapel where I was a seminarian that would say, "Let us place ourselves in the presence of God and adore him." And I'd think "Where in the heck do you think you're going to go?" As the Book of Jonah points out, you can't run away from God, you can only run around in God. We are already enfolded. It's like the song from the Eagles, Hotel California: "You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave."
It's a little distance from the Eagles to John Cassian, but I return to John. He taught his monks what we call "mantra prayer," which frightens some people, They think a mantra is something very exotic, a magical word. It's simply a phrase, repeated, that helps to induce calm:
In Zen, "clear mind, clear mind, clear mind: don't know." In Christianity, "O God, come to my assistance, O Lord, make haste to help me."
From the fourth century and John Cassian, we jump to the fourteenth century and England, with the unknown author of The Cloud of Unknowing. It's more a letter, a very lengthy letter written from a priest or a monk to a young disciple. The point that he makes is this: God cannot be grasped by our concepts. Between ourselves and God is a cloud of unknowing. "Anything you think you know, forget it." The only way to break through the cloud of unknowing and know God is through love, and love is expressed in that prayer word.
That's the basis for centering prayer. It came to us through various routes. In the eyes of some people, centering prayer is simply baptized transcendental meditation -- "the Catholics did it again!" Much more than that, I think, centering prayer is an attempt to regain something that's always been there in the tradition that got lost, ignored. At any given point in the history of any religion, people have to move often and rapidly. We throw stuff, in boxes and put it in the attic. Later we wonder, "Where is that?" So you go back to the attic and fish around, until you find it -- "I need this, this is valuable." The tradition has always been there, but it went underground.
In the eyes of a lot of people, if you're going to do this kind of prayer and quiet, well, sock yourself away in a monastery. Double-lock the doors, stay there, and do it. The fact is, it's our common heritage. A contemplative dimension is part of everyone's life. When we stop long enough, when we stop grasping, wanting, objecting to the world, we can discover something within us, another dimension of ourselves that wants to be still.
Father Morin is director of the Oblate Retreat House in Hudson, New Hampshire.
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