A week or so ago, I posted an invitation for us to look into Centering Prayer, a form of contemplative prayer that Leighton Ford mentions several times in The Attentive Life. At that time, this is what I said:

I'd like to suggest that we listen and watch Fr. Keating either during class on two Sundays, November 16 and 23, or that we get together at my home for two evenings; if we do the latter, then we can learn from the tapes and then actually put into practice what we see Fr. Keating suggesting as a way of deep prayer. Now, as I hope you know, I don't want to dragoon any of you to watch Fr. Keating's "show and tell," but I would like (in an evangelical manner, with radical hospitality) to present his introduction to CP as an opening to prayer as perhaps you've not envisioned prayer before. So let's chat about the possibilities and see where the Spirit leads us.

Well, the tapes arrived in the mail today, but I'm now aware that June and I will not return from Santa Fe, NM, until November 17, and therefore I won't be with you on the 16th. And, if I remember rightly, Mondays were mentioned as the time best for everyone to meet at our home. Now, however, when I look at our November calendar, it appears that all the Mondays are committed to travel either from Nashville or to Georgia, and I will not be able to meet anytime until December. So can you please take a look at your personal calendars and see if you all are available on Monday, December 8, and Monday, December 15?

Chapter 9: Grandfather Time, When Evening Comes

Although I was not able to be with our class on Sunday, October 26, Harry Smiley told me that all went rather well and that on November 2 we will be discussing Chapter 9 in The Attentive Life. Alas, as I told Harry this morning, June and I will be in Santa Fe, NM, for the next two Sundays, and, as a consequence, we'll need to stay in touch you by prayer and online. Inasmuch as this chapter alludes frequently to the office of Compline, I thought it might be helpful if we might acquaint ourselves with Compline in preparation for the discussion. Here, then, are some places you might like to visit as you read Chapter 9 and get ready for Sunday's discussion:

• Compline as published in The Book of Common Prayer


• The Compline Choir


• The Minnesota Compline Choir


• Compline: Christ Church Savannah


• The Pittsburgh Compline Choir


• Compline at Christ Church


• Compline: New York City

Image: Compline: NTC

Chapter 8: Lighting the Lamps, The House with the Golden Window (5)

On Centering Prayer

Contemplation is not a means to an end. It is not even a goal sought for itself. It is so utterly simply that they very desire for it becomes an obstacle to achieving it. And when you achieve it, you haven't really achieved anything. You do not get some place where you were not. You are getting where you always really are: in the presence of God. You have achieved nothing. Yet you have achieved everything. For you have been transformed in consciousness so that you recognize yourself for who you really are. [William H. Shannon, Seeking the Face of God; qtd. Paul Harris, The Fire of Silence and Stillness, 16]

Image: Edward Hopper, Sun in an Empty Room

Chapter 8: Lighting the Lamps, The House with the Golden Window (4)

As promised on my posting of October 21, I'm continuing with daily comments about Centering Prayer. Take a look at the photograph on the left. Fr. Basil Pennington, one of the instrumental pioneers in re/introducing Centering Prayer to the Church, sits between my friend Jon Kessler and me. Jon played a big part in my return to the Church, and I will tell that story sometime later. As a fervant practioner of Centering Prayer, Jon was desperately ill when this picture was taken. Yet during all his illnesss, he centeringly prayed each day, morning and evening. At the time this picture was taken, May 29, 2000, Jon and I were attending a Centering Prayer retreat with Fr. Basil, somewhere in Minnesota, if I remember rightly. For three days Fr. Basil spoke about Centering Prayer, providing us with its origins and history in the Church, its theological and Biblical foundations, praying with us in a small group, and offering his counsel as we met with him privately. While I can't remember any of the exact words Fr. Basil spoke, I can provide you here with a quotation from one of his books, a quotation which is so quintessentially the voice of Fr. Basil:

Centering Prayer is very simple, very pure, and for that reason very demanding, indeed totally demanding. We should not go to the Prayer seeking to achieve something, to succeed in making a Centering Prayer, in doing it right. We simply seek to be to God and let happen what may. Here Dom Chapman's oft-repeated words are relevant: "Pray as you can, don't pray as you can't" (Centering Prayer: Renewing an Ancient Christian Prayer Form, 97).

If you are unintroduced to Centering Prayer, that may not make a lot of sense to you. Once, however, you come to know a little bit about the Prayer, Fr. Basil's words and encouragement will come home to you in understanding and practice. Our Sunday class hopes to give you that opportunity soon.

Chapter 8: Lighting the Lamps, The House with the Golden Window (3)

With this posting I'm hoping to prepare us for a discussion on Centering Prayer, a way of praying which Leighton Ford has mentioned and commented on in The Attentive Life. Last night before going to bed I read "The Origins of Centering Prayer" in Thomas Keating's Intimacy with God: An Introduction to Centering Prayer and found this little factoid:

Fr. Basil gave the first retreat to a group of provincials, both men and women, of various religious congregations at a large retreat house in Connecticut. It was they who suggested the term Centering Prayer to describe the practice. The term may have come from their readings of Thomas Merton, who had used this term in his writings.

Inasmuch as I was priviledged to know Fr. Basil, the mention of his name brought back wonderful memories. Nine years ago, in August, 1999, driving from St. Joseph's Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts, to where I was staying, Fr. Basil spent a day with me in quiet conversation. I remember especially that when he left, I asked him to bless me, and he put both of big hands on my head and blessed me, praying for what seemed like five minutes, asking God to strengthen me in my resolve to learn how to be with God intimately. As I listened to his blessing, I promised myself that I would begin to practice Centering Prayer, to learn how to to pray without images, without words, and without any preconceptions as to what to expect; all I would do is let God would know of my desire to enter fully into his Presence.

Fr. Basil Pennington died on June 3, 2005, at age 73, and each year on that day I remember him and give thanks to God for the privilege of knowing him a little bit. I've gotten to know him even better by reading nearly all that he has written; among them are these favorites:

• Centering Prayer: Renewing an Ancient Christian Prayer Form
• Centered Living: The Way of Centering Prayer
• True Self/False Self: Unmasking the Spirit Within
• On Retreat With Thomas Merton

Recently for a birthday gift, my children--Kirk, Lisa, Amy, and Chelsea--gave me a gift certificate for some purchases at http://www.amazon.com/, and I have chosen to buy a book about Fr. Basil that I've not read: As We Knew Him: Reflections on M. Basil Pennington. I'm really looking forward to its arrival in the mail. In the meantime, here's a word for you from Fr. Basil about Centering Prayer:

The word "contemplatio," contemplation, etymologically has three sections to it. "Tion" means abiding state. All of us have those, if we are alive, wonderful moments when suddenly God touches us, and we experience him and so on. What we are looking for is a way that will help us to begin to live more and more constantly in that wonderful communion with God. And that’s what "con" is about. Con means with. And "templa." Well, in the early Roman times the templa was a particular segment of the heavens, and the priests of the temple, the priests of the people, would try to revive that and try to see how the birds flew, and so on, and from that come to know the will of God, the presence of God. Now that time, that templa, got projected on earth and became the templum, the temple, a place we went to commune with God. So contemplation is abiding with God where His will is known, where His love is known, where He is present in His temple. [From A Centering Prayer Retreat with Fr. M. Basil Pennington]

Image information: I set the camera on a pile of books on a table, set the timer, pushed the button, and ran around to get close to Fr. Basil; then we both smiled and the camera took the picture.

Chapter 8: Lighting the Lamps, The House with the Golden Window (2)

Leighton Ford comments on Centering Prayer on page 179 in Chapter 8 of The Attentive Life: Discerning God's Presence in All Things. Here is what one Christian who practices Centering Prayer says concerning her practice:

We do not need to go to Calcutta to find Christ in the poor. If we have not found Him in our very midst, if we have not learned to love those who share our daily oives more than ourselves, preferring their needs to ours, then we will not find Him anywhere else. As Mother Teresa has daid: "Do not search for Christ in far off lands. He is not there. He is in you."

We find Christ in every moment, which is truly present to use and we to it. The present moment is, therefore, always the moment of Christ. Our neighbour is, therefore, always the present Christ. Saying the mantra [the sacred word many use in Centering Prayer] restrains our ego and roots us in the present; likewise turning to the poorest of our neighbours restrains our egoism and shatters our illusions, revealing to us the only wisdom we can hope to acquire--the wisdom of humility. Humility is to be ground in the truth about ourselves--that we are poor.

Lee-Moy Teresa Ng, "Meditation and Working among the Poor"

Image: Roman Catholic priest and champion of the poor, Abbe Pierre

Chapter 8: Lighting the Lamps, The House with the Golden Window (1)

I've just finished reading this chapter and am delighted to see that again Leighton Ford makes mention of Centering Prayer, this time a half-page comment wherein he says, "I have found it helpful both at the beginning and at the ending of a day to spend a few minutes in this kind of quietness . . . ." (179). While I realize that a few Sundays ago I passed out a small descriptive brochure providing you with an introduction to Centering Prayer, I hope it's all right with everyone that this week I begin a more earnest introduction to its practice. Let me be openly professing: I practice Centering Prayer quite regularly and would like to share its praxis with you in more detail. To that end, I'd like to share two "talks" by Father Thomas Keating that are available on video tapes in late November. The first is The Method of Centering Prayer; the second, The Psychological Experience of Centering Prayer; they are both from a larger series, "The Christian Contemplative Heritage: Our Apophatic Tradition."

I'd like to suggest that we listen and watch Fr. Keating either during class on two Sundays, November 16 and 23, or that we get together at my home for two evenings; if we do the latter, then we can learn from the tapes and then actually put into practice what we see Fr. Keating suggesting as a way of deep prayer. Now, as I hope you know, I don't want to dragoon any of you to watch Fr. Keating's "show and tell," but I would like (in an evangelical manner, with radical hospitality) to present his introduction to CP as an opening to prayer as perhaps you've not envisioned prayer before. So let's chat about the possibilities and see where the Spirit leads us.

As we read Chapter 8 and then come to Ford's comments on Centering Prayer near the end of the chapter, I'll be posting quotations, scrapes of sayings, and some poetry along the way. Here's one by Thomas Merton:

Our real journey in life in interior: it is a matter of growth, deepening, and of an every greater surrender to the creative action of love and grace in our hearts.

[From The Road to Joy: Letters to New and Old Friends; qtd. The Fire of Silence and Stillness, ed. Paul Harris, p. 10].

Image source: Silent Prayer

Chapter 7: When Shadows Come, Darkness Comes Early (continued)

At the end of Chapter 7, Leighton Ford tells the story of Jerry Sittser, who “lost his mother, his wife, and their youngest daughter” in one tragic moment. In some sort of a “waking dream” Jerry found himself completely unable to find any kind of solace; his was a great inability to chase and grasp any light of a sinking western sun. After he “felt a vast darkness closing in,” Ford tells us that Jerry’s sister, Diane, “told him that the quickest way to reach the sun was “not to go west” into the diminishing sunset, “but instead to head east, to move fully ‘into the darkness until one comes to a sunrise’.” That “counterintuitive insight” helped Jerry find “a road to recovery.” He allowed himself to “walk into the darkness” and so “be transformed” by his suffering “rather than to think that somehow [he] could avoid it” (162).

All of us in our class who are reading The Attentive Life have some inkling, some knowledge of what it means to “walk into the darkness.” If ever you should get to know my wife June and me well, you will come to know that both of us have gone through, like you, a lot of darkness. In addition you will find out that twice a day June and I sing three or four (sometimes more) psalms, making our way through the Book of Psalms once a month. So it is that on the morning of the sixteenth of each month, we turn to Psalm 88 and quietly chant it to a very simple tune or psalm tone. The end of Psalm 88 ends with these words: “and darkness is my only companion.” In the short silence that follows our psalm singing, June and I are reminded on each month’s sixteenth day that we’ve not been alone whenever we've entered darkness. Long before us, some Hebrew poet (maybe it was David) has previously gone eastward at sunset. Psalm 88 is a very dark poem, full of foreboding, weighed down with a sense of loneliness and despair. And yet June and I sing it. I chant it quietly because like the “counterintuitive insight” of Jerry’s sister, we need the reminder that it’s genuinely all right to walk into the eastward darkness at day's end because that’s where our Lord Jesus has been. He too has gone into the Dark, and in the Dark my Lord will be with June and me.

The Dark, of course, can take many shapes. Sometimes death, sometimes divorce, sometimes addiction, sometimes guilt, and sometimes a profound personal dissatisfaction with the way one’s life is going. In one form or another, I, perhaps along with you, have experienced nearly all of these Darknesses. Now that I’m in my seventies—strange as it may seem—it’s at times the realization that my life has been unsatisfactory to me (and to God) that presents itself as a Darkness into which I must enter. I have a postcard I use as a bookmark in my prayerbook that says “Jesus joins us in our human difficulties at the point which we dislike ourselves the most.” That place "where I dislike myself the most" is the Dark into which I take one step at a time as Jesus Christ carries a lamp to my feet and a light to my path. As I enter that darkness I'm discovering that my Lord is transforming me into his likeness. It's all very slow and not very dramatic, but it's happening. It's happening as Paul promised in his second letter to the Corinthians when he says, "So we're not giving up. How could we! Even though on the outside it often looks like things are falling apart on us, on the inside, where God is making new life, not a day goes by without his unfolding grace."

I don't know what your darkness is, but like Jerry, like the Psalmist, and like Christ, you may go eastward at sunset and be transformed by whatever suffering in darkness you experience because God is with you on the way.

Acedia

Last Sunday in our discussion on Chapter 6, we spent a few minutes talking about acedia, the Greek word Ford says is "a state of soul marked by sluggishness, moodiness and distaste for spiritual things." According to Ford, "the fourth-century monk John Cassian called acedia "the noonday demon" (121).

Yesterday I received the latest issue of Books and Culture which contains a review of Kathleen Norris' Acedia & Me. Dennis Okhom, the reviewer, reporting from Norris, helps us understand the history of the word and its meaning:

The Greek word acedia simiply means "a lack of care." But as Norris excavates the concept we find that it is deeper and richer. She rightly traces the Christian discussion to the 4th-century ascetic Evagrius Ponticus and his list of eight "thoughts" that characterize the human condition. One of the eight--acedia--was the "noonday demon" (Ps. 91.6) that attacked the monk who kept checking the angle of the sun to see if was time for the afternoon meal as he languished in the tedium of what seemed like a 50-hour day. John Cassian (5th century) carried forward the list of eight to Gregory the Great (6th century), who transposed acedia (along with tristitia) into "sloth" as he reconfigured the list into the "seven deadly sins."

Okholm goes on to report much, much more of what Norris aims to do in Acedia & Me, indicating that her consideration of acedia is highly nuanced, well worth the purchase of the book and a consequent careful reading. Carmen Acevedo Butcher provides another review. After I read two or three more reviews to make sure I want to read the book, I may be off to the bookstore to locate a used copy.

Image: 12:00 noon

Chapter 7: When Shadows Come, Darkness Comes Early

In Chapter 7, Ford makes extensive mention of Ronald Rolheiser's The Holy Longing (146 ff.). It's a book I read about six years after my son's death in 1993. Although I've given away, sold, and lost lots of books, The Holy Longing is one book I've always kept within easy reach. And inasmuch as Ford's meditation on the monastic office of None and its associative linking with "the third hour" of Christ's death day, and all those times when the shadows lengthen, ushering us into considerations of death, I reached for Rolheiser to re-read what he says about the ways in which we die. Most of us experience dying in preparation for death, Rolheiser reminds us, in at least five ways:

1. the death of our youth


2. the death of our wholeness


3. the death of our dreams


4. the death of our honeymoons


5. the death of a certain idea of God and Church

These are serious dyings, and I have time here only to reflect on one of them: death to living with a pre-critical faith. What you are about to read I'm taking from a posting I made several months ago in response to Alan Jamieson’s Chrysalis: The Hidden Transformation in the Journey of Faith:

Grateful to Scott McKnight for an opportunity to share thoughts about Jamieson’s Chrysalis, I’m one, now seventy years old, who has experienced a good bit of transformation in the journey. I have for years appreciated James Fowler’s Stages of Faith, built upon the contributions of thoughtful developmental psychologists such as Piaget, Erickson, and Kohlberg. Thinking that perhaps I could understand the turnings of my life somewhat more perceptively, I read Chrysalis with considerable
interest.

In the end, however, I found it disappointing. For all its allusions and descriptions of “the dark night of the soul,” Jamieson’s rehearsal of the “cacooning” stage is far too domesticated for those of us whose faith journey was seriously interrupted so as to be profoundly exilic, a devastating wilderness trek, radically separated from anything resembling the Church’s life. ithout getting unwisely too confessional here (although I now highly prize the Sacrament of Confession and Absolution; see The Augsburg Confession, Article XXV), Jamieson’s use of the pupal stage of a butterfly as a supposedly apt metaphor to describe “a period of hyper-critical faith” (96) hardly describes the harsh realities that many Christians experience in their transformation from pre- to post-critical faith. To be swaddled, wrapped, and enveloped in the hard-shelled pupa of a butterfly (no matter how life-changing the hibernation) is simply too insipid a metaphor for an often protracted and public middle stage migration many Christians experience.

My own experience and that of several other Christians whom I know requires that whatever happened between pre- and post- was certainly not pupal in nature. Yes, at times Jamieson comes close to what can only be described as an absolute middle-stage rejection of all things Christian, but he never quite gets there. For example, he says that “it is journey from an effortful faith to a doubtful faith and on to a restful and thoughtful faith” (97, Jamieson’s italics). My middle stage was not “doubtful”; it was no faith. Everything went, it was kaput, gone, absent. And by the way more than one of my friends describes his and her experiences, they too say that they were completely out of the loop.

A few lines of Henry Vaughn’s “The Retreate” from Silex Scintellans come to mind. In “The Retreate” Vaughn describes his “first” life; it was a time

Before I taught my tongue to wound
My conscience with a sinfull sound,
Or had the black art to dispence
A sev’rall sinne to ev’ry sence.

Within the middle stage that I and others experienced, we too defied conscience and (to say things as delicately as possible) learned a good many of the black (well, at least very dark “grey”) arts that made appeal to “ev’ry sence.” For such missteps and wanderings, the aptness the Bible’s description of Israel’s exilic sinning surely seems more accurate than some quiet (at least by connotation) pupal life. In some instances we were “deported”—and deported ourselves–from the Church and became expatriates.

Although the stories of our returnings are varied, the one constant is that God managed to intervene so strongly that after a while we had no other option than to come home, albeit in bodies that harbor spirits fundamentally different from early moorings. For me that homecoming arose from a son’s death, an introduction to the desert fathers and mothers by a Cistercian abbot, a wife’s and children’s forgiveness, the gift of an adopted child, and the renewed friendship of two seminary buddies, one of whom walked in my shoes.

All of this is not to say that Chrysalis will not be helpful to many whose journeys, like that of Phillip Yancey have been from pre-critical to post-critical faith—yet inward and hidden. Others, however, may perhaps find it helpful to envision themselves like seeds that fell on hard ground and were gobbled up by a bird. In that bird’s gizzard they stewed around for a good while until that raucous bird shat the seeds out, and they dropped on good fertile soil. In the end they discovered that the Sower, that Crazy Farmer, was quite aware that some of his seeds would now and then return to earth to be nourished by the warm, odorous manure of the Church. They have since grown up, to switch parables, to be old fig trees, whose fruit is ready for plucking, ready for the making of fig preserves. Some of my preserves are now being shelved at Praying Daily and Peaceful Christians.

Well, there you have one form of dying. And in the None of my life--resurrection.

Image: House of the Dying, Casa de la muerte, Benares, India, 1998