My Centering Prayer Experience
Many years ago, my focus was meditation through the mental focussed pursuit of silent awareness. Whilst this established a desire for silence it led me down a path where God remained an activity or pursuit through my own will.
CP introduced me to a dynamic which unfolded devotionally at the heart. In CP I consent to sitting in a trusting inward awareness in faith, letting go of all thoughts, feelings, imaginational activity, even the desire for God. This consent to remain empty allows God to act according to God’s desire to love me. This means I am unaware of how God is choosing to love me and how God will heal my heart and mind of its distortions. The fruit of centering prayer, emerges in my life. For me the gift I offer God is the sitting in faith where I am acknowledging God as the source of my life and the bestower of all of God’s gifts. I am His/Her Beloved child and I live because God chooses to share God’s life with me.
This action of centering prayer often appears as a nothing yet it’s slow work has brought me to a desire to participate in this awareness of God beyond the cushion. I find myself remembering and asking for God’s help throughout the day in an ever more constant way.
My experience of CP is that it is a very gentle method of prayer. However, the automatic patterns of my personality resists God’s loving and kind gaze. To let go, can feel impossible at times because my precious ego self which I have spent my whole life protecting is incredibly resistant. CP acts as a placeholder for God’s loving embrace in this difficult and demanding journey of self-emptying.
I mostly look forward to CP because I trust in this rendezvous with God and because I trust in His/Her desire to love me and offer me what I need. I no longer trust myself to know what I imagine I need. This of course does not stop my ego from preferencing my will over God’s will. Yet more and more there is a deepening and a yielding to God’s grace in the unfolding of my life and the unravelling of my ego.
Ken O’Neil retired teacher of Religious Education