A Little History
As you consider your semester or seasonal goals for your own prayerful practice, here's a bit of Centering Prayer history. CP made its appearance in the modern Christian world in the mid-1970s. As early as the 1960s, Thomas Merton was writing books calling for a recovery of Christian contemplative prayer not only within the monastery but beyond it. Thomas Keating and John Main responded to Merton’s prophetic call, developing simple prayer-based meditational methods solidly rooted in the Christian spiritual tradition and suitable for use not only within the cloister walls, but in a world hungry for the recovery of its spiritual roots. All three of these men recognized meditation not as a newfangled innovation, let alone the grafting onto Christianity of an Eastern practice, but rather, as something that had originally been at the very center of Christian practice and had become lost.
In the case of Centering Prayer, Thomas Keating noticed the number of young people in the 1960s who had been raised Christian and were flocking to New Age and Eastern traditions in order to find a “path.” Frustrated, Keating issued a challenge to his Cistercian monastic community: “Is it not possible to put the essence of the Christian contemplative path into a meditation method accessible to modern people living in the world?” One of the monks, Father William Meninger (the official “founder” of the method of Centering Prayer), took Keating up on the challenge. In his well-thumbed copy of The Cloud of Unknowing, a 14th-century spiritual classic by an anonymous English monk, Meninger found instructions that he believed might be helpful.
This became the cornerstone of what was first called “Prayer of the Cloud,” but “Centering Prayer,” originally coined by Thomas Merton, seemed to offer a more inviting description. The practice caught on, particularly among lay participants, and has grown steadily ever since. [1]
[1] Contemplative Outreach, an international network founded by Fathers Thomas Keating, William Meninger, and Basil Pennington, provides opportunities for the teaching and practice of Centering Prayer. Learn more at contemplativeoutreach.org.
This post adapted from Cynthia Bourgeault, 2004, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, Lanham, MA: Cowley Publishing, p. 55-58, and Richard Rohr's Daily Meditations.
