A
sizable group of seekers and practitioners from near and far gathered at St.
Bart’s Church in San Diego on a rainy February morning for a full day retreat with Fr. Bill
Sheehan, a guide on the centering prayer path from its earliest emergence in
the latter 20th century. Fr. Sheehan has known Fr. Thomas Keating
since his days as abbot at St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts; Sheehan
was also one of the “original twelve” participants during that ground-breaking
14-day centering prayer retreat at the Lama Foundation in 1983. Drawing on the
works of both Thomas Keating and Cynthia Bourgeault, Fr. Sheehan presented a
clear, engaging overview of the contemplative Christian journey as it has been
elucidated to modern-day seekers.
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| Fr. Bill Sheehan |
Centering
prayer is rooted in centuries-old wisdom, including John Cassian’s conferences
and The Cloud of Unknowing. Those
teachings offered guidance on apophatic practices to individuals undergoing
spiritual direction, often in monastic settings. As valuable as these texts
are, Keating recognized that modern-day seekers would benefit through an
approach to the spiritual journey that incorporated the language and
innovations of psychology. Thus, Sheehan points out, Keating’s earlier
contemplative teachings (in his books Open
Mind, Open Heart, Invitation to Love, and Intimacy with God) examined the psycho-spiritual effects of
centering prayer. This silent prayer, Keating explains, reconnects us to the
body, which is the storehouse of all our psychological and emotional
experiences, both good and bad. From infancy onward, the body absorbs the
wounds of a lifetime, and these wounds create blockages to the free flow of
God’s love. Through an ongoing practice of centering prayer, God softens and
loosens these blocks, allowing previously repressed experiences to be released.
On occasion, this “unloading of the unconscious” can be disturbing, even
necessitating professional therapy in some cases. However, Keating reassures us
that God never brings anything into our consciousness that we are not ready to
receive. This “unblocking” is ultimately a deeply healing process initiated through
God’s grace and rooted in our prayerful
consent to God’s love. This process came to be known as “divine therapy.”
Taking
a further look at consent In Invitation
to Love, Keating outlines the “four consents” of the spiritual journey
(which also correspond to developmental milestones of the psyche): Consent to
the fundamental goodness of our being; consent to the gift of our creative and
sexual energy; consent to the experience of human limitation (i.e., aging), and
consent to the gift of transformation, which entails the willingness to die to
self. Part of the conundrum of the human condition is that we generally hesitate to consent to each of these
gifts. But over time, with a persistent contemplative practice, Jesus takes us
on a kind of “archeological dig” of our inner psychospiritual realm in which we
are invited to let go of our hesitancy to consent. As we deepen into releasing
this hesitancy, the divine therapy heals and supports the growth of divine life
within us.
In
2005, Keating published his book Manifesting
God – coming out at about the same time as Cynthia Bourgeault’s seminal
work, Centering Prayer and Inner
Awakening. Sheehan explains that these texts corresponded to deepening insights
about of the practice of centering prayer: “prayer in secret” and “heart
perception.”
As
Keating has long asserted, centering prayer is scripturally based, patterned on
Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 6:6: “If you want to pray, enter your inner room,
close the door, and pray to your Abba [Father] in secret. And your Abba who
sees in secret will cause you to blossom.” The emphasis here is on an Abba who
is tender and loving rather than harsh and punishing, a continuously present
God who always nourishes us from within our “secret” (i.e. wordless, silent)
prayer, bringing us to fruition. God is the very ground of being in which we
are rooted. As such, God is never absent (even when we feel distant from God)
and, as Teresa of Avila reminds us, the biggest obstacle on the spiritual
journey is praying as if God were not present. “We come from God and we return
to God, breath by breath, moment by moment,” says Fr. Sheehan.
In
the inner room, praying in secret, a threefold process occurs. First, we are
affirmed as God’s beloved in the very core of our being. Second, as we continue
to receive this inflow of divine love, it builds up our capacity to trust, and
we are able to rely more fully on the One who loves. Third, once there is
trust, God begins to heal the wounds that have accrued over a lifetime.
Rev.
Cynthia Bourgeault, a student of Keating’s and a journeyer-teacher in schools
of inner awakening, expresses this process from a different point of view. For
her, prayer in secret entails “dropping from the head into the heart.” Many of
us have “head” addictions – attachments to thinking and analyzing that give us
a false sense of power and control. The heart, our magnetic center, is our true
organ of spiritual perception – that deeply listening
capacity within us that integrates body, mind, and spirit; it is also the
avenue for the blossoming of creativity, intuition, wisdom, and compassion.
For
Bourgeault, the contemplative journey entails going “beneath” the
ego-identified self and becoming centered in the heart, where we can realize
and act on our connection to divine being. However, as Sheehan explains,
Bourgeault recognizes that there has been some confusion about the terms “ego”
and “false self.” False self is a term that Thomas Merton coined to describe
that part of our being that takes itself as the whole and lives as if it were
separate from God. Keating later adapted Merton’s term to his own teaching,
describing the false self as: “the self-image developed to cope with the
emotional trauma of early childhood … basing its self-worth on cultural or
group identification.” In reaction to its wounds and its painful sense of
separation from God, the false self develops overweening attachments to safety
and security, affection and esteem, and power and control, chasing after a
happiness that it can never attain.
The
false self and the ego are not the same thing, however, and Sheehan points out
that many people today mistakenly use these terms interchangeably. This is
problematic, as the ego is a necessary part of our humanity: the seat of our
personality, the conscious decision-maker, the learner and developer of talents
and skills. We need a functioning ego to move about in the world and relate
with others; thus, it is counterproductive to think of “getting rid of the ego”
as some kind of spiritual goal. The “false self” is meant to be understood as a
wounded component of ego, but it is not the entire ego itself. Furthermore, as
we continue along in the spiritual journey, we become more deeply unified in
the mind and heart of Christ, which transcends both the false self and the ego.
Around
2008, Sheehan explains, further clarifications about the spiritual journey
emerged through prayer, reflection, and dialogue within the Christian
contemplative community. Keating, for example, refined his ideas about the
method of centering prayer by observing its psychological aspects from “within”
the inner room where we pray in secret. Beholding this, one of the richest
fruits of centering prayer becomes evident: the contemplative journey is deeply
incarnational.
In
essence: As we continue to walk the contemplative path, the indwelling God
heals our wounds and cultivates the seeds of our divine potential, awakening
the heart and activating our capacity to become conduits for God’s
dynamic presence. Through grace, we become infused with the divine. Motivated
by the heart-level realization that we are called to live out the beatitudes,
we manifest the love of Christ in the world. The ego willingly serves the
heart, empowering us to embody the Gospel in our day-to-day lives. Thus, we
take action on behalf of justice. We become healers and peace-makers. We do hidden, humble tasks that unexpectedly bring blessing to others. In all
variety of ways, small and large, we share the gifts of faith, hope, and love in solidarity with
and service to others. Herein lives the incarnational hallelujah: Contemplation
and action, being and doing, are like the in-breath and out-breath – necessary
and complementary to each other -- and the kingdom of heaven is here and now,
within and among us.
