Centering Prayer and Ignatian Prayer: Two Paths to the Same End

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Centering Prayer and Ignatian Prayer: Two Paths to the Same End? ... For example, the best-known authors associated with Carmelite ... All of these different spiritualities (there are many more) offer a particular framework that has been ... each system is to provide a scaffolding that facilitates an encounter with God.
Centering Prayer and Ignatian Prayer: Two Paths to the Same End? Margaret A. L. Blackie

Within the Christian tradition, there is a wide range of tried and tested approaches that facilitate encounter with God. In the Roman Catholic Church in particular, these approaches have been strongly associated with different religious orders. Benedictine, Franciscan, Dominican, and Igantian spirituality are all characterized by the teachings of their founders. n There are, however, exceptions to founderbased spirituality in religious orders. For example, the best-known authors associated with Carmelite spirituality are Saint Teresa of Avila and Saint John of the Cross. Another example is the spirituality of The Cloud of Unknowing. This informs Centering Prayer which has been popularized in the last fifty years by the Contemplative Outreach movement and authors such as Thomas Keating. All of these different spiritualities (there are many more) offer a particular framework that has been developed over time. All fall under the broader umbrella of Christian spirituality. The primary goal of each system is to provide a scaffolding that facilitates an encounter with God. Some systems favour an apophatic approach whilst others favour a cataphatic approach. People over the ages have found all these systems useful. Likewise, in each spiritual system, one may find beginners and very mature followers. This article focuses on the teaching of two of the more widely known and used schools of prayer: Centering Prayer and Ignatian prayer. SIDEBAR Two spiritualties Apophatic spirituality emphasizes the absence of thought or reflection and focuses on a purely loving relationship with the Divine. Cataphatic spirituality emphasizes the use of the intellect and senses to come to a deeper knowledge of the Divine. /SIDEBAR I am a spiritual director steeped in the Ignatian tradition. I made the Spiritual Exercises as a young adult. I then spent four years working in a Jesuit retreat centre from 2003 to 2006, and I have spent a good deal of time in the years since then giving spiritual direction and training spiritual directors. My own training and formation have been heavily slanted towards Ignatian spirituality. It is no surprise, then, that the Ignatian framework forms the lens through which I have viewed the contributions of other spiritualities. If I am honest, I must confess to a certain bias against other spiritualities. This bias is further entrenched by what I experience as a fairly consistent misapprehension in a notable percentage of those I have encountered that somehow the “quiet” methods of prayer were superior to the “chattiness” of Ignatian methods. I call this a misapprehension because I perceive it is a direct result of a conflation of apophatic prayer methods with the spiritual experience of contemplation. It is analogous to the critique that writer and Trappist monk Thomas Merton supposedly made of the monks at Gethsemani, who are part of a contemplative religious order. The rich spiritual tradition largely

buried in the religious orders of the Roman Catholic Church since the Reformation broke out into wider consciousness following the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. Accompanying this has been a renewed interest and deep thirst for contemplation. The story told by writer, speaker, and priest Richard Rohr, OFM, is that many of the monks at Gethsemani were not great fans of Merton because he had told them that they were introverts, not contemplatives. Merton’s painful insight was that not all those who were cloistered in the monastery were there for an encounter with God (contemplation); a fair number were there for the quiet, uninterrupted lifestyle (introversion). Likewise many who favour “quiet” methods of prayer may be conflating “silence” with “contemplation.” This, coupled with the tragic human weakness that always seems to try find a way to make “us” better than “them” has resulted in an unfortunate sense of hierarchy with respect to prayer methods in some spheres. In such circles, Ignatian prayer can be seen as a good “starting place” that will ultimately have to give way to an apophatic method as spiritual maturity increases. It is true that as one matures in the spiritual journey, one’s prayer does tend towards greater silence, but this has far more to do with the prayer coming to fruition than the choice of starting point. I perceive that the apophatic and cataphatic dualism is simply not helpful, and I would argue it is potentially destructive when one is seen as being superior to the other. In recent months, I read Cynthia Bourgeault’s book Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening. In reading it, I found myself increasingly convinced that both the Centering Prayer and Ignatian prayer methods are essentially trying to do the same thing—put the self in place of least resistance to Divine encounter. There is a separate argument that one can make about non-dual consciousness that I will purposefully avoid here. I am not sufficiently schooled on this topic yet to take a position. My goal is to explore how both methods of prayer foster surrender of the self and a reliance on the grace of God. The prayer that one prays at the end of the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola sums up some of the key elements: Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and all my will—all that I have and possess. You, Lord, have given all that to me. I now give it back to you, O Lord. All of it is yours. Dispose of it according to your will. Give me love of yourself along with your grace, for that is enough for me! ([234] Ganss translation)

This is not an easy prayer to pray. The first time this prayer is encountered, most people choke gently and, in Ignatian terms, pray for the desire to have the desire to pray this. In a world that favours autonomy, the thought of willingly holding lightly the very things that I believe make me “me” seems ludicrous. I suspect the more successful one is—the harder one has had to work to achieve one’s status in life—the more challenging this prayer is to pray. Yet slowly over time, we come to realise that we are holding rotting husks and are being offered pure gold if we would just open our clenched fists. When we realize that what we are surrendering was never really ours in the first place and is not in our control to keep, we begin to recognize the bitter chatter of the egoic self. In the act of surrender, we find the pearl of great price. Likewise, Centering Prayer as taught by Thomas Keating is fundamentally a prayer of letting go.

The method of Centering Prayer is to empty the mind, simply allowing your thoughts, if there are any, to pass by without engagement. As soon as you discover yourself “thinking” or engaging with a thought, use a sacred word to dismiss the thought. A sacred word is used only periodically (although for some of us the periods may be embarrassingly short!) and is used as a conscious choice of surrender to God. In this way, every moment in prayer is an act of surrender to God. It is an act of faith that if we routinely sit and practice surrendering, grace will move in our lives and our choice to still our conscious mind will bear fruit somehow. And indeed as we practice the act of surrender and as we begin to feel the fruit of the practice in our lives, we begin to trust in the grace of God. Grace is not something we can control; it is a transformational force that opens unimagined paths. The method of Centering Prayer is appropriately termed apophatic—one is able to avoid the engagement of the rational “monkey” mind. It is not just thoughts that are clearly “distractions” that we let go of. Indeed, even thoughts that appear to be spiritual insights are left aside. It is in this last point that our faith is really tested: Will we be able to resist the temptation of that which looks like a spiritual truth in order to pursue the larger goal of surrender to God? Ignatian spirituality enters through the cataphatic door. There is an active engagement of the conscious mind. There are several elements included in an Ignatian prayer period. It begins with a recognition of the presence of God and a conscious asking for a particular grace.. The next step involves the mind focusing on several steps of imaginative or cognitive engagement. The Ignatian prayer period ends with a conversation with Jesus. Once the prayer concludes, the person conducts a short review of the prayer and discerns what might have been truly from God and what was likely not. The glaringly obvious difference between this and Centering Prayer is that this prayer has “content.” Nonetheless, two crucial elements frame the content: the prayer for a particular grace and the discernment. In the act of praying for a grace, we are consciously acknowledging that we cannot make transformation of any sort happen; instead, we can only put ourselves in the path of grace. Secondly, the act of discernment is an acknowledgement that we are characterized by poverty of mind and spirit. Even as we are in the act of prayer, we can get caught by thoughts and intentions that do not lead us towards God. It is an act of humility—a willingness to accept that even with the best intentions and the best will in the world, I can still get sidetracked. So at the end of my prayer, I examine what has happened and weigh it against what I know of God. This “weighing” is more than simply a rational process. There is a strong element of bodily wisdom—does this “sit” right in my being? If it does, I may want to spend more time with this during my next prayer period. If it seems to be from a source other than God, I simply lay it aside and let the next prayer period unfold anew. Whilst my brief descriptions of both prayer methods may be problematic in their simplicity, I hope practitioners of either school will find some resonance in what I have written. Nonetheless, it is the broader themes that I want to highlight. In Centering Prayer, the very act of the prayer practice focuses on surrender. In Ignatian spirituality, this is expressed in the idea of indifference. Ignatian indifference is not a “holy ambivalence” but rather everything is seen as secondary to the pursuit of God. Every decision—every experience—is held up against a personal touchstone of what we believe is authentically an encounter with God. Thus even something that I may passionately desire and feel a strong sense of calling to will be set aside if it is perceived that it somehow disrupts my trajectory

towards that encounter. Indifference then is the interior commitment to put God above all else. And it is thus an orientation of surrender. It is important to note here that it is discernment that allows me to distinguish between things that appear to be from God and things that I desire but in fact lead me away from God. It is the spiritual equivalent of being able to distinguish between gold ore and iron pyrite (fool’s gold). This discernment requires more than the rational mind—it requires a sitting and feeling the resonance or dissonance. The more we try, the more attuned we become, but we will never get it right all the time! Likewise, the reliance on grace emerges over time. In the beginning, the act of praying for a grace can be more a discipline than a spiritual disposition. But over time, the spiritual disposition takes root. Sooner or later, we will stumble into something we cannot will ourselves through. The most accessible example, perhaps, is forgiveness. We can express the desire to forgive, and we can pray for the grace of forgiveness, but the release of the emotional tag to the incident (which I believe is the hallmark of forgiveness) is not in our power to attain. All we can do is put ourselves in the path of grace. Whilst the orientation of surrender is explicitly and consciously developed in Ignatian spirituality, its development in Centering Prayer appears more implicit. While the Ignatian approach favours the combination of conscious grappling and discernment, Centering Prayer presumes that the daily prayer practice of surrender will slowly permeate through and infuse one’s entire being. Divine Psychotherapy The element that convinced me that Centering Prayer and Ignatian spirituality are just different routes to the same place was Cynthia Bourgeault’s description of the Divine Psychotherapy. Drawing on Keating, and I am sure her own experience, Bourgeault explains that sooner or later the practitioner of Centering Prayer will find the emergence of psychologically unsettling material bubbling up from the unconscious. This may occur relatively quickly after one begins practicing or may take many years, but if one truly begins to surrender and to rely on grace, this will happen. I have seen this same phenomenon in people who practice Ignatian prayer. Its emergence is not predictable, but it always follows an increase in the articulation of the reliance on grace. This shift in the use of the language of grace tends to indicate a growing sense of trust in God and a loosening of the reliance on oneself—that is to say, the first signs of surrender. It is again that act of the opening of our hands to hold what we think we know lightly that allows for dynamic transformation to occur. This is a psychological undoing in some senses.Certainly in my own experience, it has happened at a level that I am simply unable to articulate. I know I have been through something transformational, but I am unable to explain, even to myself, what it is that happened. There was simply a major shifting within the depths of my being that culminated in two or three weeks of periodic intense weeping. As someone who rarely cries, it was unsettling, but not unnerving. The recognition of the lack of solidity of the thing that I call “myself” called forth that significant spiritual shift. “It is no longer I who lives, but Christ who lives in me...” (Gal 2:20). Certainly, the “I” that I regarded as the bedrock of my being has turned out to be rather more fluid than I thought.

Synthesis

Far from pulling a person into a more introspective “spiritual” withdrawal from the world, what seems to emerge is a greater involvement in the world. This is evident in both those who are steeped in Ignatian prayer and those steeped in Centering Prayer. Again, I take this as evidence for my argument that these are simply two different portals to common place. When one is starting in the shallows of the any prayer method, the need to withdraw to practice the method is strong. And as one proceeds the desire to withdraw may increase. Furthermore, the times of withdrawal may well be necessary to allow the True Self to shake loose the vicelike grip of the egoic self. But ultimately, the place where one ends up is not a denial of one’s place in the world, rather a more committed engagement, because one sees “God in all things.” Seeing and serving “God in all things” is a typical descriptor of the fruit of Ignatian prayer but the culmination of Centering Prayer is no different There is a great temptation in all spiritual journeys to denounce the “things of this world” for the “higher spiritual plane.” This may be more a form of escapism than a genuine call to holiness. Conclusion It seems to me, that both Centering Prayer and Ignatian spirituality offer elements in their prayer period practices that slowly, over time, take root in our being. The essence of surrender central to both practices begins to permeate our entire being and with this our way of being in the world shifts. I hope that this article will help people get past acceptance or rejection of different methods of prayer. How one prays and what one does when one is at prayer is actually immaterial. The only useful points of discrimination are to examine how a particular prayer method shapes one’s orientation towards God. For the prayer to be an entry to contemplation, it must foster surrender of the reliance on the ego. I recommend examining an approach to prayer and taking the whole system on good faith if one believes it will lead to an encounter with God. Picking and choosing and mixing methods from various approaches may be ill-advised unless one is very well acquainted with one method. As a spiritual director, I have found the foray into Centering Prayer a useful expansion of my own way of viewing things. I am beginning to be able to look beyond the framework that has worked so well for me, to see the deeper lines that may present themselves in different guises in another spirituality. References Blackie, Margaret A. L. Rooted in Love: Integrating Ignatian Spirituality into Daily Life. Cape Town, South Africa: New Voices Publications, 2013.

Bourgeault, Cynthia. Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening. Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 2004. Ignatius, Saint. The Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola: A Translation and Commentary. Translated by George Ganss. Saint Louis: Loyola Press, 1992.

Margaret A. L. Blackie holds the equivalent position of a tenured professor in the Department of Chemistry and Polymer Science at Stellenbosch University in Stellenbosch, South Africa. She is a spiritual director trained in the Ignatian tradition and author of Rooted in Love: Integrating Ignatian Spirituality into Daily Life. She blogs at magsblackie.com and guest posts occasionally elsewhere.