contemplation and centering prayer... is their a difference btw them?

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** Christian mysticism and New Age mysticism

For Christians, the spiritual life is a relationship with God which gradually through his grace becomes deeper, and in the process also sheds light on our relationship with our fellow men and women, and with the universe. Spirituality in New Age terms means experiencing states of consciousness dominated by a sense of harmony and fusion with the Whole. So “mysticism” refers not to meeting the transcendent God in the fullness of love, but to the experience engendered by turning in on oneself, an exhilarating sense of being at one with the universe, a sense of letting one’s individuality sink into the great ocean of Being.(59)

This fundamental distinction is evident at all levels of comparison between Christian mysticism and New Age mysticism. The New Age way of purification is based on awareness of unease or alienation, which is to be overcome by immersion into the Whole. In order to be converted, a person needs to make use of techniques which lead to the experience of illumination. This transforms a person’s consciousness and opens him or her to contact with the divinity, which is understood as the deepest essence of reality.

The techniques and methods offered in this immanentist religious system, which has no concept of God as person, proceed ‘from below’. Although they involve a descent into the depths of one’s own heart or soul, they constitute an essentially human enterprise on the part of a person who seeks to rise towards divinity by his or her own efforts. It is often an “ascent” on the level of consciousness to what is understood to be a liberating awareness of “the god within”. Not everyone has access to these techniques, whose benefits are restricted to a privileged spiritual ‘aristocracy’.

The essential element in Christian faith, however, is God’s descent towards his creatures, particularly towards the humblest, those who are weakest and least gifted according to the values of the “world”. There are spiritual techniques which it is useful to learn, but God is able to by-pass them or do without them. A Christian’s “method of getting closer to God is not based on any technique in the strict sense of the word. That would contradict the spirit of childhood called for by the Gospel. The heart of genuine Christian mysticism is not technique: it is always a gift of God; and the one who benefits from it knows himself to be unworthy”.(60)

For Christians, conversion is turning back to the Father, through the Son, in docility to the power of the Holy Spirit. The more people progress in their relationship with God – which is always and in every way a free gift – the more acute is the need to be converted from sin, spiritual myopia and self-infatuation, all of which obstruct a trusting self-abandonment to God and openness to other men and women.

All meditation techniques need to be purged of presumption and pretentiousness. Christian prayer is not an exercise in self-contemplation, stillness and self-emptying, but a dialogue of love, one which “implies an attitude of conversion, a flight from ‘self’ to the ‘You’ of God”.(61) It leads to an increasingly complete surrender to God’s will, whereby we are invited to a deep, genuine solidarity with our brothers and sisters.(62)**

vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/interelg/documents/rc_pc_interelg_doc_20030203_new-age_en.html#3.4.%20Christian%20mysticism%20and%20New%20Age%20mysticism

In the Living Prayer of my life
 
blessedstar
It seems centering prayer encompasses all these traditional prayers as some would have it except it is not authentic Catholic prayer. When God becomes ‘energy’ as Fr Keating so often refers to God then we are seeing God as the new agers and eastern practises do. When God has no image as Fr Keating says then we are seeing God as the new agers and eastern practises do (this is not Eastern Orthodox, but Eastern practises such as Zen Buddhism).
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I have never seen Fr Keating refer to God as energy. Nor have I ever seen him say that God has no image.
Perhaps you can point me to where he has said these things?

My guess is that its a misinterpretation.

Fr. Keating, as St. John of the Cross teaches us, not to create images of God in our mind. To do so would be to create God in our image.

Jim
 
It places an inordinate importance on body posture and breathing, it seeks to still the mind of all thoughts and concepts ‘by letting them go’ of God which cannot be done by method and can only be done by God in contemplation.
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Show us please, where any of the members of whom I spoke said you still the mind of GOD, and that it is necessary to have a certain body posture. You will not find this stated anywhere in their posts. Period.
In this stillness of faculties which God brings about in contemplation the soul is safeguarded because at that moment, or for the short or length of duration, the soul is united to God and nothing may approach, no evil, not even the facultiies may operate to corrupt it or interfere to create deception.
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I can see that both you and the author are not understanding the gift of contemplation, whatsoever. The only time in contemplation that the faculties are completely suspended and free of the danger alluded to above, is in the Prayer of Union, which is rarely granted. In the Prayer of Quiet, the earliest form of infused contemplation, the only faculty that is ‘occupied’ is the will, and the fact the the other two are free is what St. Teresa says can cause disquiet. Hence the need to divert the extraneous thoughts the mind presents.

BUT, and this is an important BUT, the mind never empties and focuses on a nothing. It centers completely on God alone. I fail to understand why we must keep repeating that, or why you are not hearing what folks are saying.

Remember, when a person engages in the “practice of the presence of God,” one does not practice the presence of “nothing.”
 
Dear friends,

Some of our readers know well the blessings contained in the Practice of the Presence of God. Since so much of what this little Carmelite Brother Lawrence has shared are the sentiments some posters have tried to express about CP, although with difficulty and opposition. I think these few words from Brother Lawrence will help shed some light.
He said that useless thoughts spoil all - that the mischief began there. We ought to reject them as soon as we perceived their impertinence and return to our communion with God. In the beginning he had often passed his time appointed for prayer in rejecting wandering thoughts and falling right back into them. He could never regulate his devotion by certain methods as some do.
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catholictreasury.info/Presence/pr4.htm
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I found no small pain in this exercise. Yet I continued it, notwithstanding all the difficulties that occurred. And I tried not to trouble or disquiet myself when my mind wandered. Such has been my common practice ever since I entered religious life. Though I have done it very imperfectly, I have found great advantages by it. These, I well know, are to be imputed to the mercy and goodness of God because we can do nothing without Him; and I still less than any.
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catholictreasury.info/Presence/pr7.htm
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I have ceased all forms of devotion and set prayers except those to which my state requires. I make it my priority to persevere in His holy presence, wherein I maintain a simple attention and a fond regard for God, which I may call an actual presence of God. Or, to put it another way, it is an habitual, silent, and private conversation of the soul with God. This gives me much joy and contentment.
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My most usual method is this simple attention, an affectionate regard for God to whom I find myself often attached with greater sweetness and delight than that of an infant at the mother’s breast. To choose an expression, I would call this state the bosom of God, for the inexpressible sweetness which I taste and experience there. If, at any time, my thoughts wander from it from necessity or infirmity, I am presently recalled by inward emotions so charming and delicious that I cannot find words to describe them.
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catholictreasury.info/Presence/pr8.htm
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Joysong said:
If we understand the practice of CP as using one sacred word, or a few words such as in ejaculations, to maintain the supernatural ‘prayer of quiet,’ also known as contemplation, we are on safe ground. It is needful to use some type of interior help to deflect extraneous thoughts in ever so quiet a RE-turning to God.

Note this difference very carefully. It should prevent the rash judging seen so often in these threads. In the above instance, CP is NOT used to enter into the prayer of quiet, but rather to sustain it through quieting one’s thoughts which are ever ready to disturb the will. In that manner, and in agreement with St. Teresa, CP can be used.

In the example of Peary who mentioned maintaining the presence of God, whatever process he or other ‘pray-ers’ use to enter into this habitual practice of RECOLLECTION, whether through a sacred word, or simply a remembrance of God, they are indeed blessed. God commanded Abraham, “Walk in My presence and be perfect!” If one uses a practice of centering their mind on God’s eternal presence within them, in order to return them to recollection, this too is a good thing.
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Bingo 👍
 
What is the purpose of these types of prayer? I find meditating on the passion fulfilling and able to bring me to the Lord in the garden when I unite my worries or to the cross in persecution. I once said in a thread about CP, that I almost found myself hanging on the cross, but my own fears stopped the union. I wasn’t joking, it was right in the middle of group therepy, when the question came up “who would we like to be like”. I thought of Jesus and remembered His passion and first accepted it. The Spirit rushed to me as I first contemplated the cross for myself, but my fears of experiencing it stopped it, not forcing the union. I was alarmed that I thought I could relate to Jesus like that and felt pride had played a role in it, but now wonder if it was a gift granted during prayer that I just didn’t accept fully and being gentle, the Spirit didn’t force it. The Lord isn’t all butterflies and flowers. He will make the hair on your neck stand up as the true fear of the Lord hits you in awe and bring you out of your comfort zone if you follow Him. So I will continue to meditate on these mysteries I relate to and if he extends His hands again, may I trust in Him. But until then, my prayer are no less effective, maybe even more effective, bearing no visible consoling fruit. Tim
 
Fr. Keating says in Open Mind, Open Heart, “All thoughts pass if you wait long enough.”

Fr. Keating says, “As you go to a deeper level of reality, you begin to pick up vibrations that were there all the time but not perceived.”

Fr. Thomas Keating says in his book, Open Mind, Open Heart, “As you go down deeper, you may reach a place where the sacred word disappears altogether and there are no thoughts. This is often experienced as a suspension of consciousness, a space.”

Fr Keating says,“The method consists of letting go of every thought during the time of prayer, even the most devout thoughts.”

Open Mind, Open Heart, Fr. Keating says, “As the Spirit gradually takes more and more charge of your prayer, you may move into pure consciousness, which is an intuition into your True Self.”“In that state, there is no consciousness of self. When your ordinary faculties come back again, there may be a sense of peaceful delight.”

Invitation to Love, Fr Keating speaks of “Energy Centers,”

In Open Mind, Open Heart, Fr Keating says, “The Eucharist is the celebration of life: the coming together of all the material elements of the cosmos, their emergence to consciousness in human persons and the transformation of human consciousness into Divine consciousness. It is the manifestation of the Divine in and through the Christian community. We receive the Eucharist in order to become the Eucharist.”

On his Contemplative Outreach, Ltd. website: Fr Keating says, When we go to the CENTER OF OUR BEING, and pass through the center into the very CENTER OF GOD, we get in immediate touch with this divine creating energy.

Fr Keating says on his website: Today we might say that our God is unlimited energy, a nuclear explosion that never ends. It is unlimited because its force is in God, and is God. Divine love is real power, but the very reverse of control or manipulation. It is the power to give without interruption and without end. Like the sun, it never stops radiating energy, light, and life-giving power. …and…The energy of divine love has been introduced into our hearts in baptism and increased by the Eucharist and by the yearly celebration of the Resurrection.

Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey in Christian Hermeticism. The tarot is a deck of cards used in fortune telling. Fr. Keating calls the book “the greatest contribution to date toward the rediscovery and renewal of the Christian contemplative tradition.” Fr. Pennington says it is “without doubt the most extraordinary work I have ever read.” Amity House, the publisher, is heavily New Age. The Library of Congress has classified the book under “occult sciences” and “cartomancy.”

The medieval Flemish mystic Ruysbroeck said there is a form of peace that is purely natural: “When a man is bare and imageless in his senses and empty and idle in his higher powers, he enters into a rest through mere nature . . . without the grace of God. These people err gravely. They immerse themselves in an absolute silence that is purely natural, and a false liberty of spirit is born from this. Having drawn the body in upon itself, they are mute, unmoving. . . . They mistake these types of simplicity for those which are reached through God. In reality they have lost God” (John Ruysbroeck, Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage).

So, God is energy, no devout thoughts, no image of God. Purely new age and eastern approach to prayer which has been fused into Catholic prayer.

In the Living Prayer of my life
 
blessedstar said:
Fr. Keating says in Open Mind, Open Heart, “All thoughts pass if you wait long enough.”

Fr. Keating says, “As you go to a deeper level of reality, you begin to pick up vibrations that were there all the time but not perceived.”

Fr. Thomas Keating says in his book, Open Mind, Open Heart, “As you go down deeper, you may reach a place where the sacred word disappears altogether and there are no thoughts. This is often experienced as a suspension of consciousness, a space.”

Fr Keating says,“The method consists of letting go of every thought during the time of prayer, even the most devout thoughts.”

Open Mind, Open Heart, Fr. Keating says, “As the Spirit gradually takes more and more charge of your prayer, you may move into pure consciousness, which is an intuition into your True Self.”“In that state, there is no consciousness of self. When your ordinary faculties come back again, there may be a sense of peaceful delight.”
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Blessedstar, IMO this is just the unfortunate pop-lingo he uses to describe the infused Prayer of Union - - - the suspension of the intellect, will and memory in infused prayer that St. Teresa and St. John describe. He is talking about the experience of super-natural prayer.

Didn’t have the time to read the rest of the quotes . . .

Dave.
 
Thanks, Dave! 🙂
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What is the purpose of these types of prayer?
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Prayer is so very personal, and I think we all have our own path to forge in interior communion with God. As Jesus advised, Therefore every scribe instructed in the kingdom of heaven, is like to a man that is a householder, who brings forth out of his treasure new things and old.

What works for you as you bring good from your treasure, is your path. Each of us can study the ancients’ writings and take from them that which anoints our heart and which it seems to us the Lord would have us follow. But simply to debate over definitions when one has no experience of what the other has been granted, or render opinions on that which an author has expressed in the media, is like blind and deaf Helen Keller, having a definition perfectly, but having no way of understanding the experience until it ‘clicks’ personally.

I trust God to do His own work in each soul. He is Infinite Mercy, and knows who are His own, and like the Good Shepherd that He is, will not allow His sheep to fall into evil hands without a great deal of intervention. He has not made any of us spiritual directors of anothers eternal soul, and we dare not impose our hands on His sacred work without incurring His deep displeasure.
 
Fr. Keating says … etc., etc., etc.
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I don’t give a hang what Fr. Keating says. We are NOT sharing his entire book on which you base everything that has been shared above, and twist it, B.S.

Read back again what WAS shared. Dismiss everything else, please. We are not discussing all portions of his work as you keep injecting, nor are we debating it. We are only applying that which is useful and which is has been handed down to us from St. Teresa and Brother Lawrence. Please stop reading more into this than that which has been posted.
 
newadvent.org/cathen/12608b.htm

For anyone who wishes to understand the Prayer of Quiet let them read this link and the quote taken from it as below:
**
The prayer of quiet does not entirely impede the exercise of the faculties of the soul. The will alone remains captive. The intellect and memory appear to have greater activity for the things of God in this state, but not so much for worldly affairs. They may even escape the bounds of restraint and wander on strange and useless thoughts, and yet the will, attracted by the charm of the Divine presence, continues its delights, not wholly in a passive way, but capable of eliciting fervent affections and aspirations. As to the bodily senses St. Francis de Sales tells us that persons during the prayer of quiet can hear and remember things said near them; and, quoting St. Teresa, he observes that it is a type of superstition to be so jealous of our repose as to refrain from coughing, and almost from breathing for fear of losing it. God who is the author of this peace will not deprive us of it for unavoidable bodily motions, or even for involuntary wanderings of the imagination. **

I would invite again for people to read the Vatican’s advice as stated here taken from their website:

vatican.va/roman_curia/po…ge%20mysticism

The tendency to interchange psychology and spirituality was firmly embedded in the Human Potential Movement as it developed towards the end of the 1960s at the Esalen Institute in California. Transpersonal psychology, strongly influenced by Eastern religions and by Jung, offers a contemplative journey where science meets mysticism. The stress laid on bodiliness, the search for ways of expanding consciousness and the cultivation of the myths of the collective unconscious were all encouragements to search for “the God within” oneself. To realise one’s potential, one had to go beyond one’s ego in order to become the god that one is, deep down. This could be done by choosing the appropriate therapy – meditation, parapsychological experiences, the use of hallucinogenic drugs. These were all ways of achieving “peak experiences”, “mystical” experiences of fusion with God and with the cosmos.

and

**Prayer and meditation: are we talking to ourselves or to God?

The tendency to confuse psychology and spirituality makes it hard not to insist that many of the meditation techniques now used are not prayer. They are often a good preparation for prayer, but no more, even if they lead to a more pleasant state of mind or bodily comfort. The experiences involved are genuinely intense, but to remain at this level is to remain alone, not yet in the presence of the other. The achievement of silence can confront us with emptiness, rather than the silence of contemplating the beloved. It is also true that techniques for going deeper into one’s own soul are ultimately an appeal to one’s own ability to reach the divine, or even to become divine: if they forget God’s search for the human heart they are still not Christian prayer. Even when it is seen as a link with the Universal Energy, “such an easy ‘relationship’ with God, where God’s function is seen as supplying all our needs, shows the selfishness at the heart of this New Age”.(75)

New Age practices are not really prayer, in that they are generally a question of introspection or fusion with cosmic energy, as opposed to the double orientation of Christian prayer, which involves introspection but is essentially also a meeting with God. Far from being a merely human effort, Christian mysticism is essentially a dialogue which “implies an attitude of conversion, a flight from ‘self’ to the ‘you’ of God”.(76)“The Christian, even when he is alone and prays in secret, he is conscious that he always prays for the good of the Church in union with Christ, in the Holy Spirit and together with all the saints”.(77) **

In the Living Prayer of my life
 
B.S. I concede. Post and post and post and post, if it helps you believe you are making progress. I see that there is no reasoning with you. I also believe God Himself is the author of the work in a person’s soul, and He will guide them in spite of you.
 
OK now that Jesus might become the center of this thread how abouit looking at the charismatic prayer groups that came out in the 70s and so on. I don’t think there is any difference between the two prayer areas spoken about and the latter. OK. so lets keep to charismatic and we will have NO fighting.

Let Jesus be Lord for ever and ever and ever and ever

AMEN
Godbless.
 
What it comes down to, there are those like blessedstar, who can not grasp what people like Fr Keating say, and those of us who do.

That is not to say we’re smarter, but rather, the experience God blesses us in prayer, can be related with others who have experienced the same thing. Those who do not have this experience, will not grasp it, nor the explanation.

BTW, I looked up where Fr Keating uses the word, “Divine Energy.” He uses this term when speaking about God, acting within nature and within us. So then, I went to Newadvent.org and did a search for “divine energy.”

I got a whole bunch of links to documents writen by the Church and by Saints, who use the term, “divine energy,” in the same way Fr Keating does.

Again, if you haven’t experienced contemplation while using Centering Prayer. it will be incomprehensible.

God has given me great blessings through this form of prayer.

Who is anyone to tell me he doesn’t?

Jim
 
Unfortunately, the apparent inability of posters to interact constructively on the topic of centering prayer has become a disruption in the forums and that is why this interaction is being brought to an end.

**Centering Prayer may not be discussed for any reasons for the remainder of 2007.

Any remaining questions should be directed to our apologists**.

Before contacting them, please review these answers, articles, and programs from Catholic Answers about centering prayer.

What does the Pope think about centering prayer?
Is seeking contemplative prayer wrong?
Is Lectio Divina considered Centering Prayer?
Can Catholics engage in Centering Prayer?
Is Centering Prayer an authentic spirituality?
Is Centering Prayer Catholic meditation?

The Danger of Centering Prayer (This Rock: November 1997)
Letters in response to The Dangers of Centering Prayer (This Rock: February 1998)

What’s Wrong with Centering Prayer? by Clare Merkle (Catholic Answers Live: Nov 6, 2006)
Learn to Discern: Christian or New Age? by Susan Brinkmann (Catholic Answers Live: Oct 29, 2007)
 
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