Meditation and Centering Prayer

.

Levels of

Centering Prayer

For those new to meditation or centering prayer, a workshop will be offered each Monday evening from 7:00-8:00 in room 23. Although the workshop will cover different forms of meditative prayer from various spiritual traditions, the emphasis will be on Centering Prayer. Each weekly workshop will provide instructional insights to Centering Prayer as well as practice sessions. The workshops will be led by Fr. Dad Davis OP, Pastor, Ron Langdon, resident parishioner, and Fr. Jim Barnett, OP who has recently joined our community after ministering at the Friends of God Ashram.

Centering Prayer is a method of prayer, which prepares us to receive the gift of God's presence. It consists of responding to the Spirit of Christ by consenting to God’s presence and action within. It furthers the development of contemplative prayer by quieting our faculties to cooperate with the gift of God’s presence.

Centering Prayer facilitates the movement from more active modes of prayer — verbal, mental or affective prayer — into a receptive prayer of resting in God. It emphasizes prayer as a personal relationship with God. At the same time, it is a discipline to foster and serve this relationship by a regular, daily practice of prayer. It is Trinitarian in its source, Christ-centered in its focus, and ecclesial in its effects; that is, it builds communities of faith.

Centering Prayer is drawn from ancient prayer practices of the Christian contemplative heritage, notably the Fathers and Mothers of the Desert, Lectio Divina, (praying the scriptures), The Cloud of Unknowing, St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila.. It was distilled into a simple method of prayer in the 1970’s by three Trappist monks, Fr. William Meninger, Fr. Basil Pennington and Abbot Thomas Keating at the Trappist Abbey, St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts.

Daily meditation at St. Tom’s fifteen minutes before morning prayer(7:45am) and evening prayer (4:45pm). All are welcome.