Imago Dei Christian Community

Centering Prayer is a very simple way of prayer which can be used by anyone who wants to be with God, to experience His love and presence. It is a prayer of longing that leads into a prayer of Presence. First of all, we settle ourselves down quietly. Most of us pray best sitting down, but take any posture that works well for you. It is best if the back is fairly straight and well supported. If we gently close our eyes, we immediately begin to quiet down, for we use a lot of our psychic energy in seeing.

Once we are settled, we turn our attention to the Lord present within us. We know He is there by faith, that is, we know He is there because He said so. In love, we turn ourselves over to Him. For these twenty minutes, we are all His. He can do with us whatever he wants. This prayer is a pure gift, a gift of self in love.

In order to be able to abide quietly and attentively with our Beloved, we use a love word, a prayer word-a simple word that expresses our being to the Lord in love. It might well be our favorite name for Him: Lord, Jesus, Father, Love…whatever is meaningful for us. We just let that word be there, to keep us attentive to Him. It is not an effortful proclamation or a constantly repeated mantra, but rather a sigh of love, a murmur of love, a “being to.”

Whenever during the time of our prayer, we become aware of anything else, we simply use our love word to return to the Lord. Some days we will have to use the word constantly; there may be a lot of commotion around us or in us. No matter. Each time we use it, each time we return to Him, it is a perfect gift of self to Him in love. Other days we may not need to use our word much at all. Fine! It really makes no difference. Simply, these twenty minutes are all His to do with as He likes. We don’t seek anything for ourselves. It is pure gift. It is not in the twenty minutes we will be aware of things. All our attention is on Him. It is outside the time of prayer that we will begin to see the difference, as the fruits of the Spirit–love, peace, joy, kindness…begin to flourish in our lives.

At the end of our twenty minutes, we do not want to jump right back into activity. We have gone very deep even if we don’t seem to sense it. So, we want to end our prayer very gently. I suggest praying interiorly, very slowly, the Our Father. Let each phrase come forth with all its meaning. In this, the Lord will teach us much. And the deep peace of our contemplative prayer will flow into our active lives.

It is a prayer of experience, so we can only know it by experience. We always urge people learning this prayer to make a commitment to themselves to practice the prayer faithfully, twice a day, for thirty days. Then, perhaps with a close friend, for someone else can usually see better than we, look and see what has been the fruit of the prayer in our lives. If the way we were praying before was producing better fruit, don’t hesitate to return to it. But if this simple prayer of listening, attentive love has been good for us, then by all means continue in it. The important thing is that we do pray regularly and allow God to be to us the source of love, life, peace and happiness that He wants to be.