Centering Prayer and Attention of the Heart Cynthia Bourgeault In the thirty years now since Centering Prayer first moved beyond the walls of St. Joseph’s Abbey in Massachusetts and became a lay groundswell, it has certainly implanted itself deeply and (one hopes) permanently in the canon of Christian contemplative practice. Yet it still jostles somewhat uneasily against the walls of received tradition. I am not speaking here of fundamentalist‐generated fear (“The devil will get you if you make your mind a blank”), but rather, of serious reservations on the part of some deeply formed in the Christian contemplative tradition that this prayer is somehow “breaking the rules.” In its classic presentations, Christian prayer is “progressive”; it passes through stages. And the contemplative stage is traditionally regarded as the highest, or most subtle. In the concluding words of a recent, thoughtful article by a well‐prepared commentator, “One does not take the kingdom by force.”1 Contemplation is approached by a gradual path leading from purgative to illuminative to unitive; from cataphatic to apophatic. The “ladder” of spiritual ascent is so deeply engrained on the Christian religious imagination that it seems virtually impossible to conceive of the journey in any other way. Contemplative prayer is “higher,” and it is approached only gradually through a long journey of purification and inner preparation. But is this in fact really so? “You have to experience duality for a long time until you see it’s not there,” said Thomas Merton at a conference given to the nuns of the Redwoods shortly before boarding the plane to Asia on the last leg of his human journey. “Don’t consider dualistic prayer on a lower level. The lower is higher. There are no levels. At any moment you can break through to the underlying unity which is God’s gift in Christ. In the end, Praise praises. Thanksgiving gives thanks. Jesus prays. Openness is all.”2 Certainly, these words of unitive, realized mastery make it clear that Merton “got there.” But how? Was this breakthrough insight the result of his long tread up the traditional ladder of ascent—in other words, is he “exhibit A” of the assertion that the classic monastic model works? Or is his unitive awakening something more akin to Dorothy in the final scene of The Wizard of Oz, when she realizes that all along the shoes that would carry her home have been right there on her feet? This is, of course, an impossible question to answer, and I do not intend to do so directly; only to use it as a kind of leverage. In the words of the poet Philip Booth, “How you get there is where you arrive,” and Merton’s journey could only have been Merton’s. And yet the door, once he found it, can only be seen as the timeless and universal gate. Like a few others before him and a few significant monastic others following in his wake (Thomas Keating most prominently), he simply, in my estimate, came upon that hidden back door or “wormhole” within the Christian path that transports one out of the “progressive” journey in linear time into the instantaneous, seamless fullness from which prayer is always emerging. And he found it in the same way that all who find it do so: in the gathering awareness that the cave of the heart is entered not only or even primarily through purification and concentration, but through surrender and release. This is this hidden, backdoor path that I wish to explore in the following essay. My thesis is that there has always been an alternative within Christian spiritual practice to the “ladder of ascent”: perhaps not as well known, but fully orthodox and in the end even more reliable, since it derives, ultimately, from the direct teaching and self‐understanding of Jesus himself. It is from this alternative pathway that Centering Prayer derives its legitimacy and its powerful capacity to heal and unify. Centering prayer as self‐emptying love First, let me give a quick summary of Centering Prayer, for those unfamiliar with its somewhat unusual methodology. As a method of meditation situated within the Christian contemplative tradition, Centering Prayer...