Dit is mijn onderzoeksnotitie over de oorsprong van contemplatief of centrerend gebed

 

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http://www.cuc.claremont.edu/interfth/Centering%5Ccentering_prayer.htm

The Origins of Centering Prayer 

Centering prayer is deeply rooted in the church’s long tradition of contemplative prayer. In A Taste of Silence, Carl Arico highlights the striking similarities between centering prayer and the prayer of giants like Gregory of Nyssa, John Cassian, Pseudo-Dionysius, Bernard of Clairvaux, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Therese of Lisieux and Thomas Merton.

Merton in particular made three important contributions to the practice. The Seven Story Mountain introduced the monastic life and contemplative prayer to a wide secular audience. Before Merton wrote, contemplative living and the experience of prayer without words or images were simply not on the radar screen of most contemporary thought. Second, during the last years of his life, Merton fostered an understanding of Eastern mysticism and how its teachings and practices paralleled and illuminated Christianity. Finally, Merton’s own practice of contemplative prayer foreshadowed centering prayer. He wrote: "You rest in [God] and He hears you with His secret wisdom." In a letter to Abdul Aziz, a Sufi scholar, Merton described his prayer as "centered entirely on the presence of God and His will and love," and as "rising up out of the center of nothingness and silence." It is most appropriate, therefore, that the practice of centering prayer takes its name from Merton’s writings.

The current practice of centering prayer can be traced to the mid-1970’s, St. Joseph Abbey in Spencer, Mass., and three monks, Abbot Thomas Keating, William Meninger and Basil Pennington. Their work was a response to the exhortations of the Second Vatican Council to become more knowledgeable about other religious faiths through dialogue with believers from these traditions and to revitalize the path of contemplative prayer in order to help Catholics, especially those who had left the church, to find such experiences in their own faith tradition.

Fathers Keating, Meninger and Pennington entered into intense, sustained dialogue with leaders from other traditions who lived near the abbey. They invited to the abbey ecumenically oriented Catholic theologians, an Eastern Zen master, Joshu Roshi Sasaki, who offered weeklong retreats on Buddhist meditation, and a former Trappist, Paul Marechal, who taught transcendental meditation. The interaction between these Christian monks and practitioners of Eastern meditation helped distill the practice of Christian contemplative prayer into a form that could be easily practiced by a diverse array of "non-monastic" believers: priests, nuns, brothers and lay men and women.

Thomas Keating was personally disappointed that so many Catholics had left the church because they had no idea it offered meditation practices that could cultivate the inner peace and spiritual union they desired. At a monastery gathering in the mid-1970’s, Keating posed a question to his fellow monks that provided the impetus to the centering prayer movement: "Could we put the Christian tradition into a form that would be accessible to people in the active ministry today and to young people who have been instructed in an Eastern technique and might be inspired to return to their Christian roots if they knew there was something similar in the Christian tradition?"

William Meninger’s contriution was to develop a simple, easily taught method of prayer based on the 14th-century mystical classic, The Cloud of Unknowing. Believers are invited to enter into a deep, silent state of "unknowing" during which one expresses one’s "naked intent" to rest in deep communion with God. Meninger suggested the mental repetition of a single "sacred word" that symbolizes the believer’s intention to turn completely toward God. This made it easier to let go of the thoughts and feelings that would invariably come into one’s awareness during prayer. An abundance of conferences, retreats, audio and videotapes and publications have followed from these humble beginnings

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http://www.centeringprayer.com/resting.htm

The contemporary form of centering prayer was discovered, initially taught, and developed during Keating's tenure as abbot at St. Joseph's. He had been involved in reforms resulting from the Second Vatican Council's call for spiritual renewal in the Catholic Church, and he had also observed that young Catholics were leaving the Church in droves to join Hindu ashrams and Buddhist sanghas. In 1971 he attended a meeting of Trappist superiors in Rome, where, addressing the monks, the late Pope Paul VI invoked the spirit of Vatican II. The Pontiff declared that unless the Church rediscovered the contemplative tradition, renewal couldn't take place. He specifically called upon the monastics, because they lived the contemplative life, to help the laity and those in other religious orders bring that dimension into their lives as well.

Keating came away from the meeting determined to make a contribution. He asked the monks at St. Joseph's to search for a method rooted in Christian tradition that would make contemplative prayer more accessible to those outside the monastery. The novice master at St. Joseph's, William Meninger, found a simple technique in the 14th-century Anglican classic The Cloud of Unknowing. Meninger called the method "The Prayer of the Cloud" and began teaching it to retreatants at the abbey guesthouse. Another St. Joseph's monk, Basil Pennington, began teaching it to religious men and women. At the first workshop given to the Leadership Conference of Women Religious and the Conference of Major Superiors of Men, Pennington frequently quoted his friend and correspondent Thomas Merton, who often when writing abut this type of prayer, would use the term "center." For example, in Contemplative Prayer Merton says, "We rarely pray with the 'mind' alone, Monastic meditation . . . involve[s] the whole man, and proceed[s] from the center of man's being." By the end of the workshop, participants were referring to the technique as "centering prayer."

 

http://www.americamagazine.org/gettext.cfm?articleTypeID=1&textID=2172&issueID=379

The Origins of Centering Prayer

Centering prayer is deeply rooted in the church’s long tradition of contemplative prayer. In A Taste of Silence, Carl Arico highlights the striking similarities between centering prayer and the prayer of giants like Gregory of Nyssa, John Cassian, Pseudo-Dionysius, Bernard of Clairvaux, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Thérèse of Lisieux and Thomas Merton.

Merton in particular made three important contributions to the practice. The Seven Storey Mountain introduced the monastic life and contemplative prayer to a wide secular audience. Before Merton wrote, contemplative living and the experience of prayer without words or images were simply not on the radar screen of most contemporary thought. Second, during the last years of his life, Merton fostered an understanding of Eastern mysticism and how its teachings and practices paralleled and illuminated Christianity. Finally, Merton’s own practice of contemplative prayer foreshadowed centering prayer. He wrote: “You rest in [God] and He hears you with His secret wisdom.” In a letter to Abdul Aziz, a Sufi scholar, Merton described his prayer as “centered entirely on the presence of God and His will and love,” and as “rising up out of the center of nothingness and silence.” It is most appropriate, therefore, that the practice of centering prayer takes its name from Merton’s writings.

The current practice of centering prayer can be traced to the mid-1970’s, St. Joseph Abbey in Spencer, Mass., and three monks, Abbot Thomas Keating, William Meninger and Basil Pennington. Their work was a response to the exhortations of the Second Vatican Council to become more knowledgeable about other religious faiths through dialogue with believers from these traditions and to revitalize the path of contemplative prayer in order to help Catholics, especially those who had left the church, to find such experiences in their own faith tradition.

Fathers Keating, Meninger and Pennington entered into intense, sustained dialogue with leaders from other traditions who lived near the abbey. They invited to the abbey ecumenically oriented Catholic theologians, an Eastern Zen master, Joshu Roshi Sasaki, who offered weeklong retreats on Buddhist meditation, and a former Trappist, Paul Marechal, who taught transcendental meditation. The interaction between these Christian monks and practitioners of Eastern meditation helped distill the practice of Christian contemplative prayer into a form that could be easily practiced by a diverse array of “non-monastic” believers: priests, nuns, brothers and lay men and women.

Thomas Keating was personally disappointed that so many Catholics had left the church because they had no idea it offered meditation practices that could cultivate the inner peace and spiritual union they desired. At a monastery gathering in the mid-1970’s, Keating posed a question to his fellow monks that provided the impetus to the centering prayer movement: “Could we put the Christian tradition into a form that would be accessible to people in the active ministry today and to young people who have been instructed in an Eastern technique and might be inspired to return to their Christian roots if they knew there was something similar in the Christian tradition?”

William Meninger’s contribution was to develop a simple, easily taught method of prayer based on the 14th-century mystical classic, The Cloud of Unknowing. Believers are invited to enter into a deep, silent state of “unknowing” during which one expresses one’s “naked intent” to rest in deep communion with God. Meninger suggested the mental repetition of a single “sacred word” that symbolizes the believer’s intention to turn completely toward God. This made it easier to let go of the thoughts and feelings that would invariably come into one’s awareness during prayer. An abundance of conferences, retreats, audio and videotapes and publications have followed from these humble beginnings.

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http://www.centeringprayer.com/newsltrs/Summer06/TKInterview.htm

An Interview with Father Thomas Keating

Experiences
of Interreligious Dialogue

by Netanel Miles-Yepez

 

 

No, I started getting interested in interreligious dialogue in the late Sixties. I was abbot of St. Joseph's Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts from 1961 to 1981, and even before 1970, we invited speakers from other religious traditions to speak at the monastery. At the time, a number of Eastern teachers were coming to the West. A half-hour up the road from the monastery was the Insight Meditation Center that drew a number of outstanding vipassana teachers from the Buddhist Theravada tradition, and some of them came down and visited us. One of these was Achaan Cha. I was very impressed with him, and we had a great time together; he had the same kinds of problems in his monastery as I was having in mine, and we had great fun comparing notes! He was like an old shoe. He reminded me a lot of Pope John the XXIII, whom I had met briefly, and whom I also greatly admired. Achaan Cha was really laid-back. He ran a very strict monastery and I don't know what he was like there, but he was friendliness itself when he visited us. Another outstanding teacher was Joshu Roshi Sasaki of Mount Baldey near Los Angeles. Just before we met, he was actually heading for Europe to check out Trappist monasteries there. He had heard that they were similar in monastic observances to Zen Buddhist monasteries of Japan. When he heard about St. Joseph's Abbey, he decided that he didn't have to go so far. Anyway, he came and offered to give us a sesshin [a special period of intense meditation], and we accepted. After that, he came to the monastery twice a year for ten years offering sesshin each time. Fortunately, I was able to get to most of them and to hear his teachings first hand. 

NM-Y: What was it about Sasaki Roshi that so impressed you? 

TK: Sasaki Roshi was eager to teach Christian Zen. For him, Zen was not the property of Japan or even of Buddhism, but the basic and universal religious attitude. I admired that perspective and have adopted it in my own life. I found the modest exposure I had to Zen extremely helpful, and Sasaki Roshi's taishos [dharma talks] were mind expanding. He belonged to the Rinzai school of Zen and made a special effort to invent Christian koans for us! 

NM-Y: The dialogue has obviously come a long way in the intervening years. Were all the monks as inclined to dialogue as you were in the early days? 

TK: This was brand new territory for us and not looked upon with much sympathy by many members of the community. When Sasaki Roshi put on the Cistercian habit and joined us in the refectory, it was a little shocking to some monks. 

NM-Y: Were there any visits from representatives of traditions other than Buddhism? What about Hindus? 

TK: We had less exposure to the Hindu traditions. But we were pleased to host Swami Satchidananda and several teachers from the Transcendental Meditation movement. I was also very interested in the Hindu-Christian dialogue going on in India initiated by Bede Griffith and Swami Abhishiktananda, both Benedictine monks. They were trying to live the Christian monastic life inside Hindu culture. 

NM-Y: When did Centering Prayer get started? 

TK: Actually, Centering Prayer began around 1976 at St. Joseph's Abbey, after a year's trial of a method taught by Fr. William Meninger and based on the Cloud of Unknowing. After I resigned as abbot, I intended to focus on ecumenical and interreligious dialogue, but I became more and more involved with the Centering Prayer movement. This eventually grew into a spiritual network called Contemplative Outreach at the end of 1984. There has been some tension for me in trying to serve both interreligious dialogue and Contemplative Outreach. 

“There is mutual enrichment in genuine dialogue that gradually dissolves suspicion and allows religious persons to work together in the world in areas of common interest such as the environment and justice and peace issues. . . . understanding, friendship and respect are contributions we can make not only to our dialogue partners, but also to the invisible spiritual world of Humanity at large. The abiding disposition of universal compassion in each of us affects everybody, whether they know it or not.”

NM-Y: Really? When I have observed you in interreligious dialogue or teaching Centering Prayer, you seem to move seamlessly from one category to the other, almost as if there was an intrinsic relationship between the two. 

TK: Yes, there was a lot of interaction between the two, and it has grown over the years. You see, a great many Christians had joined one or other of the Eastern disciplines in their youth because they couldn't find any comparable depth of spirituality in the Christian milieu, whether in churches, parishes or schools. In fact, many have said to me, that had they known there was a Christian contemplative practice, they wouldn't have gone to the East. But, still, they benefited from their Eastern practice and many remained with it. Others returned to the religion of their childhood because they felt more at home there. Our chief reason for presenting Centering Prayer was to contribute to the renewal of the Christian contemplative tradition, and thus to provide an option in the marketplace marketplace for Christians who would never have the time or inclination to learn an Eastern method of meditation. 

NM-Y: Why did you feel this was a need? 

TK: During my early encounters with teachers of other traditions at St. Joseph's Abbey, I met a lot of Buddhist and Hindu teachers and their students, and it was evident, as I said, that they were benefiting from their respective practices. For example, there was a psycho-spiritual wisdom presented in the form of methods articulated in Buddhist meditative disciplines that at the time was not articulated in the same practical way in the Christian scheme of things. The Christian monastic lifestyle is an environment conducive to spirituality, but it isn't a method in the same sense. It has many practical rules and disciplines, most of which are duplicated in almost all monastic traditions, but they are not applied to the individual in the same way that Buddhist practices are. 

NM-Y: It seems to me, looking back over your career and your writings, that you have spent a great deal of time and energy not only articulating a clear "method," but also in making the psychological and contemplative sophistication of Christianity explicit. 

TK: That's true. It was there, but it was distributed over a large number of books. In this work, I benefited a great deal from contemporary science especially developmental psychology, which I feel teaches truths that all of the world's religious traditions need to take into account. Likewise, I believe that the existence of the Unconscious discovered by Freud has tremendous consequences for the spiritual journey. 

NM-Y: You founded the Snowmass Interreligious Conference in the early eighties, didn't you? 

TK: I always saw myself more as its "convener" than "founder." It was really just a big experiment in the beginning, and I didn't know how it would work out. I began planning it in 1983 after taking part in a series of Christian-Buddhist dialogues at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. During these "dialogues," I noticed that the dialoguers were not speaking to each other as much as addressing the audience. But on the two occasions, when the moderator succeeded in bringing us together a day before the conference, we actually got to talk to one another as peers. So I asked myself, what would happen if we got together to talk without any audience? And what if the meeting was broader than a Buddhist-Christian dialogue? Those questions were what sparked the initial motive for getting the first group of teachers together at St. Benedict's Monastery in Snowmass, Colorado, where this dialogue began, and where it got its name, the "Snowmass Conference".

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http://www.brown.edu/Faculty/Contemplative_Studies_Initiative/grant_location.html

 

Saint Joseph’s Abbey
http://www.spencerabbey.org/

Origin of Centering Prayer movement
Spencer, MA

Glastonbury Abbey
http://www.glastonburyabbey.org/

Located in Hingham, Massachusetts, Glastonbury is a small community of Benedictine monks striving to embrace the challenges of contemporary living within the time-tested values of a vital monastic spirit.

Abbey of Gethsemani
http://www.monks.org/index.html


Trappist, KY

Centering Prayer – Boston Chapter
http://www.centeringprayer.com/

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.

Franciscan Renewal Center
http://www.thecasa.org/
Scottsdale, AZ

A Community of Faith Through Liturgy, Retreats, Education, Counseling, Social Justice, Spiritual Direction, Meetings & Conferences, in the Tradition & Hospitality of St. Francis of Assisi...

First Zen Institute of America
http://www.firstzen.org/New York, NY

The First Zen Institute of America (FZIA) is a non-profit religious organization founded and incorporated in 1930 by Sokei-an Sasaki, the first Zen master to settle permanently in America. The Institute is independent, self sustaining, and governed by its voting members. The FZIA is not a monastic training center and has no Zen master in residence. It introduces Rinzai Zen to lay students, offers facilities for practice and provides information on Zen Buddhism to the public.

 

 

 

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