Prayer of the Heart

 

Prayer of the Heart Retreat Participants, The Bishop's Ranch

I feel sorry for people who only have books to rely on.  It’s amazing how different what we think we understand is from what we learn later through experience. - St. Teresa of Avila

I'm a person who loves - LOVES - books.  Some of my best and longest-standing friends are books!  I've drawn sustenance from them and even a kind of energetic vibration that resonated within me while reading them.  Even so, there are some things we can only learn through direct experience, and that is certainly true in the life of prayer. I've just finished leading a two-day intensive Centering Prayer retreat with a half-dozen beautiful souls, who embraced the intimacy and transfiguring power of shared silence and holy conversation. I'm so grateful for their vulnerability, wisdom, and desire for God.

The focus of our time together was the practice of Centering Prayer, which Cynthia Bourgeault describes as "The prayer of the heart in meditation form."  It is a method of meditation that brings the mind into the heart, awakening the heart's capacities as an organ of spiritual perception beating in rhythm with the heartbeat of God.  It fosters what Jesus called metanoia - transcending or expanding the mind to embrace a larger consciousness that perceives the divine energies suffusing all of reality in love.  "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God."

St. John of the Cross perhaps best describes the experience of the awakened heart.

The soul feels its ardor strengthen and increase and its love become so refined in this ardor that seemingly there flow seas of loving fire within it, reaching to the heights and depths of the earthly and heavenly spheres, imbuing all with love. It seems to it that the entire universe is a sea of love in which it is engulfed, for conscious of the living point or center of love within itself, it is unable to catch sight of the boundaries of this love.

Centering Prayer helps us to stabilize our identity with this living center of love within ourselves, which is our true identity in the imago Dei.  When we do so, we begin to love others as our selves because they are: we begin to radiate the energy of agape, of self-emptying love.  

The practice of Centering Prayer literally reconfigures our brains - metanonia written in neural pathways that increase our capacity for wisdom and compassion, as contemporary neuroscience is beginning to discover.  

What we do matters.  How we pray matters.  It matters for the development of human consciousness, which may be an evolutionary imperative for the healing of the earth.  "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth."  May it be so, in us.