In the Bleak Mid-Winter,

a Read for the Heart

I love in winter how I'm drawn to stillness. These stark, often bleak days have an undertow that gently but steadily, pulls me toward deeper water. I feel it most keenly late afternoon. The light angles in low and soft, a quiet settles. At my best I consent. I go to my chair and have my second centering prayer sit of the day. My first sit is a given, grounded in my early morning routine; the second seems to come best by invitation and the yielding to it seems sweeter.

My read this season has been Cynthia Bourgeault's new book, The Heart of Centering Prayer: Nondual Christianity in Theory and Practice. It has been 12 years since the publishing of her first book on the practice: Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening. What we get in her fresh effort is a concise summary of the practice of centering prayer and the unfurling of her deepening understanding of the practice over these 12 years. She anchors the prayer in the way of kenosis, ties it together with the Eastern Church's passion to bring the mind to the heart and the Western Church's 14th century contemplative treasure, The Cloud of Unknowing, and all the while makes the case that centering prayer is generative of nondual thinking and key to creating an objectless awareness in the heart center. She expands her exploration by adding some of the latest research from the neurosciences that is beginning to confirm ancient understandings that receptive prayer does indeed change us in ways that are now traceable in our brain waves.

I've felt for some time that her linking the prayer to kenosis (the art of self-emptying love) is key to the prayer's essence. She says in The Heart of Centering Prayer, "You could really summarize centering prayer as kenosis in meditation form." All the letting go of thoughts that the practitioner of centering prayer does, minute by minute, hour after hour, year after year, creates in us a greater "consenting to the presence and action of God within", a phrase the teaching holds dear. The prayer intends the deepening of relationship with God but the fruit of the prayer in daily life is how it shapes in our heart- in our inner most being-another way of perceiving, which becomes a more unified way of living. As Cynthia likes to say we are given a new operating system. Our old system full of comparisons, separations and judgments no longer has the capacity to hold our world. In the new system it is not that one looks out for unity as it is one looks out from unity. This tug to sit I feel in the last light of a winter day is not a tug to make anything happen nor the stirring to a prayer to lead me to God, or to a better self. This strong and gentle current is the Oneness itself. I rest there.

--Glenn Mitchell, Director

In the Bleak Mid-Winter, A Read for the Heart

Glenn Mitchell

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