...and the Prayer Does You

"Pray to your Father who is in secret and your Father who sees in secret will reward you."  Matthew 6:6 (NRSVUE)

When the disciples asked Jesus how they should pray, they were asking: “How can we have a relationship with the Father just like you do?” Jesus told his disciples when they pray to go into their inner room and close the door and, "Pray to your Father who is in secret and your Father who sees in secret will reward you." We may wonder what Jesus meant by "in secret" and "reward," but listen to it this way: "Seek the God of Mystery and God will give you what you need without you knowing how.” 

We don't really know what happens in Centering Prayer – we just do it because our Lord told us to do it. We simply trust in Jesus, we trust in the prayer, we trust in our mysterious God. God offers relationship through prayer, so we pray. 

Thomas Keating said, "You do the prayer and the prayer does you." I think that sentence captures the heart of the mystery, it’s what Jesus was saying to his disciples. Simply sit in silence and consent to God’s presence and action – release your desire to control – and God will heal your emotional wounds and change your heart.

In the PBS series "Searching for God in America," Keating said, "What happens in solitude and contemplative prayer is that you stop doing so much thinking, and thinking seems to be a kind of manhole cover that keeps whatever is in the unconscious from arising into our consciousness, and we really need to know what is in our unconsciousness to know ourselves…” 

So, in resting in God's presence and consenting to His action within us, we are retiring from the normal flow of daily activities. It's like taking a nap in the middle of the day and allowing your brain to take a short time out and do whatever it needs to do. But in Centering Prayer, we remain awake while God takes advantage of our cooperation (our consent) to rewire our consciousness. He cleans out the gunk that has accumulated in our unconscious, things we have intentionally or unintentionally repressed, hidden, or locked down, but which are fermenting or decaying, and the nauseous gases and obnoxious odors keep bubbling up, fouling the air of our attitudes and tainting our disposition. 

As Keating suggested, our thoughts are like a manhole cover over the sewer, keeping that smelly stuff below ground where we don't have to see it or smell it. Like a doctor inserting robotic surgical instruments into your body through a small hole during laparoscopic surgery, God uses that manhole as a portal to our unconsciousness, mysteriously working to remove the diseased and septic parts and then soothes our inflamed tissues with his healing balm. 

God's reward is this hidden healing. It's like we are under anesthesia and have no knowledge or later memory of what he does, but we know later that something has indeed happened to us! We are changed within – we experience a new wholeness and vitality that alters our awareness and disposition towards ourselves, others, and the whole world. 

I'm not sure what or how much we need to know within our unconscious in order to "know ourselves," but I think we have to respect that there is much buried in our unconscious that affects how we live our lives consciously, and we must learn to live in a way that allows God to unload the "emotional junk of a lifetime," as Keating liked to say.Only by allowing the spiritual evacuation of this undigested emotional debris stored within our psyches and bodies can we live in the wholeness and freedom of human life that God created us to experience in union with him. 
Ultimately, Centering Prayer is a gift of God that opens us to His healing presence and the reward of fullness of life that Christ promised us.