What is centering prayer, and how are Christians to regard it?
Centering prayer, correctly understood, is a method designed to prepare sincere followers of Christ for contemplative prayer in the traditional sense in which spiritual writers understood the term in the first sixteen centuries of the Christian era. It is rooted in the word of God, both in the person of Jesus Christ and in Scripture- it comes out of traditional Christian spirituality, principally from two sources: The Cloud of Unknowing (by an anonymous, 14″‘-century author), and the works of St. John of the Cross. Throughout the history of Christianity, this kind of prayer has been known by different names, such as: the prayer of faith, the prayer of simple regard, the prayer of simplicity, and the prayer of the heart. Centering prayer is an effort to present these elements of traditional Christianity in an updated or contemporary form, and-to put a certain order and regularity among and into them. On the whole, Centering Prayer, correctly understood, and carried out with the guidance
