Fire and Water: Centering Prayer and the Yearning for God

I was able to grab a quick photo with Cynthia at a Wisdom School spiritual retreat at Lake Cowichan, British Columbia in April, 2019 before we began our afternoon with a Centering Prayer sit.

Introduction

Can you have too much desire for God? This is the question that has been circulating in my mind during the summer holidays. Two weeks ago—June 28 to be exact— I wrote a note to a fellow traveler on the spiritual path sharing this question, but I veiled my thoughts, unsure how directly I wanted to share such a personal concern. To have been more plain about it, I would have said, “Regardless of the highs and lows of my personal life, there is always this gnawing feeling of wanting to ‘find the divine’ or ‘know the truth about the universe’ or, to paraphrase Joseph Campbell, to have the ‘experience of being alive.’ It’s always there and I don’t know what to DO about it!”

I knew yearning was the engine of the spiritual life, but can it have a shadow side?

While it certainly seems like a good problem to have compared to putting career before all else or having an alcohol addiction, it wasn’t until recently that I began to question whether this desire for God was a problem in my life. Stumbling across a journal entry I wrote in 2016 that expressed this very same forlorn sense of longing, I considered only recently that perhaps my very desire for God was an impediment on my spiritual journey towards God.

Playing in the back of my mind was a teaching from Five Element theory in Chinese medicine in which the heart can have too much joy. Excessive love is a stressor. According to this theory, the heart as part of the fire element needs to be tempered by water; without sufficient water, the entire system runs too strong, too hot, for its own good.

Could one’s internal burning bush burn too strong? I had never considered this possibility.

Centering Prayer

My friend thoughtfully wrote back and then concluded simply, “See if you can go back to Centering Prayer to hold you.”

My first reaction was telling, “Centering Prayer? Really?! I mean, yeah, it was a big part of my changes over the years, but it hasn’t solved this problem of excessive desire for God.” My knee-jerk response revealed my long-running ambiguity about the role of meditation in my life. I was first introduced to this prayer by that great Trappist monk Basil Pennington in the mid-90s, which I practiced from time to time. Then in 2012 my health-cum-spiritual crisis led to me to finally embrace daily Centering Prayer as I went off to my first retreat with Cynthia in Assisi. I wrote in my book The Wisdom Way of Teaching that this was the pivotal moment in my transformation to the Wisdom path.

The last time I met Father Basil Pennington in 2004 at Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts, not far from his home monastery St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer.

Yet Centering Prayer as a daily committed practice was always in and out of my life. Last summer as I wrestled with my new-found love of energetic kinesiology and Chinese medicine, I decided I was going to hire a life coach to help me “figure it all out.” Then I read acupuncturist Lonny Jarrett’s third great tome on this topic, which began in chapter one with the absolute centrality of the role of meditation in developing a practitioner’s efficacy. I canceled the idea of hiring a coach and began meditating on a daily basis. I can’t help but link that decision to the profound experience I had at the chapel of St. Benedict’s monastery in Snowmass, Colorado several weeks later in which I received my only truly visionary experience of my life. I believe meditation played a role in that preparation.

Yet the practice lapsed once I got back into my school routine.

My parents and I after Sunday mass at St. Benedict’s Monastery in Snowmass, Colorado.

Summer Commitment

It took me a couple of days for me to come to terms with the silliness of my resistance. Responding to my initial skepticism, another part of me queried, “So let me get this right. You suspect you have too much desire for God for your own good, but you don’t know what to do with that desire. A friend suggests embracing Centering Prayer—your decades-long spiritual practice that has played a pivotal role in your spiritual journey in your life—and you still recoil from your friend’s sensible suggestion. What possible argument could there be against this?”

The argument was simply I didn’t understand—or more perhaps more accurately, could not trust—how something as simple as suspending my mental faculty in order to open the heart could actually work, even though I wrote a recent blog about exactly this! Upon reflection, I can only conclude that as an enneagram type 5 who is a humanities teacher with a PhD and a book, perhaps my attachment to mental processes runs far deeper than I can imagine!

But I had no excuse not to try this—and every reason to suggest that I indeed needed to do it. So, I started on July 1^st.

Measuring Yearning

However, I did introduce one new twist—certainly a mental accommodation— from my recent forays into energetic kinesiology. While I hesitate to share what might be perceived as “woo-woo,” it is central to this Centering Prayer experiment.

A kinesiology session

Through my kinesiology training I have learned how to energetically test the subtle energies of various propositions using my own muscles. So, before I do my 20 minutes of Centering Prayer in the morning, I test how strong is my desire for the divine. On the first day it was 100. Then after I did the meditation, it was reduced to 45. (See the chart below for the specifics on the data.) I also tested some other questions related to desire and yearning in my life, and the pattern held: the fire of yearning on a range of topics seemed to be reduced by the cooling waters of meditation. I would then test again before my evening meditation, and once again desire had risen throughout the day and then would fall again during the meditation.

Subjectively, too, that uneasy yearning for God as well as other desires —regarding my future with kinesiology or my hopes for relationships—all seemed to fall from very high to more tempered. I definitely felt more balanced and more able to stop clinging to ideas that were not serving me well.

I’m not necessarily recommending this approach to others, but initially the numbers made a big difference to encourage me to keep up the practice. While subjectively the differences within me early on were quite subtle, there was nothing subtle about the numbers. I have easily “persevered” in these first 10 days of twice-daily practice of Centering Prayer—something I’ve never done outside of retreat settings—because I had a quantifiable measurement of change that coincided with my personal experience.

Witnessing Presence and The Cloud of Unknowing

Drawing upon Cynthia’s teachings, what really seems to be happening is that I’m developing what is called “Witnessing Presence,” or the “Inner Observer,” that she speaks about in her writing. The basic idea is that there is a heart-based neutral observer that maintains proper homeostasis of one’s being. This growing sense of Presence seems to be skillfully balancing my inner life of strong desires with regard to my relationship with God and with others.

Cynthia writes about the medieval author’s view of Mary Magdalene’s desires in the 15^th century classic text The Cloud of Unknowing. Here are the key lines of The Cloud I want to emphasize from her book The Heart of Centering Prayer:

Do not wonder at this, for it is the condition of a true lover that the more he loves, the more he longs to love (185).

And therefore, she hung up her love and her longing desire in this cloud of unknowing (186).

Cynthia comments, “Note that she did not renounce her love and longing desire. She simply let them go, entrusting them into the gentle, enveloping wisdom of the cloud” (186). This describes well how I have begun my Centering Prayer practice this summer. I have intentionally brought these strong desires to mind as I begin my practice, asking for divine assistance. Then I begin the practice of surrendering thoughts.

I’ve read and heard Cynthia’s “put the mind into the heart” a thousand times, but it still has felt like an alien leap into the dark to commit myself to this practice twice a day. Now in the midst of my experiment, I have to conclude that my yearning for the divine was being held in the wrong place! It was too much in my conscious mind—all part of what Cynthia calls an unconscious (to me) but consciously held “spiritual ambitiousness” (76).  And that gnawing sense was the tug of the heart to go to a deeper place beyond thought—to that unseen “cloud of unknowing.”

Lessons about Yearning and Witnessing Presence

I’d like to draw a few conclusions about yearning and Witnessing Presence. To illustrate these comments I will—with some hesitation, as if spiritual progress can be quantified using data points—share my admittedly subjective measurements of these energies. My justification for including the numbers is simply to say that it was what I as a mindy teacher needed to drag me for the first time to the “daily dose” of Centering Prayer twice a day.

Date	Desire for God (before AM CP)	Desire for God (after AM CP)	Witnessing Presence (after AM CP)
July 1	100	45	3
July 2	94	39	5
July 3	87	37	11
July 4	75	33	17
July 5	68	33	23
July 6	69	33	33
July 7	62	25	43
July 8	63	23	49
July 9	60	23	54
July 10	61	23	67

My subjective measurements suggest that my desire for God before Centering Prayer was running to “too high,” which was then moderated by the letting go of thoughts. In addition, the muscle of Witnessing Presence gained strength through the 10 days.

I share the numbers to explain my “method,” but what’s most important is the meaning that comes from this experimentation that aligns with both my subjective experience and Cynthia’s teachings. Here are my conclusions:

1. Centering Prayer tempers “nostalgia for the divine” in ways that bring about greater wholeness, which means more trust and less desperation about the state of my spiritual life.
2. The twice-daily dosage of Centering Prayer seems necessary to maintain a proper equilibrium of subconscious desires, even if they are relatively healthy attachments.
3. Witnessing Presence is a muscle that is strengthened by the regular practice of Centering Prayer.
4. Witnessing Presence is an essential aspect of creating a new way of knowing that satisfies the heart.

Perhaps what most intrigues me about the Witnessing Presence is Cynthia’s claim concerning its real purpose: “It’s there to connect the two worlds in you . . . It lives at the intersection of the two axes [of the horizontal and vertical dimensions], and its purpose is to bring them into meaningful alignment.” Cynthia explains further in Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, “The most important thing to keep reminding yourself about the inner observer is that it is not judgmental and heavy, but essentially playful. It is the quintessential experimenter, always finding new ways to connect the two worlds in you” (131). As I look back over my teaching career, which I share in my book, the ultimate driving force has been to bring together our life in time with that more powerful and profound domain of the timeless. Is this playful Witnessing Presence the one essential tool I’ve been missing all along?

Conclusion                        

For nearly thirty years—starting with Father Pennington in the mid-90s, then Cynthia in 2012, more recently with Lonny Jarrett last summer, and now this challenge in 2023—Centering Prayer has offered living water for my fiery soul, but I’ve struggled to commit to the daily regimen twice a day.

Now in the midst of this summer experiment, I have to affirm that what Cynthia made so plain so many years ago in her introduction to Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, my most read book of all-time, appears to be fundamentally true: “At root, [Centering Prayer] is a very simple method for reconnecting us with that natural aptitude for the inner life, that simplicity of our childhood, once our adult minds have become overly complex and busy. It’s very, very simple . . . Your own subjective experience of the prayer may be that nothing happened—except for the more-or-less continuous motion of letting go of thoughts. But in the depths of your being, in fact, plenty has been going on, and things are quietly but firmly being rearranged. That interior arrangement—or to give it its rightful name, that interior awakening—is the real business of Centering Prayer” (6).

The experiment continues.