Centering Prayer is a method of Christian contemplation based on the fourteenth-century mystical text The Cloud of Unknowing. The Cloud offers spiritual guidance to one who is ready to progress in the spiritual life from verbal to nondiscursive prayer. Following the apophatic strand of Christian mysticism which holds that the divine is ultimately beyond human comprehension, The Cloud envisions God lying above the one who prays with a cloud of unknowing in between. The goal of the practice is to focus attention on God by directing “sharp darts of longing love” into the cloud. The text envisions a second cloud, a cloud of forgetting, lying between the one who prays and the world. The anonymous author insists that any ideas or thoughts that arise during prayer are distractions that pull attention away from God and must be avoided by placing them under this cloud of forgetting.
Method. Centering Prayer originated in the 1970s at St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts. Two Trappist...
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Thralls, C. (2015). Centering Prayer. In: Leeming, D. (eds) Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27771-9_822-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27771-9_822-3
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