The method of Centering Prayer or the Prayer of the Cloud taught by Contemplative Outreach is designed to facilitate the development of contemplation by preparing our faculties to cooperate with this gift. Based on the fourteenth century Cloud of Unknowing, it is an attempt to present the teaching of earlier times in an updated format and to put a certain order and regularity into it. It is not meant to replace other kinds of prayer; it simply puts other kinds of prayer into a new and fuller perspective. Its primary purpose is to deepen our personal relationship with God through love and the positive fruits that the grace of contemplation brings forth in our lives. Thus it is a response to the call of Cardinal Ratzinger's Letter to the Catholic Bishops on Some Aspects of Christian Meditation to renew the Christian contemplative tradition.

For the first sixteen centuries of the Christian era, contemplation enjoyed a specific meaning. In recent centuries, the word has acquired other meanings and connotations. To grasp the full import of this key word in Christian spirituality, it is necessary to know that it evolved out of two distinct sources: the Bible and Greek philosophy. To emphasize the experiential knowledge of God, the Greek Bible used the word gnosis to refer to the knowledge of God proper to those who love Him. He constantly prayed for this intimate knowledge for his disciples as if it were an indispensable element for the complete development of Christian life (cf. Ephesians 3:14–21; Colossians 1:9).

The Greek Fathers, especially Clement of Alexandria, Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, borrowed from the Neoplatonists the term theoria. This originally meant the intellectual vision of the truth, which the Greek philosophers regarded as the supreme activity of the person of true wisdom. While using this technical term, the Fathers added the meaning of the Hebrew word da’ath, that is, the experiential knowledge that comes through love. It was with this expanded understanding that theoria was translated into contemplatio and handed down to us by Christian tradition.

This tradition was summed up by St. Gregory the Great at the end of the sixth century. He described contemplation as the knowledge of God that is impregnated with love. For Gregory, contemplation was both the fruit of reflecting on the word of God in scripture and a precious gift of God. He called it “resting in God.” In this “resting” or stillness the mind and heart are not actively seeking Him, but are beginning to experience, “to taste,” what they have been seeking, placing them in a state of tranquility and profound interior peace. This state is not the suspension of all action, but the reduction of many acts and reflections to a single act or thought to sustain one’s consent to God’s presence and action.

Contemplation, understood as the knowledge of God based on the intimate experience of His presence, remained the accepted meaning of the term until the end of the Middle Ages. Ascetical disciplines and devotional practices were directed toward contemplation as their goal.

Lectio Divina is the most traditional way of cultivating contemplative prayer. It consists in listening to the texts of the Bible as if one were in conversation with God and He were suggesting the topics for discussion. Those who follow the method of lectio divina are cultivating the capacity to listen to the Word of God at ever deepening levels of attention. Spontaneous prayer is the normal response to their growing relationship with Christ, and the gift of contemplation is God’s normal response to them.

The reflective part, the pondering upon the words of the sacred text in lectio divina, is called meditatio, discursive meditation. The spontaneous movement of the will in response to these reflections is called oratio, affective prayer. As these reflections and particular acts of will simplify, one tends to resting in God or contemplatio, contemplation.

These three acts—discursive meditation, affective prayer and contemplation—might all take place during the same period of prayer. They are interwoven one into the other. One may listen to the Lord as if sharing a privileged interview and respond with one’s reflections, with acts of will, or with one’s silence—with the rapt attention of contemplation. The practice of contemplative prayer is not an effort to make the mind blank, but to move beyond thinking and the multiplication of particular acts to the level of communing with God, which is a more intimate kind of exchange—a presence-to-presence, being-to-being exchange.

Contemplative prayer, rightly understood is the normal development of the grace of Baptism and the regular practice of lectio divina. It is the opening of mind and heart—our whole being—to God beyond thoughts, words and emotions. Moved by God’s prevenient grace, we open our awareness to God whom we know by faith is within us, closer than breathing, closer than thinking, closer than choosing —closer than consciousness itself. Contemplative prayer is a process of interior transformation, a relationship initiated by God and leading, if we consent, to divine union.

The development of the personal love of Christ, which for a Christian is the heart of the spiritual journey, has given rise to some misunderstandings in the history of contemplative prayer. There is a venerable controversy about the place of the sacred humanity in the transition from discursive meditation to contemplative prayer. St. Teresa of Avila is quoted as saying that we should never omit the thought or concept of the sacred humanity no matter what state of contemplative prayer one may have received. This counsel has to be understood in the context of her whole teaching because it could be a serious obstacle in following the call of the spirit to interior silence if taken too literally. St. John of the Cross in The Living Flame of Love , stanza III, verses 26–59, describes the great harm that spiritual directors can do if they dissuade those who are called by the spirit to interior silence and waiting upon God with loving attention from following this attraction.

St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross are both Doctors of the Church. It is easy to understand how this controversy could arise among people sincerely seeking the truth. Whatever exaggeration St. Teresa was actually reacting to in her time, methods of prayer that are not inspired by the gospel should not be confused with the normal development of our relationship with Christ and the further dimension that contemplative prayer gives rise to, which is resting in the divine presence beyond thoughts and feelings.

“Non-conceptual prayer—prayer without images and thoughts—does not by itself imply bypassing the humanity of Christ. There is a phase in the spiritual life when Christ is not the object but the subject. The one who prays is standing within the Trinitarian circumincessio, one with the Son, towards the Father in the Spirit.” (Ama Samy, “May a Christian Practice Zen or Yoga?” Inculturation, Vol.5, No. l, Spring 1990)

“The Spirit”, as Paul says, “prays within us with unspeakable groanings.” Groanings are not words or images. The Spirit transcends the interpretations of reason and emotion. St. Thomas Aquinas reminds us that everything we say about God is only an analogy since God infinitely surpasses anything we can say or think of Him. Quoting the prophetic words of Isaiah to the Israelites, “to what have you likened me?”, St. John of the Cross warns that if we rely on concepts and thoughts to go to God, we are likely to fall into human projections and the kind of image-making that God condemned such force in the Old Testament.

In human relationships, as mutual love deepens, there comes a time when the two friends convey their exchanges without words. They can sit in silence sharing an experience or simply enjoying each other’s presence without saying anything. Holding hands or a single word from time to time can develop this deep communication.

This kind of relationship points to the level of interior silence that is being developed in contemplative prayer. The goal of contemplative prayer is not so much the emptiness of thoughts or conversation as the emptiness of self. In contemplative prayer, one ceases to multiply reflections and acts of the will. A different kind of knowledge rooted in love emerges in which the awareness of God’s presence supplants the awareness of one’s own presence and the inveterate tendency to reflect on self. The experience of God’s presence gradually frees one from making oneself or one’s relationship with God the center of the universe. The language of the mystics must not be taken literally when they speak of emptiness or the void. Jesus practiced emptiness in becoming a human being, emptying himself of his prerogatives and the natural consequences of his divine dignity. The void does not mean void in the sense of nothing at all, but void in the sense of attachment to thoughts and acts that are necessary preliminaries to getting acquainted with Christ, but which have to be transcended if Christ is to share his most intimate prayer to the Father which is characterized by total self-surrender.

In contemplative prayer, the humanity of Christ is not ignored but affirmed in the most positive and profound manner because contemplation pre-supposes a living faith that the sacred humanity of Jesus contains the fullness of the Godhead. Christ leads us to the Father, but to the Father as he knows Him. In virtue of Christ’s sacrificial death and resurrection, we participate by grace in Christ’s divinity. We are invited to move beyond our superficial faculties and to worship the Father in spirit and truth. This is to follow Christ into the bosom of the Father where, as the Eternal Son of God, he surrenders to the divine Source from whom he eternally emerges and returns—in the love of the Holy Spirit.

Since the“ love of God is poured into our hearts by the Holy spirit,” as Paul says, we too, as contemplative prayer grows, participate in this movement of grace. The divine presence is simply a fullness that no longer requires the stepping stones of particular acts. One has penetrated the mystery of Christ’s humanity and entered into union with the divine Person who is identified with it. During contemplative prayer one transcends the details of Christ’s humanity because one has accessed the divine Person who possesses it. One returns to daily life with this transformed consciousness, manifesting the fruits of the Spirit and the beatitudes.

Negative theology (sometimes called the apophatic tradition) means opening to the mystery of the divine presence within us which transcends the capacity of every human faculty. It is an important bridge in East–West dialogue, without which that dialogue is virtually unthinkable. Many who have gone to the East in search of spiritual wisdom have been able to return to their Christian roots upon hearing that there is a Christian contemplative tradition.

This form of prayer was first practiced and taught by the Desert Fathers of Egypt, Palestine and Syria, including Evagrius, Cassian and St. John Climacus, and has representatives in every age: in the early Church, St. Augustine and St. Gregory the Great in the West, and Pseudo Dionysius and the Hesychasts in the East; in the Middle Ages, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, William of St. Thierry and Guido the Carthusian; the Rhineland mystics including St. Hildegarde, St. Mechtilde, Meister Eckhart, Ruysbroek and Tauler; later the author of the Imitation of Christ, and the English mystics of the fourteenth century such as the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, Richard Rolle and Julian of Norwich; after the Reformation, the Carmelites St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross and St. Therese of Lisieux; among the French school of spiritual writers, St. Francis de Sales and St. Jane de Chantal and Cardinal Berulle; among the Jesuits, Fathers De Caussade, Lallemont and Surin; among the Benedictines, Dom Augustine Baker and Dom John Chapman; among modern Cistercians, Dom Vital Lehodey and Thomas Merton.

Over the centuries, this prayer has been called by various names such as the Prayer of Faith, Prayer of the Heart, Prayer of Simplicity, Prayer of Simple Regard, Active Recollection, Active Quiet and Acquired Contemplation. Centering Prayer is an effort to make this teaching accessible to ordinary people who are experiencing a hunger for a deeper life of prayer and for a support system that will sustain it.