At the end of a 7 day prayer retreat at St Benedict’s Monastery in Snowmass, Colorado, I recorded a series of short “espresso shot” videos to succinctly explain the practice of Centering Prayer that has so transformed my life. The Retreat House here was for many years the epicentre of the worldwide explosion of Centering Prayer that has made this probably the pre-eminent Christian meditation practice. I pray that these videos are useful as a simple explanation and that they carry some of beauty of Christ’s Presence that I experienced in Snowmass.
This second video in the series examines Jesus’ first teaching on prayer, in Matthew 6, and finds that it is a step-by-step approach to meditation – silent prayer. This is also how the earliest Christian’s interpreted it. In John Cassian’s Conferences he quotes the 3rd century Desert Father, Abbott Isaac commenting on Matthew 6:6 as follows: “We pray to God in the inner room when we withdraw our hearts completely from the tumults and noise of our thoughts and worries, and when we secretly and intimately offer our prayers to the Lord. We pray with the door shut when without opening our mouths and in perfect silence we offer our petitions to the One who pays no attention to words but looks hard at our hearts.“
We have a weekly group that practices Centering Prayer by video call. You can learn more here – on how to join or how to replay guided meditation sessions from this group.
Rob Gerhard 