Centering Prayer

Gordie Jackson
3 min readJan 12, 2020

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Photo by John Peters on Unsplash

The Religious Society of Friends ( Quakers) in Britain is organised into around 70 plus Area Meetings (AM). So, for example, I attend St Albans local meeting which is part of, ‘Leighton Luton’ Area Meeting. Every two months we have a local Preparative Meeting (PM) usually the week before the AM. AM is made up of 9 local meetings in the area. It is my responsibility as a member to attend both the PM and the AM. Quakers in Britain do not have a hierarchy ie there are no appointed ministers believing that all are ministers. It is the responsibility of each member to contribute to the functioning of the local meeting and the Area Meeting. The difficulty can be sitting through what are essentially business meetings. It is one thing to sit in a Quaker, ‘Meeting for Worship’ (MfW)and quite another to sit in a Quaker, ‘Meeting for Business’ (MfB).

The local meeting PM can take on average an hour and the AM the best part of 3 hours. They all fall on a Sunday so when you have already attended Meeting for Worship it can be a long day on a Sunday AM falls.

Today I had a sense that I would not be attending the AM which was being held in Leighton Buzzard. In the same sense that I experience a desire to go, I experienced a sense that I may not be going. I wondered was it because of the weather, it was overcast, the time of year, January, I like these days to travel by train and it wasn’t so easy to get there by train. I believe I had a deeper sense and that sense was the need to not jam in too many things. That is something I have become more aware of in the period between Christmas and the New Year.

I was mindful of this as I sat in MfW not yet knowing whether I would go or not, the possibility still remained. My mind had been overtaken by the progress in Northern Ireland on Friday and yesterday which I focussed in yesterday’s story.

The first fifteen minutes of meeting often clears the mind and then the Holy Spirit can begin its work.

For some years I have held in possession a book called, ‘The Inner Journey’ published by Parabola. Like many of the books I hold I return to them periodically rarely reading them straight through. I find that books that contain spiritual writings are to be read in a contemplative manner which is slow reading. I have been reading an interview with Father Thomas Keating who is known for being an exponent of, ‘Centering prayer’. It is my experience that this is what happens in a Quaker meeting. As I sit layers are removed within the quarters bringing us to a greater depth than we normally experience. This centering brings us to the centre of all things and in that place all things are held together. In that place, all things are eternal yet outside the clock of time continues to ticks.

In that place, I am aware that I am connected to all things and all things are connected to me. In that place I am complete there is no lack, not even an awareness that lack exists. I only become aware of a lack when I am outside of that place.

The following words of Father Thomas Keating were speaking to my experience,

“ We suffer from illusion — not knowing what true happiness is — and ……… a desire for the wrong things, or too much of the good things. And then if we ever discover the path to true happiness, our will or energy is too weak to pursue it anyway. So in the desperate need to find happiness which seems to be deeply rooted in every human being, we begin to develop emotional programs to shore up the fragile ego, to compensate for the happiness we can no longer find in the intimate experience of the source of our life. When a sense of connection to that source has been lost almost anything seems better than to endure the emptiness, boredom, alienation — perhaps existential dread — that goes with feeling one’s sense of isolation in a potentially hostile universe.”

They may also speak to you.

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Gordie Jackson
Gordie Jackson

Written by Gordie Jackson

Speaks with a Northern Irish accent, lives in Hertfordshire, England.

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