Be Still and Know: August 2020

We have entered rocky times. We might feel—perhaps more than ever—that we are not on solid ground. We may not share the same political and social understanding as people we know and love, and this is difficult. Most likely, your prayer group, like mine, has members who understand the world differently and thus have quite different opinions about the political and social scene. How do we as facilitators navigate these differences? Here are some thoughts and ideas.

Our awareness of the purpose of a Centering Prayer group is most important. If we keep ourselves attuned to this awareness, the ways in which we approach differences will fall into place. According to the facilitator handbook:

“The primary purpose of Centering Prayer Groups is to help sustain the commitment to a regular practice of Centering Prayer.”

One way to stay with the primary purpose of a Centering Prayer group is to establish ground rules for expression where people feel free to offer their understanding of their spiritual journey based on their Centering Prayer practice. It is our task as facilitators to help create an atmosphere of trust, non-judgement, and support.

In thinking about this question, I have taken some liberty with an article that I recently read in the June 2020 Contemplative Outreach newsletter. It was about the Guard of the Heart Practice. The article discusses this practice as it applies to the individual. I have extended it to include the group climate we hope to establish in our groups.

“Guard of the Heart” is a practice designed to bring the effects of Contemplative Prayer into daily life. “Heart is defined as the deep self or the seat of motivation. It refers to our inmost intention. If we want to get to our destination, which is inner peace, we have to keep our intention on course.” The method that is suggested in individual practice is to let go of “every emotional disturbance as it arises and before we start thinking about it”. Easier said than done.

Guarding the Heart of Our Groups

As facilitators, we hope to create a “safe haven” where the inner peace and sense of silence experienced during prayer time extends into our verbal sharing with each other. We hope to establish a ground of expression where people feel free to offer their understanding of their spiritual journey based on their Centering Prayer practice, where people feel free to express their uncertainties and their faith.

This certainly will not occur if we have political discussions. Especially not now. I have found that when political/social issues are allowed, resentments and defensiveness can build and divisions within a group can occur and have the potential to damage it. People no longer feel safe to share themselves. The climate of support and non-judgment we hope to develop can easily be broken. Applying a practice of Guard of the Heart may help us keep our group connected to the greater silence and the greater good.

A technique of the practice of Guard of the Heart is:

“If (as individuals), we find ourselves going down the path of destructive thought, make a conscious choice not to continue the thought, and replace the thought with something else”.

In applying this to group facilitation, we can redirect the conversation to the stated purpose of the group and focus on topics that have to do with prayer.

Or, in the words of some cowboy: “cut them (thoughts) off at the pass.” So, whether it is destructive thoughts--or as in groups, destructive conversations--we can use certain methods to help keep our sharing on course and mitigate hurtful and defensive discussions.

Here are some concrete ideas that can be helpful:

-- Establish a group norm that politics are not discussed in the group. You may also want to have your group agree that dogmatism about any kind of idea--political, social, and religious--are not a part of the group. I am defining dogmatism as “I know what is right” and “if you don’t agree with me, you are wrong”.

When you establish norms, you may want to ask the group’s permission to state the norm when you think it is not being followed. In other words, make apparent what you see happening in the group: “I think we have veered off into a political topic, and I don’t think this is a good idea.” Or: “We have established a norm not to do this.”

--If you do discern some underlying tension, go over the guidelines of faith sharing. Do this as often as you think this is needed, or at least once a month or any time a new person joins.

--Invite the group to have a moment of “resting in silence” when discussion seems to be producing tension. A good way to diffuse a heated situation is to have 3 minutes of silence.

One year, I went to Snowmass on an intensive retreat where people could talk to each other outside of Centering times. Many of the people were new to the prayer. Outside our times of meditation, some retreatants sat around wondering together how people in the CP movement could have political opinions that differed from theirs. I felt that the questions they were asking were legitimate, but also that the retreat setting was not the right one for these discussions. It created a diversion to the process they had come to Snowmass for. Instead of focusing on their experience during the retreat and on what they could control, they focused on what they could not control: different political opinions and the political climate. This divergence can also happen in our groups.

A spiritual director at Snowmass offered me some wisdom about our role as facilitators. She said that we are guides to others in this transformative contemplative journey that we are on, and one purpose we serve is to help people stay faithful to the prayer and to feel safe enough in group to be open to others about their journey. We need to tap into our loving center and help others in the group tap into theirs.

As always, apply what I have shared as you will and in a way that you think is appropriate for your group. I hope some of this has been helpful.

I have included as attachments the short article on Guard of the Heart and an essay about "loving community" that I think speaks to our contemplative idea of “shared presence.” I am also attaching the Guidelines to Faith Sharing.

Be safe, be well.

Kathy Agnew

Guard of the Heart

~Bob Mischke

“If you do Centering Prayer and don’t bring it into active life – like the active prayer phrase, the Welcoming Prayer, and Guard of the Heart – you will have trouble.” Thomas Keating, 2016

Some fifteen years ago, I asked Fr. Thomas to explain the practice of Guard of the Heart to me – more than what I had found in Open Mind, Open Heart and Invitation to Love. Something was drawing me to this practice. Several years later I asked Fr. Thomas if he would go through those explanations again with me and let me record his descriptions so we could perhaps write them up and share them with others. Seventeen revisions and two years later we got it done. I learned that this was how Fr. Thomas worked, with scrupulous attention to every word and comma until his carefully crafted words reflected some nuances of his deep understanding, and as much as possible, the ineffable. He wanted this description of Guard of the Heart to be as helpful to us as possible. I encouraged him to publish it in our Contemplative Outreach newsletter but before that happened, he gracefully joined the Communion of Saints, continuing, I believe, to assist us. So finally, here is Fr. Thomas’ description of Guard of the Heart:

Guard of the Heart

One practice to bring the effects of contemplative prayer into daily life is traditionally known as “Guard of the Heart.” “Heart” is the deep self or seat of motivation. It refers to our inmost intention. If we want to get to our destination, which is abiding inner peace, we have to keep our intention on course. This consists of letting go of every emotional disturbance as it arises and before we start thinking about it.

When something arises independently of our plans, we spontaneously try to modify it. Our first reaction, however, should be openness to what is actually happening so that if our plans are upset, we are not upset. This method is more sophisticated than dismantling the emotional programs for happiness because it deals with the whole of life. It expresses our ongoing intention to be with God in the present moment and sustains it. Guard of the Heart is based on the sense of interior peace that comes when our human will is united by intention with God's will.

The fruit of Guard of the Heart is the habitual willingness to modify our plans at a moment’s notice. It disposes us to let go of personal likes and dislikes and to accept painful situations as they arise. Then we can decide what to do with them and whether to modify, correct or improve them. In this way, the ordinary events and ups and downs of daily life become the focus of our practice. Monastic structures are not the path to holiness for lay folks; the routines of daily life are. Contemplative prayer is aimed at transforming daily life with its never-ending round of ordinary activities and to remain in God’s presence no matter what is happening.

Whenever our basic sense of peace is disturbed, we need to reaffirm our intention to be united with God by some simple and appropriate act or acts. Our intention to abide in constant union of our will with God’s will might be compared to a radio beam that used to guide an airplane. If the plane moved off course a signal would warn the pilot to readjust his direction. If the plane veered too much to the right, he would get a signal like “beep, beep, beep.” If the plane went too far to the left, he would get some other sound. If he was on course, he would hear nothing. Our warning signal in Guard of the Heart is the loss of peace, which could be large or small, depending on how far off course we actually have drifted.

The intention of Guard of the Heart is to be in God’s loving Presence both in prayer and action, either working to carry out God’s will, or just loving God in silent attentiveness. The Holy Spirit plans the itinerary. If we remain on course, there is no sound. If we hit a strong headwind that blows us off course, we hear “beep, beep, beep,” announcing the need to refocus our intention.

Never grieve over being off course. Just return to your original direction by renewing your intention, which is a movement of the heart to be with God and surrendered uninterruptedly to God’s will. Once you return to your original intention, the warning noise will stop.

This is a relatively simple but reliable practice. You don’t have to go through steps like listing your possible motives for getting off-course. In heavy weather or turbulence, as for example when you are talking too much or get into an argument or similar straights, you may bounce around a bit. Airline pilots call this turbulence. You will then have to give more attention to your intention because your silent on-course direction has been interrupted. You lost it through nobody’s fault. It was just bad weather.

The following are three ways of keeping yourself on course in everyday affairs. The first is to place disturbing thoughts as soon as they arise into God’s lap, or to give them to God as a gift. The second is to apply your attention to whatever you are actually doing, concentrating on the activity or duty of the moment. Third, if you find you are unoccupied when disturbing thoughts arise, pick up a book or take up some prearranged project. All three methods can help to avoid the commentaries that reinforce interior turmoil.

Jesus in his teaching seems less interested in raising us to highly enlightened states of consciousness than in becoming one with us in our experience of ordinary daily life. To relive the sacred mysteries of his earthly life in each of us is his plan and desire; to share every moment of our lives with him is the practical living out of divine union. His presence manifests in every action, however trivial from our point of view. We are invited by grace to have no movement of body, mind, and heart except from the Spirit, who wills to take us over entirely and inspire all our thoughts, words, and actions. (Fr. Thomas Keating, 2017).

I have come to love this practice. It is the closest thing in my experience in our Centering Prayer world to what Eckhart Tolle calls Presence Practice – staying in the present moment with awareness. The desert fathers called it “watchfulness.”

Fr. Thomas refers to Guard of the Heart as a practice a little more advanced. It’s a beautiful and powerful complement to Centering Prayer which teaches us about the inner room. Then, as he says, we ask Spirit to extend the walls of our inner room to all of our life. The active prayer phrase quiets internal commentary. The Welcoming Prayer releases false-self programs. Then when our hearts are “on course” the “beep, beep, beep” signals us to release inevitable false-self emanations and stay on course. Our heart is our governor, our homing device.

When Rabbi Rami Shapiro asked Fr. Thomas how he was preparing to die, he “cupped his hands and said ‘Every time Thomas comes up, I let Thomas go.’” This is shared from the Divine Indwelling – a poignant description, in my view, of Guard of the Heart practice.

I give thanks to Fr. Thomas for this practice and all the wealth it gives us. I suspect he had me, for one, in mind when he smilingly closed with this comment: “You have to choose the one that helps you most. You don’t have to be serious about this – you can experiment with one or the other.”

“It is not enough to do the practice itself even if this is done twice a day, unless at the same time one carries into daily life the effects of the humility … as time goes on the Divine Therapist extends the walls of our office, so to speak, our inner room, to the whole of life so that everything becomes a process of purification, of healing, and of releasing the unconscious.”

--Thomas Keating, Heartfulness: Transformation in Christ video series.

~Bob Mischke currently serves on the Center for Contemplative Living Advisory Council and presents Introductory Workshops, the Welcoming Prayer, the Guard of the Heart practice, and the 9-month course known as The Contemplative Living Experience program. He is a member of the Contemplative Outreach Facilitator Training Team, and he attends annual retreats at St. Benedict’s monastery.

Loving Community

"Community of Heart: Practicing in Common-Unity"

Communities of spiritual practice are often home to those who would not typically choose to spend time together.

In Chris Heuertz’s most recent book, The Sacred Enneagram, a book integrating contemplative prayer with personality psychology of the Enneagram, Chris writes this of his contemplative prayer group: “Those who normally would be divided by doctrine and belief come together in unity. Through their words, they would find plenty about which to disagree, but silence brings them into a new kind of communion, forming a new kind of community.”

Silence, creating communion. Silence, creating common-unity.

What kind of strength is needed for community to come together though they disagree on doctrine and belief? What kind of community is in common-unity despite being “divided” on such things as apparently important as “doctrine and belief?” Only a community grounded in the spiritual heart.

The beauty of contemplative prayer is that it is “trans-rational,” meaning it transcends or goes beyond our ordinary awareness of the thinking mind, bypassing our usually tight-gripped and deeply defended concepts and beliefs.

If “trans-rational” isn’t the right word for you, another more ancient way of putting this would be to speak of contemplation as descending “with the mind in the heart.” This mind-in-heartedness, as Tilden Edwards would say, means our mind isn’t all alone by itself. With the mind in the heart, our mind’s sweetly defended concepts and ideas are all of a sudden in the company of Spirit and Truth in the Heart of our being.

In many ways our contemplative prayer does not ignore the mind or ignore the doctrine; it simply puts it in its rightful place: second to the more immediate and fundamental Presence shared by all. And this Presence, as Tilden Edwards says, is present “prior to” our ideas about the Presence.

Attending to this Presence is the way of contemplative prayer, the path to the spiritual heart. And in that heart, we find the One, the Only, and the Holy. Attending to the One in group practice allows a community to transcend the rational thinking mind, bypassing our concepts about the Sacred. In this group, trans-rational, spiritual state, we indeed find ourselves in community—in deep common-unity—precisely because the Sacred to whom we attend is in common-unity with Itself. And we are a mirror and expression of that unity. We are its image and likeness, both as individuals and as a collective.

I encourage you, as you find or participate in group prayer and meditation, to rest into this space of trans-rational, mind-in-heartedness, for in it we may recognize not only our preexisting union with God but union with others.

~ Keith Kristich

Guidelines for Faith Sharing in Centering Prayer Groups

1. We accept one another as we are.

2. We do not give advice.

3. We do not criticize what others share.

4. We listen attentively, without interruption, when someone else is speaking. In this regard, we avoid any "cross-talk."

5. We keep the sharing in the group absolutely confidential.

6. We gather to care, not to cure nor remove the crisis or pain. God does the healing.

7. We make sure that each person who wants speak will have a chance to speak. We give the opportunity for all to speak before someone speaks a second time.

8. We are always free to remain silent if we wish.

Important Points to Consider

a. "Personal sharing" is not a discussion of ideas, but a discussion of my personal spiritual journey.

b. When sharing my own personal experience of Centering Prayer, it is helpful to keep the focus on “I statements,” not “we”, “they,” or “them” statements.

c. It is often helpful to begin the personal sharing by asking yourself this question: "What has been my experience of Centering Prayer this past week?”

Monday, August 17, 2020

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"Upon this rock I will build My church . . . "

We invite you to a few minutes of silence before we begin our prayer time together.

Take a deep breath and breathe in the breath of God, knowing by faith that God breathes into us the breath of life.

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"Even the dogs eat the scraps that fall..."

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We invite you to a few minutes of silence before we begin our prayer time together.

Take a deep breath and breathe in the breath of God, knowing by faith that God breathes into us the breath of life.

Notes From Events Planning Meeting, Aug 5, 2020

In attendance: Mary Williams, Linda Dollins, Joan Thompson, Kathy Mendoza, Elena Andrews, and Chris Hagen. Patti Smith was not able to attend

Purpose of Meeting: To assess where we are with event planning and creating a possible schedule of events for the rest of 2020 and possibly 2021.

We began the Zoom meeting with 10 minutes of Centering Prayer.

Scheduled events for 2021: United in Prayer Day, March 21st. (Note: Because COSD couldn’t host this year due to the pandemic,--our two chapters alternate hosting--we need to decide who will host in 2021.) Prince of Peace Retreat October 15-17.

Possible events this fall on Zoom. Mary said that Patti Smith had taken the Welcoming Prayer Training and had shown an interest in presenting this fall. Mary will be taking the Lectio Divina Presenter training this weekend and will probably need to present to receive certification.

Modeling Opportunity: Mary Magdalene Church is offering a presentation by Dr. Oliva Espin on John of the Cross on Zoom August 22^nd and 29^th for two hours each time. Some of us are going, in part, to see if that format is something we can use. Here is the Eventbrite link to register for the event.

CONSD Presenters:

Elena has reservations about doing a retreat in November on Zoom. The nature of her retreats incorporates a physical space and necessitates a certain amount of prayerful and reflective time for participants to experience the essence of the morning.

Chris has considered using a Zoom format for the presentation he has created: “Transformation of Consciousness: Becoming the Word of God.” One concern is that he would like to be able to show his slides and also be seen at the same time rather than switching back and forth. Mary said that Vincent Pizzuto’s “Apocalypse Now” switched between slides and Fr. Vincent’s talk as the slides were shown.

Chris also talked about possibly using former half-day retreat material again such as “Spiritual Gifts” and “The Prodigal Son.” Forms would be required for the Spiritual Gifts retreat, and Joan suggested that they could be sent to registered participants and printed out before the retreat.

Ideas for Events:

Joan suggested that we have an event offering for Advent. Linda mentioned using Alana Levandowski’s “Behold I Make All Things New” then realizing that Zoom doesn’t transmit music well. We also considered showing YouTube videos which do allow for music.

Linda suggested finding out more about Peter Traben Haas as a potential speaker either in a Zoom format or live. He is a pastor at The Church of Conscious Harmony in Austin Texas.

Mary reminded us that Rev. Susan Latimer who has been trained under and worked with Cynthia Bourgeault is a possible presenter from our area (Hemet). She has presented using chanting and other contemplative forms.

Chris suggested that the prayer groups be contacted to find out what the members’ need for events is.

Actions: Kathy said that she would find out more about the possibility of Peter Traben Haas presenting. Linda, with Mary’s help, will work on contacting the prayer groups for input. Linda will also work on sending out (Mailchimp) another list of Virtual/Zoom opportunities available through C.O., Mary Magdalene Church, and Fr. Vincent Pizzuto. Chris suggested that Mary contact Pamela Bergman and Mary Best for advice on hosting Zoom events and webinars for our local contemplative communities.

We agreed to meet early in September if needed.

~ Linda Dollins

Sunday, August 2, 2020

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"O you of little faith, why did you doubt?"

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We invite you to a few minutes of silence before we begin our prayer time together.

Take a deep breath and breathe in the breath of God, knowing by faith that God breathes into us the breath of life.

Be Still and Know

Sunday, August 30, 2020

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Sunday, August 23, 2020

Lectio Archive

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Thursday, August 20, 2020

Guarding the Heart of Our Group

Guard of the Heart

Loving Community

Guidelines for Faith Sharing in Centering Prayer Groups

Monday, August 17, 2020

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Monday, August 10, 2020

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Thursday, August 6, 2020

Notes From Events Planning Meeting, Aug 5, 2020

Sunday, August 2, 2020

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