by Joe Guppy

It’s Good Friday. Earlier this evening, I facilitated a Centering Prayer Workshop in the sanctuary.

When I first signed up to do the workshop, it seemed like the right thing to do, but I didn’t see an immediate connection between Centering Prayer and the spirit of Good Friday. Frankly, despite experience to the contrary, I’ve persisted in stereotyping contemplative prayer as something that’s supposed to be a mellow, zen-like, peaceful experience. And Good Friday I think of as tumultuous, definitely not peaceful; filled with difficulty, somberness and strife.

But then I got a glimpse that Centering Prayer is a just-about-perfect prayer practice for Good Friday. It started with looking at Luke 22:39-46:

He then left to make his way as usual to the Mount of Olives, with the disciples following. When he reached the place he said to them, “Pray that you may not come into the time of trial.” Then he withdrew from them about a stone’s throw away, and knelt down and prayed. “Father,” he said, “If you are willing, take this cup away from me. Nevertheless, let your will be done, not mine.” Then an angel appeared to him, coming from heaven to give him strength. In his anguish he prayed even more earnestly, and his sweat fell to the ground like great drops of blood. When he rose from prayer he went to the disciples and found them sleeping for sheer grief. And he said to them, “Why are you asleep? Get up and pray that you may not come into the time of trial.

And I noticed a resonance with the basic guidelines for Centering Prayer:

1) Choose a sacred word or phrase as the symbol of your intention to consent to God’s presence and action within.

2) Silently introduce the sacred word as the symbol of your intention to consent to God’s presence and action within.

3) When engaged with your “thoughts,” ever-so-gently reintroduce the sacred word. (“Thoughts” is an umbrella term for all that we experience during the prayer period.)

The essential desire of Centering Prayer is the intention to say “yes” to God, to consent to God’s presence and action within - to spend 20 minutes consciously practicing what Jesus said in his prayer time in the garden and then carried out on the cross: “Let your will be done, not mine,” surrendering every thought, perception and experience to the will of the Lord.

I can imagine Jesus in the garden practicing a version of this prayer, returning to “thy will be done” as a sacred phrase grounding him in the midst of the storm of doubt, fear and dread he was experiencing.

I also saw that I could view the “return to the sacred word” as similar to Jesus returning to his disciples to remind them to pray. In Mark and Matthew’s account of the story, there is even another repetition of Jesus returning to the disciples prior to his arrest.

Jesus instructs them to “pray that you may not come into the time of trial.” This reminds me that Centering Prayer has helped me maintain a touchstone in the timeless spirit of the Lord in the midst of some of the more tumultuous times in my own life, such as in the deaths of my brother in 1998 and my father last year. The “times of trial” do come, but they are not as severe when we stay, as much as possible, centered in God. “Be still and know that I am God,” Psalm 46 tells us and Psalm 62 says “My soul finds rest in God alone.”

This calls to mind several other scriptural passages that can serve as an inspiration to a contemplative prayer practice. The letter of James (ch 1) tells us that the “double-minded man, inconsistent in every activity” is like the “waves thrown up in the sea by the buffeting of the wind.” Rooting our faith in a constant return to the sacred calms our emotional seas, as Jesus himself calmed the storm (Luke 8:22-26). Likewise, this practice builds our spiritual house on a foundation of rock, not on the shifting sand (Matt. 7:25-27).