A Teacher
Thomas Keating
Centering Prayer as consent to the presence and action of God
The transmission
Thomas Keating was born in 1923 in New York City and entered the Trappist (Cistercian) order in 1944, later becoming abbot of St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts.
In the years following the Second Vatican Council, concerned that many spiritual seekers were leaving Christianity for Eastern meditation traditions, Keating and fellow monks Basil Pennington and William Meninger sought to recover a simple contemplative method from the Christian heritage, drawing especially on the fourteenth-century English text The Cloud of Unknowing.
The result, developed in the 1970s, was the practice they named Centering Prayer. Keating spent the rest of his life teaching and systematizing this method, settling at St. Benedict’s Monastery in Snowmass, Colorado, and founding Contemplative Outreach in 1984 to spread the practice among laypeople worldwide.
His many books, most notably Open Mind, Open Heart (1986), presented Centering Prayer as accessible to ordinary practitioners and integrated it with a psychological account of how silent prayer surfaces and heals the “emotional programs” of the wounded self.
He died in 2018, widely regarded as one of the principal architects of the modern Christian contemplative revival.
What they gave
Centering Prayer as consent: Keating defined the practice not as concentration or visualization but as a gentle consent to God’s presence and action within, using a single “sacred word” only to return from thoughts, a discipline of release rather than effort.
- The divine therapy and the false self: He taught that sustained interior silence allows the “false self” and its unconscious emotional programs to surface and dissolve, framing contemplation as a deep psychological and spiritual healing he called the “divine therapy.”
- Receptive interior stillness: His method places the seeker in a posture of letting-go and surrender, trusting that transformation and union are given by grace and received in stillness, not seized by the will.
- Democratizing contemplation: Through Contemplative Outreach he made a once-monastic discipline available to laypeople, reframing the deepest interior practice as the birthright of every believer rather than a specialist vocation.
In their words
The sacred word is the symbol of our intention to consent to God’s presence and action within.
The line they stand in
Influenced by: the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing, John of the Cross, Teresa of Ávila, the Desert Fathers, and his fellow Trappist Thomas Merton.
- Influenced: Cynthia Bourgeault and Richard Rohr, the global Contemplative Outreach network, and the broad movement bringing silent Christian contemplative practice to lay practitioners.
Revelations they taught
Essential Works
- Open Mind, Open Heart1986
- Invitation to Love1992