Stop holding onto people who keep letting go of you. Pay attention to the faithful people. The ones you don’t have to impress. The ones who always have your back. The ones that love you with no strings attached. — Unknown

What do you do when it feels like your prayers are going into a deep, dark void and aren’t connecting you with the Divine?

Well, 700 years ago a Christian mystic had an answer, an alternative to traditional prayer that he believed offered a direct connection to God. The Roman Catholic church shunned the practice and for centuries it was largely forgotten—but in the past few decades, it has made an amazing comeback. (Though in some Catholic circles, it is considered dangerous.)

It’s now widely known as centering prayer, though it was originally referred to as contemplative prayer. While its origin may date back to early days of the church, religious scholars point to the 14th century as the seminal point of this spiritual invocation. It was then that an unknown Catholic mystic wrote a book called The Cloud of Unknowing that set the foundation for this practice. It…

Sometimes I grow weary with all the days, with their fits and starts. I want to climb some old gray mountain, slowly, taking the rest of my lifetime to do it, resting often, sleeping under the pines or, above them, on the unclothed rocks. I want to see how many stars are still in the sky that we have smothered for years now, a century at least. I want to look back at everything, forgiving it all, and peaceful, knowing the last thing there is to know.

All that urgency! Not what the earth is about!

How silent the trees, their poetry being of themselves only. I want to take slow steps, and think appropriate thoughts.

In ten thousand years, maybe, a piece of the mountain will fall.

~ Mary Oliver, The Poet Dreams of the Mountain. Swan: Poems and Prose Poems

Photo: NerySoul

Most of us do not live a life of monastic rigor. Our days are full of jagged edges and jangling moments. But most of us do have quiet routines that inform our lives. We rise each morning and greet our day in the same fashion. A first cup of coffee, a glance at the paper, a certain way we bathe and prepare for our entry into the day — these do not change. They are the rituals by which we shape our days. But we do not value them as rituals. To us they are the ordinary — sometimes comforting, sometimes mind-deadening — activities that give a familiar sameness to our life. Far from honoring them, we pay them no heed. We see them as routines, not as paths to awareness. My time in the monastery taught me otherwise. To be sure, the monks lived a life of deep sacramentality…