A Journey Of Consent

[Note: Today’s guest blog is written by Chris Phillips. Chris is certified coach in the Unified Mindfulness system, a presenter of basic Centering Prayer trained by Contemplative Outreach International, and is just completing a two year training program as a spiritual director with Oasis Ministries.   He’s very involved with the Blooming Lilac Sangha (Rochester) and the local community of mindful living in Thich Nhat Hanh’s Buddhist tradition. In his professional work, he offers a mixture of services to support people with their mindfulness practice and contemplative prayer.]

One way to think about the Christian spiritual life is to think of it as continual consent to God’s presence and action. We keep showing up and saying, “Yes,” to God’s will in our lives.

Lent is a journey of consent, and Jesus is a model of consent.

In the late 90’s I spent 5 years as volunteer staff at the Barre center for Buddhist Studies in Massachusetts. Down the road in Spencer, MA, is a Trappist Abbey where, only 15 years before, 3 monks developed a simple new synthesis of contemplative prayer. They drew on many of the great God Seekers in the Christian tradition and distilled their prayer teachings into 4 guidelines with which anyone can easily begin the path of contemplative prayer. They called it “Centering Prayer.”

The Catholic Workers in Worcester, MA, got to know one of these young monks who was developing Centering Prayer. His name was Father Thomas Keating. Keating dreamed with my Catholic worker friends that there would someday be cells of spiritual revolution in every city and town where folks gathered for Centering Prayer, to empower their action and service to suffering humanity and the Earth.

When I moved back to my home in Worcester and opened Turtle Path Mindfulness Practice Center, my neighbors down the road were Mike and Diane Boover. Mike was a founder of the local Catholic Worker, the Mustard Seed soup kitchen, and we connected on many levels. Mike and Diane had redone their garage and turned it into a poustinia (a little chapel) and named it “The Hound of Heaven.” Friends began to meet at “The Hound” every Saturday morning for Centering Prayer. Imagine a bunch of Catholic Worker activists sitting still together in silence! Diane dubbed the group “The Lazy Bums.”

What were we doing, silently riding this ramshackle Hound into the divine embrace? 

We were trying to consent to God’s presence and action in our lives – together.

The essentials of Centering Prayer are quite simple:

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

2 Settle briefly and silently introduce the sacred word.

3 When engaged with “thoughts,” return ever so gently with the sacred word/symbol.

4 At the end of the prayer period, remain in silence for a couple of minutes.

As we continually engage this practice, we learn to rest in the Sacred by maintaining our intention to consent over and over again at the moment-to-moment level – repeatedly offering a quiet, “Yes,” to God’s Presence and Action. When our consent is open and in the groove, we often experience a sense of rest and of being a beloved child of God. When our attention drifts or gets fixated on something else, we try to gently release our grip on whatever has engaged us, and let go, back into a wide open spacious Yes. To help us return to the Yes we use a sacred word we have chosen as a reminder of our intention to consent.

Centering prayer experiences generally last about 20 minutes, but it is in the repetition that we begin to encounter new depth. We become like a painter, filling in the details of our Yes to God with the fine-brush strokes which make a painting come alive. This consent becomes willing and consistent and slowly builds power. Consent to God overflows into our daily actions, life and ministry.

While we spend our daily prayer time filling in those fine brush strokes of consent, we may become aware of some big consents in our developmental journey which are still not entirely complete.  No matter what stage of life’s journey we are on, we are invited to say an ever-deepening Yes.

This is part of the journey of Lent. We follow the consent of Jesus (as our pattern and our promise) through his career to his Passion and to the power of the resurrection.

Practice: To support a Lenten Journey of deepening consent, we may like to ask two prayer questions every day. It takes about 2 minutes, but you can expand it into 5 or 10. You ask God to show you whatever the Divine Beloved wants you to see about the state of your life consents and then ask:

1 When and where today did I say yes to Life and to God? (pause)

2 When and where today did I have trouble saying yes to Life and to God? (pause)

This simple practice will help us to open up new spiritual territory and vision that can then be deepened through our Centering Prayer experiences.

For Further Information:

http://www.contemplativeoutreach.org/

Fr. Thomas Keating’s Intro to Centering Prayer (31 min)- https://youtu.be/5FWvxwfN_CE?list=PLBE6fmRmYU8g6CAOwq4-IEvpSnbBxKfRO

The 4 Consents Part 1 32 min These broad brush stroke consents to Life support and finish our Yeses to God.

And to connect further with Chris: http://www.sunlightoftheheart.com/