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Centering Prayer

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Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion

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Centering Prayer is a method of Christian contemplative prayer based on the fourteenth century mystical text The Cloud of Unknowing. The Cloud offers spiritual guidance to one who is ready to progress in the spiritual life to nondiscursive prayer. Because the divine is ultimately beyond human comprehension, The Cloud envisions God lying above the one who prays with a cloud of unknowing in between. The goal of prayer is to focus attention on God by directing darts of loving desire into the cloud. Since prayer is understood as attention focused on God, the text envisions a second cloud, a cloud of forgetting, lying between the one who prays and the world. The anonymous author insists that any ideas or thoughts that arise during prayer are distractions that pull attention away from God and must be avoided by shoving them under this cloud of forgetting (Johnston, 1963).

Methods

Centering Prayer originated in the 1970s at St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts. Two Trappist monks, M....

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Bibliography

  • Johnston, W. (Ed.). (1973). The cloud of unknowing. New York: Image Books.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Harrisburg, PA, 17102, USA

    Chad Thralls

Authors
  1. Chad Thralls
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Blanton-Peale Institute, 3 West 29th Street, New York, NY, 10001, USA

    David A. Leeming Ph.D.

  2. National Institute for the Psychotherapies, 250 West 57th Street, Suite 501, New York, NY, 10019, USA

    Kathryn Madden Ph.D.

  3. Pittsburgh Center for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, 4527 Winthrop Street, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213-3722, USA

    Stanton Marlan Ph.D.

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© 2010 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Thralls, C. (2010). Centering Prayer. In: Leeming, D.A., Madden, K., Marlan, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-71802-6_822

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-71802-6_822

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA

  • Print ISBN: 978-0-387-71801-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-0-387-71802-6

  • eBook Packages: Behavioral Science

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