Three Schools of Meditative Practice
by Fr. Tom Ryan, CSP

For the Christian who is seeking guidance in meditation today, there are more resources available than at any time in twenty centuries of Christianity.

In the early 1970s, the increasing number of people from North America and Western Europe who were turning to Eastern forms of meditation served as a wake-up call to western Christian monastics to take a fresh look at the resources available in their own treasure chest to meet this pronounced interest in and hunger for more contemplative forms of prayer.

In 1974, the Benedictine John Main opened a Christian meditation center at Ealing Abbey in England. While in the English foreign service in India, he had learned to meditate from a Hindu swami. Later, when he became a Benedictine monk, he began to discover the rich resources in his own tradition for meditative prayer.

A year later, three Trappist monks at St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, MA, --William Menninger, Basil Pennington, and Thomas Keating-- began bringing together in a coherent way the scattered teachings on contemplative prayer and sharing this tradition with others in retreats.

In 1977, John Main and Laurence Freeman were invited by the bishop of Montreal to come and establish a Christian Meditation Center in the heart of the city. By the time John Main died in 1982, it had already become a key resource center for a growing international movement among lay members of the Christian churches. In 1991, the international center moved to London, England, as the World Community of Christian Meditation under the leadership of Laurence Freeman, OSB.

Whereas John Main called his packaging of the tradition “Christian meditation,” the Trappist monks decided in favor of the title “centering prayer”, borrowing a reference from Thomas Merton who spoke frequently of attaining the experience of God by going to one’s center and passing through it into the center of God. But both Trappists and Benedictines were working with the same primary resource material in the tradition.

Today, we might think of them as two “schools” in the recovery of Christian contemplative prayer as something intended, not just for the religious “professionals”, but for all those initiated into Christian faith. A difference between the two is that the Christian Meditation school attaches greater importance to the retention of the sacred prayer word or mantra throughout the period of meditation than does the Centering Prayer school.

In 1987, Mary Jo Meadow, with Carmelites Kevin Culligan and Daniel Chowning, began to lead Silence and Awareness meditation retreats, based on the teachings of St. John of the Cross and Vipassana (Insight) meditation practice.

Together, these dedicated people have rendered the invaluable service of sifting through the gospels and the writings of the early desert fathers, as well as many Christian holy men and women like Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, and the rich Jesus Prayer tradition in the Christian East. With an eye toward the modern inclination for convenient “how-to” formats, they then brought these disparate teachings together into synthesized presentations for modern men and women seeking guidance in meditation today.

As a result of this effective crystallization, the tradition of Christian contemplative prayer is available to laity and clergy alike and is enjoying an unprecedented period of flowering among Christians throughout the world.

See for yourself the resources available today.

In the Christian Meditation school: www.wccm.org
In the Centering Prayer school: www.contemplativeoutreach.org
In the Silence and Awareness school: http://www.laycontemplative.org/thesites/resources_ecumenical.htm