St. Teresa of Avila said that all difficulties in prayer come from one single flaw; praying as if God were absent.  All difficulties in daily life are probably the result of living as if God were absent.  The impression often is given in catechetical or religious instruction that the self is outside of God and God is outside of self.  On the contrary, God is totally present to us all the time: closer than thinking, closer than breathing, closer than choosing, closer than consciousness itself.  God could not get any closer.

Creation is an ongoing event.  It is not something that happened only once.  We emerge from our Source at every micro-moment of time.  The chief wound of the human condition is the monumental illusion that God is absent.  We have self-awareness.  But without the experience of union with God this self-reflection gives rise to feelings of fear, guilt or acute loneliness.  Because the human heart is designed for limitless happiness, limitless truth and limitless love, nothing less than that kind of fulfilment can satisfy our innate longing.

We all come into this world in a state of complete helplessness.  Very early in our lives we have traumatic or painful experiences, such as moments when we feel deeply rejected or neglected.  As a result we feel increasingly alienated and alone in an unsafe world.  We try to compensate for these painful feelings by developing complex emotional programs that search for happiness in symbols of security, esteem and power provided by the culture or environment.  What might be called the false self is the aggregate of these programs that compensate for the pain of our emotional wounds coupled with our over-identification with cultural values or disvalues.  It is the source of all our ordinary thoughts and feelings.  It is who we think we are.

Contemplative prayer is a kind of divine psychotherapy that dismantles the false self system.  It helps to heal the deep emotional wounds of a lifetime and opens us to the possibility of experiencing, right here in this world, intimacy with God and divine union.  In the apprenticeship for contemplative prayer that we call centering prayer, we sit in silence for 20 to 30 minutes and open up to the spiritual level of our awareness by disregarding the thoughts, feelings and impressions that are passing along the surface of our consciousness.  Repeating a word of one or two syllables – such as “God,” “Abba,” “Jesus” – serves to maintain or renew our intention.  The stream of consciousness constantly is flowing by, like a river.  On the surface of the river are all kinds of particular ideas, memories, sense perceptions and emotions that we might compare to boats.  Indeed we are so dominated by the awareness of all the boats that there is almost never a moment when we see the river itself.  But sometimes God reaches up from within us and pulls us down into the divine presence.  I have met people who have experienced this who have no particular religion.  Such experiences are an invitation to begin the spiritual journey, not a sign that we have arrived.

The Christian contemplative tradition recommends a discipline of prayer that enables us to disengage temporarily from our usual flow of thoughts.  Our ordinary thoughts tend to reflect the mindsets, prepackaged values preconceived ideas that we learned in childhood.  To stop thinking about them for 20 minutes is like taking a much-needed vacation.  Beneath the surface of the river is the Divine Indwelling, the God who is the source of our being.

In contemplative prayer, we allow ourselves to be in God’s presence and to receive divine love without self-reflection.  It is a totally receptive attitude.  We move beyond thoughts and feelings into a more intimate exchange with God, from conversation to communion.  We allow God to be God without knowing who God is, but just that God is.  The presence of God transcends all forms of knowledge.  Thus Meister Eckhart calls this the “unknowing knowing of God.”

The thrust of contemplative prayer is not self-perfection or self-preoccupation.  Its thrust moves us beyond ourselves.  We turn ourselves over completely to God and consent to God at the deepest level of our being.

To be able to hear God, we have to learn the discipline of interior silence.  St. John of the Cross writes: “The Father spoke from all eternity just one word.  And he spoke it in an eternal silence.  And it is in silence that we hear him.”

This is a magnificent summary of what we do in contemplative prayer.  It is also the ultimate healing.