God and I Used to Talk

Part 1 of 2 in a series on contemplative prayer

God and I used to talk a lot. He and I were close (in those days, he was always he). I gushed to God about my good days and agonized to God about my bad ones. God was there for me. In high school, I talked to God about my insecurities and crushes; after college, I prayed for confidence in job interviews and that I wouldn’t get stuck in traffic. I also sincerely talked, and tried to listen, about what vocational path I should pursue. The Bible was there for me, too. During months of depression, that turned into years, I prayed fervently to God. When I couldn’t feel or perceive God’s love or presence—which was most of the time, except when I sang cheesy rock music praise songs—I quoted Scripture. My favorite one to this day is Isaiah 61:3: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me… to comfort all who mourn, to bestow on them the oil of joy instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair.” I’m no longer an evangelical Christian, but for all the criticism I have for my early tradition (patriarchy homophobia, denial of science, Christian nationalism, disastrous theology around atonement and hell, and more), I’m convinced that my onetime religious tribe did this important thing well: teach people how to share intimately with God about their lives.

The seal of identity in evangelical Christian circles, at least at that time, was having a personal relationship with Jesus. Jesus was the key to cozying up to God. Jesus became my friend, confidante, and Savior. Since I believed, as all of us evangelicals did, that Jesus was God, talking to Jesus was talking to God, and talking to God was talking to Jesus. I never quite understood the Trinitarian theology behind a divine Jesus, but I took it for granted and it worked. Jesus, God and me, and sometimes the Spirit, had an intimate, conversational, trusting relationship.

In hindsight, it was a fraught relationship that needed political interventions. The individualism and lack of connection to the historical Jesus—that brown-skinned, Palestinian Jew and nonviolent rebel of the first century—risked turning Jesus into my image and whoever I needed him to be. Jesus became, for many of us, a “Buddy Christ,” to reference a memorable clip from the 1999 Kevin Smith film Dogma. Buddy Jesus was cool to hang out with, ever-encouraging in my trials, and yet who, if you asked him, would have identified as white, wealthy, and into positive thinking. This is the Jesus, a reflection of American megachurch Christianity, who made his home in my heart and found his basic purpose, I inferred, in granting me a better and more thriving life. He did not challenge or upset the systemic arrangements within which I lived.

Photo by Tyler Nix on Unsplash

My relationship with Jesus also needed therapeutic interventions. I experienced Jesus operating as the loving and kind God while the scary divine Father, full of potential wrath against sin, lingered in the background. I feared God and such fear did not empower me but stripped away my constructive sense of self. I turned to Jesus’ arms as safety from the outburst that God-dad might unleash. I needed to develop a trust that God was radically for me instead of out to get me. But that would take years. Eventually, it became necessary to take some distance. So I stopped talking to him.

Over the years, I experienced a theological and spiritual evolution. I attended Harvard Divinity School and asked questions I had not had space to ask in evangelical circles. I asked why Jesus had to be the exclusive way to God in a multi-faith world—and decided Jesus provided one beautiful way to God amid many other ways. I asked about the political context of Jesus and his movement—and it led me into peace activism and community organizing. I asked questions about the biases of the biblical authors—and, with the help of my professors, concluded that systemic oppression cuts through sacred text. I asked questions about why evangelicals opposed homosexuality—and stood at the Massachusetts State House to advocate for gay marriage. You get the picture, but in all my questing, the one thing I did not regularly do was talk to God intimately from my heart. That’s when I discovered Centering Prayer—a form of Christian silent meditation.

Photo by Rui Silvestre on Unsplash

Centering Prayer opened me to a world of spirituality that both deepened and rocked my post-evangelical foundations. I first learned it at a daylong retreat with longtime teacher Cynthia Bourgeault. A friend and I drove an hour to a rural church in Massachusetts, where Cynthia presented the theological contours of the practice, and taught and led the method. First articulated in the 1970s by Benedictines in Spencer, Mass., Centering Prayer took inspiration from the ancient desert monks and the anonymous classic The Cloud of Unknowing and created a teachable method. Twenty minutes of silent prayer twice a day, consenting to the gentle presence of God. “Centering Prayer doesn’t work with the mind at all; goes straight for the heart. It’s a surrender method, pure and simple, a practice based entirely on the prompt letting go of thoughts as they arise” (Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus). And it hooked me. Centering Prayer almost instantaneously relieved my anxiety, softened my reactions, and gave me a spirituality back, all while removing the burden of communication—I didn’t really want to talk to God, and I didn’t have to! I could simply rest in God’s presence.

But it turns out that there’s a cost to refraining from talking to God. After nearly fifteen years of practice, I now can say that Centering Prayer did not go straight to my heart. It subtly bypassed it, leading me toward my heart but not to its inner chamber. That’s not Centering Prayer’s fault. It’s just that I was not yet ready. Too much healing had yet to unfold in me. Centering Prayer developed in a monastic setting in which monks chanted Psalms eight hours a day, praying vocally and in quiet. The entire context of Centering Prayer’s origins was that of devotion to God. But when my post-evangelical self discovered Centering Prayer, jaded at the excesses and pitfalls of “Buddy Christ,” I used it as my only devotional practice. I didn’t tell God how my day went as I did in years past; I didn’t listen for anything God-Life-Reality might communicate back; I didn’t pray with Scripture as the sturdy and steady monks did; I simply sat down in silence. And it changed me—but given my particular psychological and religious background, I also needed something more to take me by the hand and guide me.

Next week, Part 2: Teresa of Avila, mental prayer, and the Incarnation method of prayer through the Center for Spiritual Imagination.