Intimate Sharing Between Friends

Part 2 of 2 in a series on contemplative prayer

When I joined a new monastic community hosted by the Long Island-based Center for Spiritual Imagination (CSI), I did not know I was signing up to learn a new prayer method. The Center had been running contemplative prayer gatherings, and our small group circles included guided prayer following a specific methodology, but at first, I ignored it. I mean, I had my contemplative prayer method, and it was Centering Prayer. It worked for me; why bother learning another?

Co-founded by four spiritual innovators, the Center for Spiritual Imagination facilitates small group communities of spiritual practice and involves a four-year commitment to contemplative formation in various spiritual traditions including 12 step, Benedictine, Carmelite, and Franciscan spiritualities. Those who officially join the community in a “vowed” commitment agree to practice a Rule of Life together, which involves morning and evening prayer from the Daily Office, two meditation sits per day, lectio divina with Scripture, spiritual reading of mystical teachers from contemplative traditions, a monthly “desert” solitude day, and more. We also learn and practice a specific method of contemplative prayer that they/we are calling the “Incarnation Method of Prayer.”

The method involves four internal movements, which CSI helpfully articulates on small prayer cards (see link for pdf):

1) Centering Your Breath: “Arriving” consciously in your body through slow, rhythmic breathing.

2) Embracing Compassion: Acknowledging whatever emotions or sensations are arising as you show up for prayer; placing your hands on your heart, embracing and allowing all that is within you to be held in compassion.

3) Offering Intercession: Bringing to mind persons or places in need of prayer, talking to God about all that is going on within you, speaking to God as if you are speaking to your best friend.

4) Entering Receptive Silence: Slowly saying the name of Jesus on inhalation, and “I trust you” on exhalation, until you are ready to let go of your prayer phrase and rest in silence.

For the first year of praying this method, between steps 2 and 3, I simply gave up talking to God after a brief “hello” and rested in silence, preferring to land in my familiar Centering Prayer practice. The protective cynicism around my heart bemoaned, “Do I really need to speak to God as if God is my best friend?” Can’t I keep it simple and sit practicing the internal surrendering movement of letting go of all thoughts that I learned from Centering Prayer? But after half-heartedly praying the Incarnation Method of Prayer for a year, something started to happen. I began to enjoy talking to God again.

I started sharing with God about my day, my worries and joys, frustrations and gratitude, along with praying for people suffering in some way. To my surprise, tears often accompanied this part of my prayer. I experienced relief to be unburdening myself to God, along with a profound sense of feeling radically not alone. God and I hadn’t talked as ongoing, trusting friends for quite a while. Years, to be honest. Sure, we spoke here and there in fits and starts. I continued my silent meditation sits. I tried to speak to God, and I even managed to persuade myself that God and I were close—but this marked a new phase of relationship. The desperation and low-grade panic that rumbled beneath my informal talking with God in earlier evangelical days had faded. Intimacy took its place.

Photo by Danie Franco on Unsplash

The discovery of my revived soul-friendship with God correlated also with our community’s yearlong exploration of Carmelite spirituality. Sixteenth-century Spanish mystics Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross wrote about and practiced friendship with God in prayer long before evangelicals stressed “a personal relationship with Jesus.” Teresa of Avila wrote about prayer as “an intimate sharing of friends”: “Prayer is nothing else than an intimate sharing between friends; it means taking time frequently to be alone with Him who we know loves us” (The Book of My Life 8.5). Teresa of Avila’s words sum up my experience of the Incarnation Method of Prayer: an invitation to vulnerable sharing with God trusting that God is my friend. A grace-filled acknowledgment that God desires my friendship, too. The dedicated understanding that nurturing such a divine-human friendship requires at least some determination to be alone in solitude and silence. The foundational affirmation and experience that this friendship is built on Divine Love for us—and that we know it!

To be more accurate, Teresa’s prayer begins, “Mental prayer is nothing else than an intimate sharing between friends.” But what is the “mental” part? I turn to contemplative prayer to seek reprieve from the incessant mental chatter in my mind, so why would I want to practice a “mental” form of prayer? But such words have specific meanings in Teresa’s work. Teresa understood our contemporary struggle with obsessive thought patterns and the difficulty of truly resting in God’s presence through silence. After all, it’s one thing to set a timer on my phone for 20 minutes, sit still and pat myself on the back for my spiritual discipline; it’s another thing to enter the experience of stillness and divine intimacy in my mind, body, and soul.

Teresa wrote about the journey of prayer throughout her books such as The Book of My Life, The Way of Perfection, and her classic The Interior Castle. For Teresa, prayer necessarily involved stages: we begin with vocal prayer, praying aloud in church or to ourselves, saying the “Our Father” prayer that Jesus taught his disciples. But such prayer only remains external if it is not accompanied by an internal awareness of our relationship with God, who we’re speaking to, and who we are as we relate to such a loving presence.

Mental prayer is the internal relationship. It’s the conversations back and forth, the check-ins in the middle of the day, the honest relaying how the day went before bed, the dialogue with God about a particular passage of Scripture, the “help, thanks, wow” of it all (Anne Lamotte). Such prayer doesn’t have to involve words always, either. It could simply be looking at God with a subtle shift of present awareness. As Teresa tells her nuns, “I’m not asking you that you think about him or that you draw out a lot of concepts or make long and subtle reflections with your intellect. I’m not asking you to do anything more than look at him” (The Way of Perfection 26.3)

Contemplation is the goal that we journey toward in prayer, but not the place we begin. For Teresa, contemplation is the long-awaited “seventh mansion” after many years spent wandering around the castle’s outer courts. It is the spiritual marriage with God and soul that proves so elusive to describe that only metaphor will do: “It’s like what we have when a little stream enters the sea; there is no means of separating the two” (The Interior Castle 7.2.4) Contemplation, for Teresa, is pure gift and the place where effort and methods cease, a receptive and mutual presence between God and self. Centering Prayer, through the repetition of a sacred word and ongoing release of thoughts, brings the practitioner to contemplative surrender. In the Incarnation Method of Prayer, it’s resting in silence after having shared intimately between friends.

The Incarnation Method gave me my relationship with God back. I practiced Centering Prayer as a fresh and budding contemplative and became persuaded that I was further along the path than I was. I tried to skip over the intimate relationship with God and head straight for the boundaryless ocean of contemplation—but the life of prayer in Christianity doesn’t work that way. My heart didn’t work that way. My post-evangelical leap to apophatic prayer without words allowed me to think, with tricky subtlety, that I had put my church hurt, religious cynicism, and psychological wounds behind me. As I said last week, that’s not a critique of Centering Prayer as much as it is an honest acknowledgment of my psyche. If anything, the Incarnation Method of Prayer has helped me start practicing Centering Prayer anew, just with some “mental prayer” hanging out with God thrown in. The trajectory of my life seems to suggest that there are no shortcuts to transformation, just a “long obedience in the same direction” (Eugene Peterson). I needed the slow, long work of rebuilding trust with God, pursuing healing until healing found me, and doing so in a community. Only then did my prayer begin to deepen—and place me on the beginner’s path in earnest.

This post is part 2 of 2 in a series on contemplative prayer. Read part 1 here.