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This is the sixth of seven readings and questions to ponder for our fall Adult Spiritual Formation series “Embarking on the Spiritual Journey.” Please read and save this column. Spend some time reflecting on the questions, and jotting down your thoughts. Plan to gather after 9:30am worship on October 29th for small group discussion. Material is drawn from pages 81-96 of “An Invitation to the Spiritual Journey” by The Rev. John P. Gorsuch, and is used with the generous permission of his family. For the introduction to and all seven issues in this series, please see our website.
Gorsuch speaks of the importance of being attuned, of yearning “to find our identity in something that is rooted in the eternal.” Said another way, to find purpose and meaning beyond our individual selves. Gorsuch draws an example from contemporary society: “At our best in contemporary America we are attuned to a spirit of warm generosity and openness of spirit that makes room for great diversity and welcomes the best efforts of all citizens to better themselves. At our worst our attunement is wolfish; when that spirit prevails there is a giving-over to corrosive energy and to pluralism gone mad so that each part of the larger whole undertakes only its own gain.”
“We shall never be ourselves until we know we are here to become more and more attuned to something bigger and grander than we are. Nothing less than such attunement will pull out of us that which lies waiting to be completed in us.” He likens us to television sets: without being plugged in, we have no purpose and sit blankly in a room. By ourselves we can’t make pictures or produce sound. Only when we are attuned to the power source can we “act as transformers of the energy that comes through us.”
“The more we are attuned to God, the more we become ourselves. God and we, by a very great mystery, cannot be separated from each other. The more God lives in us, the more we become distinct, separate, unique and special persons. Such is the nature of divine love which takes such delight in empowering its creatures.”
Gorsuch turns from television to radio for further illustration: “There are all kinds of messages coming through the airwaves—some pretty good, some utterly dismal. To get a station that plays Bach can take some effort. The station you are searching for may always be broadcasting, but it may be hard to pick up without the right sort of tuning. The spiritual life is like that. There are all sorts of ‘broadcasts’ in life, some glorious and some that are destructive to the human spirit. To align with the Spirit takes some fine tuning, particularly if we have been listening for years without discrimination.”
Attunement, says Gorsuch, means opening ourselves to God and cooperating with the partnership of God “as valued partners in the process of becoming filled up and rounded out. Attunement means making room in ourselves for the Divine Life which wants more and more to radiate outward to express itself.” When we attune to God, “we are aware that under life as we normally perceive it, there is a deeper stratum, the light and love of God.” As we become attuned to it, “we get hints of what it feels like to be truly at home in this universe.”
Spiritual practices or disciplines help us make room for God, and help signal God that we are interested in attuning with him. God looks for us to be sincere, intentional, and willing. In the 17th century, Brother Lawrence was often asked by people how they could find deeper meaning in their own lives. “To all he gave the same answer: attune yourself to God. What he meant by this is learn how to live as though God is beside you and with you all the time—as in fact God is.”
To illustrate, Gorsuch quotes Parahamansa Yogananda: “When you are working, make your work a form of meditation. Don’t waste your time in idle thoughts or talk. Every now and then think, ‘Lord, it is Your power that operates these hands. Your power throbs in this heart. Your power allows me to think.’ The more you meditate upon these thoughts, the more you live within you Self, in that world which lies within, the more you become in tune with that Divine One who is throbbing in every cell of every living thing.’” We carry out the demands of life on a superficial level, says Gorsuch, but “at a profounder level, we are learning to make room for the great ocean of God’s life to expand our souls.”
In the next chapter of his book, Gorsuch writes of centering prayer as a way to inner communion with God. He quotes Archbishop Anthony Bloom, who told a story of someone learning to engage silence as a spiritual practice. The student spoke of how the silence became not just an absence of noise, but grew to become something with real substance—“a density [and] a richness that began to pervade [her]…The silence around began to come and meet the silence in [her]…[and she] perceived that the silence was a presence.” That presence was God. The student had opened herself to the One who was already present with her and around her and in her.
Gorsuch traces the origins of Centering Prayer to the 14th century work “The Cloud of Unknowing” by an anonymous Christian spiritual master, and more recently to Father Thomas Keating. Gorsuch offers two basic assumptions that underlie Centering Prayer: “The first is that God is, and the universe trembles with the Sacred Presence. This means that we don’t have to bring God close because God is already close, hidden just behind that which passes for reality to our waking consciousness. The second assumption says that because we are the very sons and daughters of God we have every right to address God”, to ask for God to reveal the divine self to us.
“Centering Prayer is based on a gentle but constant focus on the presence of God by the use of a word, a short phrase, or an image.” On their website, The Center for Contemplative Outreach describes the sacred word thus: “The sacred word is merely the symbol of the consent of one’s will to God’s presence and action within based on faith in the doctrine of the Divine Indwelling. The sacred word is simply a means of reaffirming our original intention at the beginning of our period of prayer to be in God's presence and to surrender to the divine action when we are attracted to some other thought, feeling or impression.”
The web description continues: “Throughout the period of Centering Prayer, our intention predominates: the movement of our will to consent to God's intention, which according to our faith, is to communicate the divine life to us. Hence, unlike transcendental meditation, Centering Prayer is a personal relationship with God, not a technique.” [1] Gorsuch paraphrases Thomas Keating in stating that Centering Prayer “is a way of telling God, ‘Here you are and here I am; I want you but how this happens is up to you.’”
QUESTIONS TO PONDER
1. Can you identify a time in your life when you became attuned to that deeper stratum (consisting of the light and love of God) which runs under the surface of life as we normally perceive it? Having attuned to that deeper stratum did you receive “hints of what it feels like to be truly at home in this universe?”
2. The student spoke of the silence as having substance, density, and richness that pervaded her. Have you experienced this in the silence? Does this description of the silence hold true for you? What did it feel like to experience that silence?
3. What do you make of the two basic assumptions that Gorsuch says underlie Centering Prayer? Do you embrace them or struggle to accept them, and what can you say about that?
SCRIPTURE TO CONSIDER
John 1:12
Colossians 1:9
Luke 11
[1] https://www.contemplativeoutreach.org/faq-item/how-centering-prayer-different-meditation-especially-eastern-meditation-practices
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