With Centering Prayer, Father Thomas Keating presents the first complete home study course in a silent prayer practice for consenting to the presence and action of the Divine Indwelling. Based in the Christian tradition and on teachings from the 14th-century text The Cloud of Unknowing, John of the Cross, Thomas Merton and others, "Centering Prayer" is a powerful method that has sparked the modern renewal of contemplative Christianity. With more than nine hours of guidance and teachings on CD and DVD, practitioners join this world-renowned teacher to discover a level of prayer beyond asking for aid or offering praise-one that can lead to an intimate, graceful communion with God....

One of the founders of the Centering Prayer movement, Thomas Keating offers a reflection on contemplative prayer, the human search for happiness and our need to explore the inner world. The spiritual search for God, he says, is also the search for ourselves. Drawing from Christian mystical tradition, Eastern and Orthodox religions, contemporary psychology, and the recovery model, Keating shows how the practice of contemplation can become a process of psychological and spiritual transformation. And as we move into a global culture, this process is of greater importance than ever.

He begins with the great questions of self-knowledge: "Who are you? Where are you hiding?" The seemingly fruitless search for human happiness hinges on the answers to these: "Where am I in relation to God, myself and others?" and "Whoever I think I am, I am not." The contemplative journey is "divine therapy" for the illness of the human condition, a way to open up gradually to our own wounded unconscious. It is an excuse in letting go of the false self, which is the only self we know, and in realizing that God is the only true security. Divine love is the full affirmation of who we are.

Writing with simplicity and depth, Keating brings common sense, extraordinary enlightenment, and fifty years of experience to the topic and the practice of discovering the presence of God....

This work brings together for each day of the year three prayer practices for contemplative living: first, a brief 'active prayer'; second, spiritual reading; and, third, "Lectio Divina". The brief introductory prayer sentences are from various sources - the Bible and traditional prayers of the church or of well-known spiritual writers. The spiritual readings come from eleven of Father Keatings books and one audiotape, with a month's worth of readings derived from each work. Each day's entry concludes with a brief selection from the Bible, or "Lectio Divina"....

This is the 20th anniversary edition of Continuum's best-selling spiritual classic, which has sold over half a million in the English language and has appeared in 10 foreign-language editions (Croatian, French, German, Hungarian, Indonesia, Italian, Korean, Polish, and Portuguese). The new edition consists of a substantial new preface, an expanded glossary, some changes in terminology, and a reordering of several chapters....