Looking Inward, Looking Back

At the sound of the chime, the circled meditators close their eyes and begin focusing on a sacred word to bring their minds to stillness. If thoughts flitter through, they try to detach from them. Their breathing slows as they aim to open themselves to the divine.

It looks like an Eastern meditation, except these are Catholics at Holy Family Church in South Pasadena. They are practicing a meditation method known as “centering prayer” based on the ancient writings of early church mystics. Like a growing number of believers, they are seeking to recover Christianity’s ancient contemplative heritage that has, until recently, been all but lost to the laity in many denominations.

Driven by a hunger for a deeper faith and a direct experience of God, Christians across the spectrum are embracing such ancient spiritual practices as centering prayer, meditation in a labyrinth and a regimen of regular daily prayer known as the daily office.

Experts say the phenomenon reflects a departure from the “mix-and-match spirituality” of the 1990s, in which people would patch together a hodgepodge of practices from different faith traditions--a little Zen meditation here, a little Wiccan nature spirituality there.

“Christians are moving away from the more generic, or Eastern and non-Christian, spirituality into those spiritual practices that are traditionally Christian,” said Phyllis Tickle, Publishers Weekly contributing editor for religion.

The same trend is apparent in the Jewish community as more people explore Judaism’s traditions of mysticism and spirituality, Tickle added. In the last few decades, so many Jews embraced Buddhist meditation techniques that someone coined a name for them: “Jubus.”

At Holy Family, about half of the two dozen or so prayer circle members had experimented with Eastern meditation before returning to their own tradition, said Mark Melchiorre, a Pasadena practitioner of Oriental medicine.

Melchiorre said he first tried transcendental meditation in the 1970s, initially attracted by its reported health benefits. Later, he took up Zen Buddhist meditation with his college instructor of comparative religions and continued the practice with the Zen Center of Los Angeles after moving here.

Melchiorre said he benefited from Zen and appreciated its wisdom. “But being raised Catholic, I was never totally comfortable with the religion [Buddhism] itself,” he said. “There is no personal God in it. Not that I think of a man in a beard sitting up there, but I was raised with the idea that there is a God who cares about us and takes an interest in our lives.”

When Holy Family held a workshop on centering prayer during Lent this year, it felt like coming home, Melchiorre said. Although the Christian method has similarities with the Eastern techniques, such as stilling the mind, Melchiorre said the intent is different: to recognize God’s presence and invite it to become active in you.

Holy Family’s group meets every Wednesday evening to sit in prayer, watch videos on the tradition and discuss members’ experiences. At a recent session, Irene Asbury described how the practice has cured her road rage. Lucy Palermino said meditation keeps her unruffled: When her radio and office documents were stolen from a new car, she prayed for the thieves rather than getting furious.

Others say the plunge into inner stillness seems to release suppressed or unresolved emotions in a process one of the method’s founders, Father Thomas Keating, calls “divine therapy.”

Melchiorre, for instance, said he has remembered pain caused by his father’s death when he was just 19.

“We’re inviting God to be active in our lives, so there can be a lot of lifting and clearing of past emotions,” he said.

The church nearly lost its contemplative tradition six centuries ago for reasons that still provoke complex explanations. Some suggest that it fell victim to the onset of scientific rationalism, which devalued the intangible. Others point to the 16th century Protestant Reformation against corrupt practices, including fake mystics.

In its own Counter-Reformation, the Catholic Church became fearful of “private inspiration,” Keating said, and stressed the need to stick to the letter of dogma and rules. Then in the 1960s, the Second Vatican Council began opening practices up again.

Most agree that the influx of Eastern meditation masters to the United States in the 1960s served as a catalyst for Christians to begin reclaiming their long-buried contemplative heritage. The Eastern masters brought methods of cultivating inner spiritual experiences--not just outwardly religious affirmations such as church attendance.

“Spirituality had not been part of the American experience, and, if we’re going to be perfectly honest, it wasn’t a Protestant tradition,” Tickle said. “There was no feeding of the spirit.”

An exception was the Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers, many of whom have made meditation the centerpiece of corporate worship since the denomination’s inception in 17th century England.

For many Christians, though, “the Eastern methods came flooding in to a starved people, and everyone went crazy,” Tickle said.

It was the “challenge of the East,” as Keating put it, that led him to seek ways of fashioning a Christian meditation method. In an interview from St. Benedict’s Monastery in Snowmass, Colo., Keating said he was astonished at how many young people were flocking to the East in search of a guru.

“Our question was, ‘Why don’t some of these people come to us?’ ” said Keating, who at the time was abbot of a Cistercian monastery, St. Joseph’s Abbey, in Massachusetts.

He, along with fellow monks William Meninger and Basil Pennington, began working on a method based on their tradition.

In 1975, Meninger presented it to monks at St. Joseph. It is outlined in Keating’s books, such as “Open Mind Open Heart,” and on the Web site for his Contemplative Outreach group, www.centeringprayer.com.

Some are wary of the practices, especially since chief Vatican enforcer of orthodoxy Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger warned in 1989 about letting Eastern meditation methods compromise Christian prayer. But Keating and others say the practice is firmly rooted in Christian tradition, including such classics as “The Cloud of Unknowing” and writings of saints like John of the Cross.

In any case, the movement has spread worldwide and, followers say, become a force for ecumenism. In Southern California, the practice is particularly widespread among Episcopalians. In Camarillo, a meditation group includes four Catholics, two Lutheran ministers and a “Bible Belt Christian,” Palermino said.

“This is where all religions meet, because meditation is in all great religions,” Palermino said. “In some universal way, we are all aiming at some similar journey.”