Saturday, March 7, 2026
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Gate of heaven
To the woman at the well, Jesus said:
“Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again;
but whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst;
the water I shall give will become in you
a spring of water welling up to eternal life”
In her book Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, Cynthia Bourgeault begins by describing a movement inward, using Thomas Keating’s bulls-eye diagram called “levels of awareness.” She encourages us to practice what she calls “intentional silence,” a silence that accompanies a certain kind of prayer, which Keating calls “centering prayer.”
Praying this way is simple but not easy, because it requires patience and practice to simply sit in “intentional” silence for 20 minutes. Try it for just five minutes. This is because our ordinary self doesn’t live in spiritual awareness. “Into our head, out of nowhere, pop random thoughts, memories, associations, and sensations.”
Cynthia tested herself once, sure she could concentrate and notice everything colored red in a five-mile stretch of driving. Within thirty seconds a red DQ sign caught her attention.
When I “woke up” several miles later, I realized I had been completely lost in a long reverie touched off by childhood memories of ice cream at the beach. The Buddhists smilingly call this “monkey mind.” The little beast jumps from one tree limb to the other, taking the whole of us with it.
But truly, this is the normal functioning zone of the human mind, no matter how brilliant or devout you may be. Cynthia insists we must have “spiritual training” to go deeper.
Your sense of the world and your sense of yourself will be formed at thisnormal, ordinary  level of awareness. Psychology and assessments like the Myers-Briggs and enneagram may yield insights into the workings of the personality, but these insights are still ordinary awareness.
So what else is there down deep inside the “me” that God created (beside the me I’ve worked hard to create for myself)?
You might picture it as an interior compass whose magnetic north is always fixed on God. It’s as much a part of what holds you in life as your breathing or your heartbeat. But most of us are not in touch with this spiritual awareness, let alone have any idea of what it’s there for or how to use it. Only our dreams remain as a repository of our spiritual awareness.
Please don’t miss the point that both levels of awareness are ways of perceiving. Ordinary awareness explores my individuality, how I am separate from the rest of the world … while spiritual awareness provides me an “intuitive sense of belonging” in the community and with God. Both are great gifts, but ordinary awareness alone, even as it provides me a personal identity, might well leave me isolated, anxious, and thinking of how I compare with others.
I really don’t know how to fix this on my own, and trusting God, something beyond myself might seem crazy. But here’s the thing: God loves me whether I accept it or not. I’m his kid; my DNA is spiritual as well as physical. What do you think of this::
At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and illusion, a point of pure truth which belongs entirely to God. This point, or spark, is never at our disposal, inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of no-thingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God written in us. It is in everybody and if we could see it, we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely.
 I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.
(from Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander by Thomas Merton)
Keating describes the ultimate goal of “centering” prayer as awakening, and eventually accepting, my awareness of this Presence.
So many words! As I write, this seems so full of technique, and I know at first it is. But so is learning to play the guitar. So is dancing the foxtrot. What isn’t, at first? Gradually, this “centering,” regardless of its name, becomes the lifeblood of my experience of salvation.
Cynthia’s book invites us to learn and practice three steps of the “welcoming prayer” as a way to move into this thing called centering. One step at a time, one day at at a time … sweet Jesus.
- Focus and sink in
- Welcome
- Let go
Give me living water, that I may never thirst again.
 (Micah 7, Psalm 103, Luke 15,)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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