A Prayer for Living ~ A Prayer for Dying

by Susan Rush

A wise person once said, "Find a spiritual practice and do it as if your life depends on it." In my case, that practice is Centering Prayer. Centering Prayer is a prayer of intention, a prayer of consent, a prayer of surrender. It is a prayer that allows us to touch the Divine Ground of our Being, a prayer that helps us see our true self and get a glimpse of the Love that lives within us and in all creation. It is a prayer for living and a prayer for dying.

Transformation

One comes to the practice of Centering Prayer with only one intention - to consent to God's presence and action within. Because of that intention, commitment to the contemplative journey through a daily practice of Centering Prayer involves more than just setting aside time to pray; it also means opening ourselves up to a conversion of our will and total transformation.

When we first start Centering most of us are amazed at how busy our minds are. The silence we long for eludes us. We can't hear God. But as we continue to practice - time and time again letting our thoughts go and returning ever so gently to our intention - we realize that this is all an Ultimate Mystery and requires a graced trust. With committed practice, gradually we are able to embrace the Divine Dwelling within us. There is a knowing, a conviction, that we are with God. If we stay faithful to the practice, our false self begins to be dismantled and we live more and more from our center, from that Divine Ground of Being, from our true self. We are transformed. As the beloved Thomas Keating, who has spent his life conceptualizing and teaching this prayer form, wrote, "By consenting to God's creation, to our basic goodness as human beings, and to letting go of what we love in this world, we are brought to the final surrender, which is to allow the false self to die and the true self to emerge. The true self might be described as our participation in the divine life manifesting in our uniqueness."¹

Surrender

In Centering Prayer, we consent to God's presence and action within. In dying, we consent to God's presence and action with in. It is the very same consent, the very same desire, the very same surrender. We do the prayer in life - we become the prayer in our dying. Our daily Centering Prayer practice provides a training ground for that final letting go into Divine Life, that final surrender into the Divine Mystery. Many of us are afraid of dying, but what if we were able to embrace the idea that our true self is mingled with the Divine Holy One? What if we fully realized that death can never reach the inner Self? What if we believed with Thomas Keating that "through grace we open our awareness to God whom we know by faith is within us, closer than breathing, closer than thinking, closer than choosing-closer than consciousness itself"?² Would we still fear the end of life?

A contemplative prayer life is about a relationship with our Divine Source, the Unfathomable. It is an attitude of the mind, an orientation of the soul. I believe that the best way to prepare for death is to live our lives fully immersed in the prayer and its nudge to serve others. I believe that if we do that, the full force of God's love and compassion will light up our lives and our deaths. Through the practice of Centering Prayer, our outer veneer, our false self, gets stripped away. We practice dying. We learn to detach from this world and are able to surrender, to release our grasp a little bit each day, and to experience the Truth within us - that Love lies at the very core of our being. Only then will we understand what the Psalmist meant when he wrote, "Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for Thou art with me."³

Mystery

As we practice Centering Prayer, we pass through ordinary levels of awareness, to spiritual awareness, to our true self - within which we find the Divine Presence. This mysterious process of transformation is illustrated in Fr. Keating's Levels of Awareness diagram, shown above. I believe these are the same levels we pass through as we move through the process of dying. Just as we have the opportunity to dismantle our false self and welcome our true self through Centering Prayer, we also have the opportunity to become more of who we really are as we move into end-of-life issues. We get clear about our desires, where we want to expend our energies, what we love, and who we want to have around us. In Centering Prayer, we learn to embrace our basic goodness and understand that we are intended to be happy and fulfilled, to love and be loved. As we die, we have the opportunity to become love.

In our final days or hours, I believe we open ourselves to the Ultimate Mystery, who we know is within us, just as we do in Centering Prayer. Through the ages, a number of ascetic practices developed to help the spiritual pilgrim draw closer to the Holy One - practices like silence, solitude, fasting, and the examination of conscience. I have observed many people who are in the process of dying gravitate toward those same practices, whether or not they've been schooled in them. Many stop talking hours or days before they die. The dying draw inward. Many do a life review, often asking the big life questions like, "Have I loved well? Have I made a difference?" Many stop eating - a sort of purification and retreat from the world in order to draw closer to the Divine Presence.

Death is never very far from life. With the impermanency of life upon us, we can prepare for death right here, right now, by drawing closer to the Divine Presence as we live - with intention, surrender, and love. Death, like life, is a pilgrimage, a journey into the Unfathomable. The more we welcome this great mystery into our lives while we are living, the more able we will be to gracefully welcome our movement from life to the transcendent.

Promise

I once heard a patient say that her dying process was an "ego-ectomy." The contemplative life through the practice of Centering Prayer can be an ego-ectomy, too. We come closer to our dying every day of our living, so let us live our lives to the fullest, for God's sake. Let us do our spiritual practice as if our lives depended on it - because they do. Let us welcome our ego-ectomy through the dismantling of the false self now - in life - in order to experience each day as a sacred gift. Let us do our life review every day so we will have the energy and space for those final I Love You's and those precious final blessings and thank you's. Let us embrace the sacred wonder of life and of death. Let us steward the mystery that is before us and within us.

_____________

¹ Keating, Thomas, Invitation To Love: The Way of Christian Contemplation. Rockport, MA: Element, Inc, 1992, p. 48

² Keating, Thomas, "The Method of Centering Prayer," brochure, Butler, NJ: Contemplative Outreach, Ltd. 2004. p.1

³ New Revised Standard Version of The Holy Bible, Psalm 23. Verse 4

⁴ Keating, Thomas, Intimacy with God. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1994, p. 67

Home || Prayer Groups || Upcoming Events

Copyright © 2002-2012 Contemplative Outreach of New Mexico. All rights reserved.

This page last updated 01/02/2012

To contact Web Master: 
Web Service:  At Your Service Web Site Design