When I said to myself, "This is the year that I'm going to get really good at praying," I certainly didn't have this response in mind. This book came at the perfect moment for me and helped distill and clarify several other spiritual books I am in the middle of.

Centering prayer is a Christian form of meditation developed by Benedictine monks in the 1970s as a direct response to the hoards of young people who were flocking to the new-to-the-West zen Buddhism. These monks knew that Christianity had a very old tradition of meditation, but the teachings on it were obscure, underexplored, and certainly not taught to parishioners. Teresa de Avila, The Cloud of Unknowing, Symeon the New Theologian, and the Desert Fathers and Mothers (who in turn influenced Sufi mystics), as well as the Benedictine practice of lectio divina all describe experiencing this type of prayer—but no one in modern times had synthesized these ancient writings and taught them to the spiritually hungry.

Centering prayer, then, recovers these ancient roots and incorporates vocabulary borrowed from modern psychoanalysis to sculpt and define what it is and what it is not. Most types of meditation that we see today (in apps, podcasts, psychology tools, mindfulness seminars) are variations on taming and controlling the ego/superego/id trifecta through focusing our attention, "noticing," visualizing, etc. So they are inherently about the physical body. Centering prayer aims to drop completely beneath those layers and work directly with the divine spirit "with groans too deep for words." The fruit of this work is not increased attention span, productivity, decreased anxiety, or mental clarity; the purpose is to strengthen the internal connection we have with God that we can draw from as we go about our normal day, interrupting the pattern of falling into old cycles of protecting the false self/ego/flesh (it has many names depending on the tradition), not to control it (with an overbearing superego) but to surrender use of the body as a conduit for the fruit of the spirit, the mind of Christ, and the Kingdom of God in our physical lives. At least, that's how I understand it right now.

Practicing the centering prayer doesn't really have a downside, and it's not possible to have a "bad day." It's very freeing in that sense—have you ever sat down to meditate and afterwards realized that your mind was wandering and then felt bad that you wasted your time? There's no such thing as wasted time with this practice: God is a god who wastes nothing. And it obviously doesn't exclude other types of prayer, if you enjoy doing that.

I am motivated to incorporate this practice into my daily life and excited to see where it takes me. I believe that the future of North American Christianity is in this direction. Teachers as diverse as Chögyam Trungpa, bell hooks, and Steven Hassan (all of whom I've been reading recently) recognize that Americans are incredibly spiritually hungry; I would even venture to say that is one of the defining characteristics of American culture. Why else are cults [religious and otherwise *cough* Apple *cough*] so - freaking - successful in the US? I don't believe for a second, and I never have, that millennials are spiritually dead and this is why we are leaving the church. I believe millennials are so spiritually starving that we are going literally anywhere else to try to find food of substance. Myopic leadership in the evangelical church has failed to recognize, for several decades now, that practices they have held up as "universally true Christianity" have never been anything close to universal. While those practices may have been helpful and good for some people at some time, it is time for the American church to humble itself and recognize that different cultural expressions are 100% valid in God's sight. Indeed, it is necessary to recognize them as valid in our human sight as well if we want to live out this universal siblinghood on earth.