Loading...A Centering Prayer Workshop with the Rev. Geoffrey Butcher, canon pastor at Christ Church Cathedral in Nashville, will be held Saturday, Jan. 30, at Grace Episcopal Church in Hopkinsville.
Butcher has coordinated pastoral care and lay ministries at the Nashville cathedral for the last 16 years. He teaches centering prayer workshops and leads centering prayer retreats. As an accomplished church musician and liturgist, he brings a rich variety of worship opportunities to this centering prayer retreat.
Registration deadline is Jan. 22. The cost $15 per person, which includes lunch.
The workshop offers a contemporary presentation of the discipline of centering prayer as silent communion with God beyond concepts, words and images. Centering prayer is a method of prayer, which prepares us to receive the gift of God's presence, traditionally called contemplative prayer. It consists of responding to the spirit of Christ by consenting to God’s presence and action within. It furthers the development of contemplative prayer by quieting our faculties to cooperate with the gift of God’s presence.
Centering prayer facilitates the movement from more active modes of prayer — verbal, mental or affective prayer — into a receptive prayer of resting in God. It emphasizes prayer as a personal relationship with God. At the same time, it is a discipline to foster and serve this relationship by a regular, daily practice of prayer. It is Trinitarian in its source, Christ-centered in its focus, and ecclesial in its effects; that is, it builds communities of faith.
Centering prayer is drawn from ancient prayer practices of the Christian contemplative heritage, notably the Fathers and Mothers of the Desert, lectio divina (praying the scriptures), The Cloud of Unknowing, St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila. It was distilled into a simple method of prayer in the 1970’s by three Trappist monks, the Fr. William Meninger, Fr. Basil Pennington and Abbot Thomas Keating at the Trappist Abbey, St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Mass.
Download a registration form here.
