Centering Prayer is a form of Christian contemplative prayer, to center awareness on the presence of God. This modern movement in Christianity was initiated by three Trappist monks of St. Joseph's Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts in the 1970s, Fr. William Meninger, Fr. M. Basil Pennington and Abbot Thomas Keating, in response to the growing popularity of Asian meditation methods. Name The name was taken from Thomas Merton's description of contemplative prayer, from which centering prayer draws, as prayer that is "centered entirely on the presence of God". In his book Contemplative Prayer, Merton writes "Monastic prayer begins not so much with 'considerations' as with a 'return to the heart,' finding one's deepest center, awakening the profound depths of our being in the presence of God". Origins The 20th century Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton renewed Christian interest in contemplative practices. He was an open-minded monk, who was influenced by Buddhist meditation, particularly as found in Zen. He was a lifetime friend of Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh, praised Chogyam Trungpa who founded Shambhala Buddhism in the United States and was also an acquaintance of the current Dalai Lama. His theology attempted to unify existentialism with the tenets of the Roman Catholic faith. As such he was also an advocate of the non-rational meditation of contemplative prayer, which he saw as a direct confrontation of finite and irrational man with his ground of being. Cistercian monk Father Thomas Keating, a founder of Centering Prayer, was abbot all through the 1960s and 1970s at St. Joseph's Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts. This area is thick with religious retreat centres, including the well-known Theravada Buddhist centre, Insight Meditation Society. Fr. Keating tells of meeting many young people, some who stumbled on St. Joseph's by accident, many of them born Catholic, who had turned to Eastern practices for contemplative work. He found many of them had no knowledge of the contemplative traditions within Christianity and set out to present those practices in a more accessible way. The result was the practice now called Centering Prayer. Seeds of what would become known as contemplation, for which the Greek term theoria is also used, were sown early in the Christian era. The creators of the Centering Prayer movement trace their roots to the contemplative prayer of the Desert Fathers of early Christian monasticism, to the Lectio Divina tradition of Benedictine monasticism, and to works like The Cloud