Contemplative Outreach

Contemplative Outreach was established in 1983 to help develop a network of individuals interested in the practice of Centering Prayer as taught by Father Thomas Keating. Three monks of St. Joseph's Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts are attributed with developing the practices used by Contemplative Outreach; Fathers Thomas Keating, William Meninger, and M. Basil Pennington. Fathers Meninger and Pennington began giving retreats to priests and nuns based on the 14th-century text The The Cloud of Unknowing, considered a classic in many cloistered monastic traditions. Father Keating was serving as the abbot at Spencer Monastery and encouraged this work. In 1983, Father Thomas Keating had retired to live at St. Benedict's Monastery in Snowmass, Colorado. After giving a retreat on Centering Prayer at the Lama Foundation the seeds of Contemplative Outreach were planted.

Contemplative Outreach is an ecumenical, international organization today, whose stated purpose is to:

The stated intent of Contemplative Outreach is to foster the process of transformation in Christ in one another through the practice of Centering Prayer.

Contemplative Outreach offers a number of different retreats and teachings with Centering Prayer and Lectio Divina as the primary methods used to enter into contemplative prayer.

Centering Prayer is a generic term used today for many different methods of prayer and meditation. In Contemplative Outreach it is based on the four guidelines developed by Father Meninger and based on The Cloud of Unknowing.

As abbot of St. Joseph's Abbey, Fr. Keating attended a meeting in Rome in 1971. At the meeting, Pope Paul VI called on the members of the clergy to revive the contemplative dimension of the Gospel in the lives of both monastic and laypeople. Believing in the importance of this revival, Fr. Keating encouraged the monks at St. Joseph's to develop a method of Christian contemplative prayer with the same appeal and accessibility that Eastern meditation practices seemed to have for modern people. A monk at the abbey named William Meninger found the background for such a method in the anonymous fourteenth-century classic The Cloud of Unknowing. Using this and other contemplative literature, Meninger developed a simple method of silent prayer he called The Prayer of the Cloud.

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