How Centering Prayer Helps Us - Thomas Keating at Folsom Prison

Fr. Thomas Keating's talk in Folsom, CA 12/17/99 with a group of prisoners who practice Centering Prayer discusses how in it we receive a kind of divine therapy in which God offers us our basic goodness and his love and forgiveness, we see the dark side of our personality and try to recover the likeness of God, and deep wounds from our past are allowed to come to consciousness and depart.

For info and worldwide support groups on Centering Prayer, visit Contemplative Outreach at http://www.contemplativeoutreach.org.

For info and support on prison ministry using Centering Prayer, visit Prison Contemplative Fellowship at http://www.uspcf.org.

Following is the first of three parts of a reflection on Centering Prayer at Folsom, "In Prison with Thomas Keating," by Judith Koock Strassman:

There is really no way to describe this phenomenon – Centering Prayer in Folsom State Prison. You would have to experience it yourself. I wish with all my heart that you get the chance. Fr. Thomas came to see for himself how his teachings were able to flower here in the harsh setting of the California prison system. Harsh setting – that’s an understatement. Folsom has been dedicated to incarceration since 1880.

High, cold, stone-gray walls, rolled barbed wire, towers, guards, search lights, surveillance cameras, high powered rifles with telescopes, heavy doors of barred steel -– 4,000 men walled in with their anger, bitterness, self-loathing, and ineffable sadness. Yet ironically, it is not unlike a monastery: individual cells, restricted access to the outside world, minimal life comforts, and unquestioned obedience to the rules.

The only thing missing is the quiet. And often it is the promise of quiet that first attracts inmates to try Centering Prayer – then the tiny glimmer of hope that a loving God is reaching out to them. For a new inmate, when the shock hits that he really being locked up to do a significant amount of time behind these walls, the feelings of disbelief and panic are overwhelming.

Just getting used to the regimen, the severe restriction on one’s ability to complain or to say anything about anything, the level of unrelenting noise. Just getting used to being locked in with another man in a 4x8 cell designed for one, with zero personal space, zero privacy. Just getting used to the endless rules and their strict enforcement - the written rules of the system and, even more critical, the unwritten rules of the yard. Infractions bring swift and painful punishment.

The prison world is so alien that new inmates, called “fish”, are put into a separate prison bloc until they learn to adjust. Prison has nothing to do with rehabilitation. A man who realizes he must change his life has almost no options here. The few rehab programs offered are booked solid, their waiting lists jammed.

That leaves only self-help – but how? What method? Most guys just settle in and grind out their time – time that is black, endless, unrelieved monotony. When they are released, nothing about them has changed. And in a flash, something happens they swore never would: they are back in prison again, serving another lengthy sentence. There is no way that Centering Prayer should show up here. It is impossible. Inconceivable.

But it has happened – is happening. Four hundred men are doing their daily practice in Folsom Prison. It began with individual men, searching on their own for relief, trying different forms of meditation and practicing alone in their cells.

For the next part of Judith's reflection, go to the description of the video at https://youtu.be/YMl0ZMxOuVI.

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