Centring Prayer

Continuing our series for Lent on different forms of prayer, Cameron Abernethy writes this time on the art of being still

Sometimes our hearts and minds can feel too busy to attempt to pray using words and it can be helpful to turn to centring prayer. Like many prayer experiences from across the spiritual traditions, it begins with taking time to notice our breathing and using this as a way of settling into prayer. As we let our awareness move from the thoughts in our head to the simple action of inhaling and exhaling, our bodies can relax and our minds settle down a little.

Within the Jewish and Christian scriptures, the word for breath can also be used for wind or spirit and so denote the active presence of God within the world. We might recall the image of the Spirit of God hovering over creation in Genesis or the dove coming to rest upon Christ after his baptism in the Jordan. Centring prayer can encourage one to notice the Spirit of God as she rests upon us and draws us deeper into God.

Here are a few simple guidelines for centring prayer:

1) Take time to find a comfortable position for your body. This is usually sitting in an upright manner, your feet flat on the ground and your hands resting in your lap. This should be a relaxed but alert posture.


2) Let yourself become aware of the sounds around you, those outside of the room and those inside of the room. Notice the sounds and let them fade into the background.

3) Slowly turn your attention to your breathing. Pay attention to the breath as it is moves in and out of our nostrils. Keep your focus there for a few moments

4) As you continue to breathe, begin to think of words to accompany each of the inhalations and exhalations. You might like to think ‘Jesus Christ’ as you breathe in and then ‘have mercy’ as you breathe out.

5) Stay here for a few minutes and rest in the presence of God’s Holy Spirit.

The Examen Prayer

The first in a weekly series for Lent, Cameron Abernethy leads us through a variety of forms of prayer for our personal use. Each of these was originally published in Cornerstone Magazine and are also available as a small booklet from the church.

A friend recently shared this joke with me – ‘The Franciscans, Dominicans, and Jesuits were having a big meeting that went well into the middle of the night. Suddenly all the lights went out in the meeting room. The Franciscans immediately took out guitars and sang songs, the Dominicans began pondering the meaning of the darkness and forming a sermon on the subject. But the Jesuits went to the basement, found the fuse box and reset the breaker.’

Putting such obvious stereotypes to one side, this joke seeks to illustrates the practical nature of Jesuit spirituality. One of the fundamental tools suggested by St Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuits, is the Examen Prayer. The aim of this prayer is to develop a growing awareness of God within daily life and support each person in more fully living out God’s love within the world.

Over the centuries, many different wordings of the Examen prayer, also called a Review of the Day, have been written. The one below is a more contemporary version of the Examen Prayer.

Step 1: Coming into God’s Presence
I settle myself for prayer, perhaps by being more aware of my breathing

Step 2: Review the day with gratitudeI allow the day to play through my mind like a video. I notice the joys of the day, no matter how small or insignificant they might appear.

Step 3: Pay attention to your emotionsI reflect on the feelings experienced today in both the joys and the sorrows. I ask what God might be showing me through these emotions.

Step 4: Stay with what seems significantI ask the Holy Spirit to bring my attention to something that God thinks is significant, no matter how small or mundane it appears.

Step 5: Look toward tomorrowI ask God for what I need for tomorrow to more fully live out God’s love in the world.

At the end of the Examen St Ignatius recommends talking to Jesus, as with a friend, about this time of prayer. In this conversation, or colloquy, it is useful to notice anything what was easy in the prayer and anything that was challenging. The time of prayer of usually concludes using the words of the Lord’s Prayer. Once familiar with the Examen prayer, it can be helpful to write one’s own version of the five steps.

More information on the Examen, including alternative versions, can be found at http://www.ignatianspirituality.com/

3-parent Babies, Scripture, Tradition and Reason

Stephen Holmes is Associate Rector at St John's. This is an extract from a recent sermon, the full text of which can be found online here



If you look at the gospels, exorcism is a way of speaking about Jesus’ cosmic battle with the powers of evil, his healing miracles are a way of responding to human suffering. An emphasis on miracles and exorcism is too narrow an understanding of this part of the ministry of Jesus and the church. Every time the church fights evil in society, it is being Jesus in conflict with demonic powers. Every form of relieving suffering is a participation in Jesus’ healing ministry. Fighting evil and relieving suffering are something every church and Christian should be doing.

It does, however, get us into difficult and complex areas, as the discussion of the recent Church of England submission on so-called ‘three-parent babies’ shows, where the church has been made to look either muddled or opposed to helping people. The procedure, now approved by Parliament, involves the replacement of a small piece of DNA in the mitochondria, which are a sort of battery-pack in living cells, in order to prevent an inherited disease. As such this could be seen as part of Jesus’ healing ministry. The objection that this is ‘playing at God’ is incoherent as classical Christian theology recognises that humans have been given intelligence to cooperate with God’s creative work. The objection that one form of the procedure involves creating human embryos which will be destroyed is valid if you hold human life to be inviolable from conception but even in that case there is another form which takes DNA from an unfertilised egg. Given that most authorities still object to human genetic modification, the most serious objection is that the side effects of this therapeutic change to our inherited DNA are not known and this was the main reason for the Church of England’s call for restraint – despite senior scientists arguing that it is the DNA in the cell nucleus not that in mitochondria that makes us what we are. The Bishop of Swindon, has responded to this objection by saying that sufficient safeguards remain in place and the Jesuit ethicist Jack Mahoney has suggested that Christians who hold this view are actually agreeing with some atheist secularists that who we are is solely determined by our genetic makeup.

This is complicated and there are people in our congregation who can explain it better than me but it does mean two things. The Church of England report was actually broadly supportive of this therapeutic technique but the media spun it so that it seemed that here, as in so many other areas, the church was opposing progress that would help people. Jesus healed people in the open, the Church needs to ensure it not only is but is seen to be on the side of human flourishing. Secondly human life throws up complex problems, not least in the area of healthcare. Our faith demands that we use all the intellectual and scientific means at our disposal to respond to these. A simplistic reading of the Bible is useless, a Christian should rather use these ancient stories as an incentive to thought and tackle the problems using our God-given reason in dialogue with Scripture and the ongoing tradition of scientific and theological thought. We thus end with the classical Anglican triad of Scripture, tradition and reason. Not a bad way to approach Christian life in our world.

Assisted Dying

Kenneth Boyd is Professor of Medical Ethics at Edinburgh University and an ordained member of the St John's Ministry Team. He writes for our current issue of 'Cornerstone' Magazine....

Parliamentary attempts, in Westminster and Holyrood, to legalise assisted suicide so far have been unsuccessful: most elected politicians seem wary of the issue, unsure perhaps whether it is a vote-winner or a vote-loser. Surveys of British public opinion, by contrast, record large majorities in favour of legalisation, and in Europe and North America assisted suicide or voluntary euthanasia have become legal in a slowly, but steadily growing, number of states. It is possible therefore that something like Lord Falconer’s Assisted Dying Bill, currently being debated in the House of Lords, or like the late Margo MacDonald’s Holyrood Bills, will eventually succeed, enabling terminally ill adults to be provided with life-ending medication to take when they believe the time has come.

One of the main ethical arguments in favour of assisted suicide is that, unlike voluntary euthanasia (where, as in the Netherlands, the doctor injects the life-ending medication), the final responsibility is left in the hands of the person themselves. Distancing doctors from the act itself may also be seen as a way of reducing medical opposition which is currently greater than opposition among the general public. An additional argument for such legislation is that British citizens who are determined to seek assisted suicide would no longer have to do so far from home in a foreign country like Switzerland. That families or friends (but not professional carers) who may accompany them there have now been officially advised that in these circumstances they will not be prosecuted for assisting suicide, only increases the pressure for legalisation in the UK.

The main ethical arguments against legalisation derive in principle ultimately from ‘thou shalt not kill’, and in practice from the fear that no legislative provisions, however carefully drafted, will be able to prevent consequences at least as bad as those of not legalising. What might Christian traditions of moral thinking have to say about these?

The commandment ‘thou shalt not kill’ is fundamental to all traditions of Christian moral thinking: but it also requires interpretation in certain circumstances, such as when killing an aggressor may be the only way of preventing another person from being killed. Who or what may or may not be killed, non-human animals for example, also requires interpretation. Again, medical treatment intended to relieve terminal suffering which at the same time incidentally hastens death has traditionally been interpreted as morally justified under the Catholic doctrine of ‘double effect’. Today, when suffering is difficult or impossible to alleviate by other means, keeping some dying patients unconscious for a short time until they die can be seen as ethically as well as medically justified. The moral distinction between this and advancing the hour of death by more directly life-ending medication however may seem a very fine one, especially if that is what the dying patient has asked for. Insofar as this overlaps with assisted suicide, moreover, there are also different Christian moral interpretations of whether or not suicide is wrong in all circumstances: the distinction between suicide and self-sacrifice to save others sometimes again may be a fine one. The more significant issue here for Christian moral thinking therefore may not be so much what is done but why it is done.

Why it is done, motivation, may also be the key contribution of Christian moral thinking to practical concerns about the consequences of legalising assisted suicide. It may well be that no legislative provisions, however carefully drafted, will be able to prevent consequences at least as bad as those of not legalising – vulnerable elderly people requesting assisted dying because they feel they do not wish to be a ‘burden’ to others, for example, or weary health professionals assisting the suicide of a patient whose active life could be extended, or more meaningful death enabled, by more difficult means.

Central to Christian tradition is the insight that in order to work well, good laws have to be acted out by good people. Without love, in short, legalising assisted suicide gains nothing. ☩

Kenneth Boyd