Centering Prayer 4+

This app is the perfect companion for beginning or continuing the journey of centering prayer. The creators don’t charge anything, and yet it has everything you need to begin, including a digital form of the pamphlet available on their website, which gives you the basics of centering prayer.

Using the app takes you through a process beginning with an opening prayer, followed by the centering prayer period itself, which you can adjust to a duration you’re comfortable with. You can also select the Bell sounds you prefer to open and close your prayer. After the prayer you’re encouraged to meditate on a closing text. The opening prayer and closing thought can be selected from a number of options available within the app itself.

In short, I cannot imagine a better app for free that provides the guidance and support this one does, and does so elegantly. The app was clearly designed by people who have no other motive than to introduce the practice of centering prayer to the widest range of people they can.

I love this app. I initially downloaded it to help me with the specific daily prayer practice I was cultivating, and it was perfect for that. Yet as the year (or more) since then has unfolded, I find I use it as a sort of “spiritual spot check” to re-center me at times when I get spun out or off in some way - I’ll just do 5 minutes in the car, or even during my work day. I have used it to share a meditation time with friends during a hike or while on a retreat. I use it as a prelude to a form of journaling I do as spiritual inquiry, inviting God into the inquiry through contemplative prayer before I begin my writing time. The sounds are good, the prayer selection abundant, and the directions at the beginning succinct and clear. Thank you for this app - I have shared it happily many times over!

I have found the app a very useful aid in my CP practice. If you don’t know CP, it is simply meditation where when you become aware of a thought, you release it, by the use of a short word, silently spoken. Some people use breath or an image instead. And then there is another layer, the concept that you are by this means aware, gradually, that you are “in God”. Usually this is understood in Christian terms, but really, since in Centering Prayer, we release all images or ideas of “God”, it is applicable to any religion, even a spiritual practice that does not involve a deity of any kind, but is just a practice of pure awareness.

But the app is specifically Christian, so if that isn’t your tradition, it won’t be helpful for you, most likely. There are many books on CP, just do a search. Thomas Keating’s are foundational, then Cynthia Bourgeault, and David Frenette.