Over 30 years ago at a large Cistercian monastery, St. Joseph’s Abbey, in Spencer, MA, then Abbot Fr. Thomas Keating and monks, Fr. William Meninger and Fr. Basil Pennington, began to distill the Christian contemplative tradition of the desert fathers, Eastern meditation techniques and the prayer method laid out in the fourteenth century English classic, The Cloud of Unknowing, into the method of Centering Prayer we practice today.
Fr. Meninger has reread The Cloud of Unknowing more than two hundred times and taught this simple method to thousands. His book, The Loving Search for God, shares the message of love found in The Cloud in a way easily understood today.
The opportunity to see Fr. Thomas and Fr. William together is the opportunity to experience the past and the future in the exact moment. As did those who attended the first lay retreats at Spencer, we will share the spiritual insights and discoveries of Fr. Thomas, Fr. William, and Fr. Basil. The wisdom of their life experiences since Spencer promises an inspirational and rich insight into the loving search for God as described in The Cloud.
