Carl Arico is a priest of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Newark, New Jersey. A founding member of the Contemplative Outreach Spiritual Network and vice president of Contemplative Outreach Ltd., he has been active in the Centering Prayer movement since 1975.

People from all religious traditions tend to think that prayer involves our efforts to reach God and to verbalize what is on our minds and in our hearts. Arico emphasizes another way of understanding prayer as God's work and God's gift. Our attention to the divine all around us is a form of prayer. We are called to let go of our lives and desires and to surrender to the present moment. This approach of receptivity and silence is called the apophatic tradition. In a wonderful chapter titled "Superstars of the Christian Tradition," Arico ponders the words of many early spiritual writers who have explored this path of receptivity and silence.

The author moves on to a description of the spiritual journey with the following stages: Inception, Individual Creation, Pre-immersion, Immersion in Creation, Emergence through Creation, Personal Conversion, Spiritual Engagement, Spiritual Marriage, and Personal Death. Arico then uses these stages to explore the spiritual life of Thomas Merton. This excursion makes a fitting entry to the Lectio Divina tradition which is a four-part discipline built around the practice of reading Scripture.

A second practice of the apophatic tradition is Centering Prayer, which Arico sees as both a relationship with God and a discipline that addresses three major obstacles to the spiritual journey: overconceptualization, hyperactivity, and overdependence on self. By doing so, it makes room for contemplation as a gift of God. The author of The Cloud of Unknowing offers many insights into this kind of prayer, including the use of the simple word, the loss of self, the place of Christ, and the primacy of love. Arico closes with a meditation on the fruits of this prayer practice. The appendix contains a piece by Father Thomas Keating on the method of Centering Prayer.