De-Centering Prayer

Philosopher Merold Westphal has a great essay on prayer in the newest Christian Century:

Praise presupposes, I believe, a prior kenotic gesture, an inner posture from which all five elements of prayer most properly emerge. It is the willing decentering of the self. Ironically enough, it is utterly fundamental to what is increasingly called centering prayer. For centering prayer is anything but positing the self as its own center; it is rather a movement from oneself toward God both at and as the center of one’s being.