Church offering opportunity for silent prayer

CLOVIS -- Every four weeks, Clovis’ First Presbyterian Church is offering everybody an opportunity for collective silence for 30 minutes.

“This is an opportunity for people of any or all beliefs, or none, to come together to create their own space in silence,” Melinda Joy Pattison, the psychotherapist who organized this opportunity for “contemplative prayer” for the church.

For the sessions held every fourth Tuesday, there is one rule, Pattison said.

Silence.

“They will enter in silence, and after 30 minutes, there will be an opportunity to leave the silence.”

In the secular world, contemplative prayer is comparable to “mindfulness meditation,” Pattison said.

Participants can “sit quietly in the pews, arrange themselves on the floor, bring a yoga mat, or walk around, as long as there is silence.”

The silence, she said, creates a “sweet space,” a “sacred space” for focusing the mind.

That is the goal of contemplative prayer and mindfulness, not clearing the mind, Pattison said.

Pattison said she uses mindfulness meditation in her psychotherapy sessions with patients, “as appropriate.”

Everyone can use a moment of solitude,” once in a while, she added.

She learned contemplative techniques from a Chinese medicine practitioner, she said, but they provide ”access to everyone. Everybody can do this,” no matter what their religious or cultural background.

The sessions at the church, she said, are meant to “bring people together for a common purpose and to come in silence. It’s very inclusive.”

The experience of the silence, she said is “really a whole-being experience. It deals not just with the spirit and the mind, but with the body and emotions.”

Pattison said she chose to introduce the contemplative prayer sessions to the First Presbyterian Church, because it is the church she belongs to and because “I was raised in the Christian tradition.”

Clyde Davis, an associate pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, said the church is welcoming this different approach to prayer and spirituality.

“We work as a team,” he said.

Pattison praised the church as being “very welcoming” to the opportunity to pray or meditate in silence.

There is so much division and unkindness in the world,” she said, and the periods of silence can be a break from the every-day turmoil.

Gathering for contemplative prayer, she said, “is encouragement. My hope would be that people take it up and practice on their own.”

And even if people cannot be present for the Tuesday sessions of silence, she said, “I hope they can join us in spirit wherever they are.”