Toward Blooming by

Michael Valliant

For 17 years, I have driven one or both of my daughters to school in the morning. Those drives are done now, with my younger daughter just graduating from Easton High School. It’s a chapter that is finished in her life and in mine. The story moves to what is next. If we focus too much on what is ending, we might miss what is about to begin. My best mornings include time for centering prayer, which is a way of praying developed most recently by a Trappist monk named Thomas Keating. Keating died in 2018 and was a pioneer and proponent of a worldwide movement of contemplative prayer. In his book Open Mind, Open Heart, he writes, “The purpose of centering prayer is not to experience peace, but to clear the unconscious obstacles to the permanent