The diaspora of the Being of Fr. Thomas Keating is happening. Each of us have already received it — and will receive more as our consent deepens. We have been breathed upon. Now it’s up to us — through our practice, presence and participation, the transformative work of the Spirit will grow, unify and uplift the whole.
May the will of God be done in and through us.
Amen.
From Cynthia Bourgeault:
Fr. Thomas Keating and Cynthia Bourgeault
Thomas Keating has been my teacher, friend, and spiritual mentor for more than thirty years. It is he who laid the spiritual foundations of both my teaching and my practice and who launched me on my own path as a spiritual teacher and writer. He will be remembered as one of the giants of contemporary contemplative spirituality, not only for his groundbreaking work in Centering Prayer—which made contemplation truly accessible to Christian lay people for the first time—but also for the breadth and depth of his interspiritual vision, which kept growing in luminosity and compassion right up to his very last breath. I have never witnessed a more triumphant and powerful conscious death, modeling for us all the wingspan of spirit that can dwell in a life courageously and recklessly tossed to the winds of God.
https://cac.org/father-thomas-keating-memorial-service/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2018-11-01%20Thomas%20Keating%20from%20Richard&utm_content=2018-11-01%20Thomas%20Keating%20from%20Richard+CID_b1ff5e2b1f010306ba869fe8f654e0a3&utm_source=Campaign%20Monitor%20Google%20Analytics&utm_term=Click%20here%20to%20watch%20and%20read%20short%20reflections%20by%20CAC%20faculty%20Cynthia%20Bourgeault%20James%20Finley%20and%20me%20in%20which%20we%20share%20more%20about%20Keatings%20gifts%20to%20Christianity%20and%20the%20world#reflections
Fr. Thomas Keating
March 7, 1923 – October 25, 2018
To the worldwide community of Contemplative Outreach,
It is with deep sorrow that we share the news of the passing of our beloved teacher and spiritual father, Thomas Keating. Fr. Thomas offered his final letting go of the body on October 25, 2018 at 10:07pm at St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts. He modeled for us the incredible riches and humility borne of a divine relationship that is not only possible but is already the fact in every human being. Such was his teaching, such was his life. He now shines his light from the heights and the depths of the heart of the Trinity.
The monastic community from St. Benedict’s Monastery will join together with the Contemplative Outreach community for a memorial service in Denver, Colorado. The location, date and time of the memorial service will be announced shortly. The Center for Action and Contemplation will live-stream and record the service so that anyone who wishes may join remotely.
Details will be forthcoming for a 24-hour, worldwide prayer vigil, as well as suggested schedules and enrichment for local gatherings.
Please respect the privacy of St. Benedict’s Monastery and St. Joseph’s Abbey and do not call with questions.
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Fr. Thomas was born in New York City in 1923 and remembers having an attraction to religious life from a young age. He started college at Yale University and then graduated from an accelerated program at Fordham University. While in college, a spiritual director at a camp where he worked took the counselors to Our Lady of the Valley Trappist Monastery in Rhode Island, which he ultimately joined in 1944. He was ordained a priest in 1949. He first came to Snowmass, Colorado in 1958 as the appointed superior to help build and run the new monastery, St. Benedict’s. In 1961 he was called back to St. Joseph’s Abbey and served as the abbot for 20 years. During that time, he was invited to Rome in 1971, following the Second Vatican Council where Pope Paul VI encouraged priests, bishops and religious scholars to renew the Christian contemplative tradition. As an answer to this call, Fr. Thomas, along with William Meninger and Basil Pennington, drew on the ancient practice of Lectio Divina and its movement into contemplative prayer, or resting in God, to develop the practice of Centering Prayer. The initial idea was to bring the contemplative practices of the monastery out into the larger Christian community by teaching priests, religious and ultimately, laypersons. After 20 years as abbot, Fr. Thomas resigned and returned to St. Benedict’s Monastery. He became more fully immersed in bringing the contemplative dimension of the Gospel to the public by co-founding Contemplative Outreach in 1984.
Another outgrowth of Vatican II was that Catholics were given permission and encouraged to acknowledge the work of the Spirit in other religions. In God is Love: The Heart of All Creation, Fr. Thomas states, “No one religion can contain the whole of God’s wisdom, which is infinite.” One of Fr. Thomas’ lasting legacies is that for over 30 years, he convened inter-religious dialogue at St. Benedict’s, which became known as the Snowmass Conferences. It was an attempt to dialogue with and understand the contributions of the spiritual traditions of all religions and put to rest the cultural attitudes that lead to separation and violence.
As many of you know who have met him over the years, Fr. Thomas traveled worldwide to teach us about the Christian contemplative tradition and the psychological experience of the spiritual journey. He once told Mary Clare Fischer, a reporter for 5280 Magazine, that he thought the hardest thing about his commitment to monastic life would be the separation from the outside world because “I felt a great desire to share the treasures I had found in the way of a deeper relationship with God.” His seminal work on the Spiritual Journey Series is testament to his desire.
Within the last decade of his life, Fr. Thomas said, “I am at the point where I do not want to do anything except God’s will, and that may be nothing. But nothing is one of the greatest activities there is. It also takes a surprising amount of time! What time is left each day is an opportunity for God to take over my life more completely on every level and in every detail.” (God is Love: The Heart of All Creation).
Pat Johnson, a long-time friend and one of the founders of the retreat ministry at St. Benedict’s Monastery, had a recent conversation with Fr. Thomas wherein he expressed his gratitude for her service to Contemplative Outreach over many years. She says, “Here is this man at the end of his life, in pain, and still giving his all back into the universe. If ever I had an example of what it means to love unconditionally, this moment in time was one huge example. The greatness of his giving, the greatness of his humility, left me with nowhere to go, nothing to do, and the recognition that doing nothing takes a long, long time. … What an amazing model he is for all of us as we attempt to move through our lives with grace and strength!”
Fr. Thomas is now entrusting us to bear his message of love and transformation, to continue to pass on the wealth of the contemplative dimension of the Gospel and the method of Centering Prayer to the next generation. Just before Jesus was taken up from the disciples after his passion and resurrection, he said to them:
“It is not for you to know the times and the seasons,
which the Father has put in his own power.
But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you:
and you shall be my witnesses … to the ends the earth.
And when he had said these things, while they beheld,
he was taken up, and a cloud received him out of their sight.”
– Acts 1: 7-9
Fr. Thomas is now taken from our sight. Let us open ourselves more than ever to the indwelling presence of the Trinity as we deepen our unity in prayer and service. Let us continue to persevere in our consent to the presence and action of God within us and among us and allow the inspiration and the breath of God to move us and guide us as we seek to embody and pass on the gifts we have been so privileged to receive.
With deep gratitude and hearts broken open,
The staff and governing board of Contemplative Outreach, Ltd
Memorial videos:
Thomas Keating: A Life Surrendered to Love (19 minutes)
Sharing the Divine Nature – In Memory of Thomas Keating (2 minutes)
Centering Prayer: Becoming Nothing – In Memory of Thomas Keating (2 minutes)
Other:
From Rabbi Rami Shapiro:
“I just learned that my friend, teacher, and mentor, Father Thomas Keating has died. I was with him months ago and asked him how he was preparing to die. He cupped his hands and raised them from his lap to his chest saying, “Every time Thomas comes up, I let Thomas go,” and then he uncupped his hands and let them fall back into his lap. “When I die, Thomas will cease to come up.”
“And where will you go when you die?” I asked him.
“When you no longer come up there is no need to go anywhere,” he said with a smile.
“I loved this man, and will continue to do so.”
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National Catholic Reporter article
Letter to Fr. Thomas from Ken Wilbur
image courtesy of Cynthia McAdoo
https://mailchi.mp/coutreach/thomas?e=9e6f5a05f5
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Communal Contemplation |
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Black or Africana church brings communal and embodied contemplative practice to Western Christianity. Barbara Holmes stretches the narrow Eurocentric definition of contemplation beyond solitude and silence: The African American church developed rituals and practices that nurtured and encouraged congregational encounters with the mysteries of God. Always, the focus was on piercing the veil between secular and spiritual realms through shared experiences. . . . In Africana traditions, the desert mothers and fathers offer one model of contemplative practice; the songs of Alabama chain gangs at the turn of the century, the rhythmic chants amid cotton rows in Mississippi during slavery, and the murmured hymns of domestic workers offer yet another. Those of us who grew up and worshipped in historically black church congregations wonder how a religious tradition that values bodily spirit possessions and performative vocal entreaties to a personal God can be considered contemplative. The answer is hidden in plain view and is ensconced in historical presumptions about the boundaries and practices of contemplative worship. If the model for contemplation is Eurocentric, then the religious experiences of indigenous people and their progeny will never fit the mold. But if contemplation is an accessible and vibrant response to life and to a God who unleashes life toward its most diverse potentials [and if all are created in God’s image], then practices that turn the human spirit inward may or may not be solitary or silent. Instead, contemplation becomes an attentiveness of spirit that shifts the seeker from an ordinary reality to the basileia of God. . . . I have not always been able to predict when these abiding times would arise. The places differ significantly and are only connected by my presence in the midst of faithful and expectant people. I have found myself in the midst of a transformative contemplative moment while worshiping with the Turkana in northern Kenya, watching the procession of clergy and locals and hearing the sounds of drums and hymns. Perhaps it was the heat or incongruity of regal African men in Scottish liturgical garb in the middle of the desert that created the sense of spiritual displacement; perhaps not. I experienced similar moments on a hilltop in Sonora, Nogales, Mexico, as we sojourned with a family in their cardboard and corrugated tin home. Time seemed to stand still as we ate dinner together in the darkened room. Outside, another “temporary” refuge caught fire and burned. There was no way to save the dwelling, so we stood and silently prayed. Similar moments occurred while singing “Amazing Grace” in a Japanese Christian church in Onjuku and while giving birth to my sons surrounded by strangers and loved ones. The times and places are less important than the shared experiences of holy abiding. |
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To experience a taste of communal and vocal contemplative practice, listen to this moving song “Oh, Jesus.” Join your own voice—in moan and ecstatic cry—with this choir from Trinity United Church of Christ. [1] |
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[1] “Oh, Jesus,” Sanctuary Choir, Trinity United Church of Christ, Chicago, Illinois. Barbara A. Holmes, Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church, second edition (Fortress Press: 2017), xxxiii, 18-19.
Center for Action and Contemplation- week 38, 2018 |
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September 16 – September 21, 2018 Western Christianity
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To learn contemplative practice is to learn what we need so as to live truthfully and honestly and lovingly. It is a deeply revolutionary matter. —Archbishop Rowan Williams (Sunday)
Meditation [was] not a newfangled innovation, let alone the grafting onto Christianity of an Eastern practice, but rather . . . something that had originally been at the very center of Christian practice and had become lost.—Cynthia Bourgeault (Monday)
God is not just with us, not just beside us, not just under us, not just over us, but within us, at the deepest level, and, in our inmost being, a step beyond the true Self. —Thomas Keating (Tuesday)
Sin is primarily living outside of union; it is a state of separation—when the part poses as the Whole. It’s the loss of any inner experience of who you are in God. (Wednesday)
Addiction can be a metaphor for what the biblical tradition called sin. It is quite helpful to see sin, like addiction, as a destructive disease. . . . If sin indeed makes God unhappy, it is because God loves us, desires nothing more than our happiness, and wills the healing of our disease. (Thursday)
The word contemplation must press beyond the constraints of religious expectations to reach the potential for spiritual centering in the midst of danger. . . . During slavery, . . . crisis contemplation became a refuge, a wellspring of discernment in a suddenly disordered life space, and a geo-spiritual anvil for forging a new identity. —Barbara Holmes (Friday)
Howard Thurman (American Mystic. 1899 -1981)
rom a Commencement speech, Spelman College, 1980
The Sound of the Genuine
There is something in every one of you that waits, listens, for the sound of the genuine in yourself and if you cannot hear it, you will never find whatever it is for which you are searching and if you hear it and then do not follow it, it was better that you had never been born…
You are the only you that has ever lived; your idiom is the only idiom of its kind in all the existence and if you cannot hear the sound of the genuine in you, you will all yourself spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls…
There is in you something that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself and sometimes there is some much traffic going on in your minds, so many different kinds of signals, so many vast impulses floating through your organism that go back thousands of generations, long before you were even a though in the mind of creation, and you are buffeted by these, and in the midst of all of this you have got to find out what your name is. Who are you? How does the sound of the genuine come through you…
The sound of the genuine is flowing through you. Don’t be deceived and thrown off by all the noises that are part even of your dreams, your ambitions, so that you don’t hear the sound of the genuine in you, because that is the only true guide that you will ever have, and if you don’t have that you don’t have a thing.
You may be famous. You may be whatever the other ideals are which are a part of this generation, but you know you don’t have the foggiest notion of who you are, where you are going, what you want. Cultivate the discipline of listening to the sound of the genuine in yourself.
Now there is something in everybody that waits and listen for the sound of the genuine in other people… I must wait and listen for the sound of the genuine in you. I must wait. For if I cannot hear it, then in my scheme of things, you are not even present. And everybody wants to feel that everybody else knows that she is there.
I want to feel that I am thoroughly and completely understood so that now and then I can take my guard down and look out around me and not feel that I will be destroyed with my defenses down. I want to feel completely vulnerable, completely naked, completely exposed and absolutely secure… that I can run the risk of radical exposure and know that the eye that beholds my vulnerability will not step on me. That I can feel secure in my awareness of the active presence of my own idiom in me.
So as I live my life then, this is what I am trying to fulfill. It doesn’t matter whether I become a doctor, a lawyer, housewife. I’m secure because I hear the sound of the genuine in myself and having learned to listen to that I can become quiet enough, still enough to hear the sound of the genuine in you.
Now if I hear the sound of the genuine in me, and if you hear the sound of the genuine in you, it is possible for me to go down in me and come up in you. So that when I look at myself through your eyes having made that pilgrimage, I see in me what you see in me and the wall that separates and divides will disappear, and we will become one because the sound of the genuine makes the music
Eastern Christianity
September 9 – September 14, 2018
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The Cappadocian Fathers developed an intellectual rationale for Christianity’s central Matter and Spirit must be found to be inseparable in Christ before we have the courage and Christ is the Archetype of Everything. Just as some Eastern fathers saw Christ’s human/divine nature as one dynamic unity, St. Gregory of Nazianzus emphasized that deification does not mean we become God, [Gregory of Nyssa taught universal salvation from] a fundamental belief in The Eastern Fathers have always stressed . . . that if we are in Christ we participate
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Let me begin with one of my favorite passages from the brilliant philosopher Ken Wilber:
. . . Religion itself has always performed two very important, but very different functions. One, it acts as a way of creating meaning for the separate self: it offers myths and stories and tales and narratives and rituals that, taken together, help the separate self make sense of, and endure, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. This function of religion does not usually or necessarily change the level of consciousness in a person; it does not deliver radical transformation. Nor does it deliver a shattering liberation from the separate self altogether. Rather, it consoles the self, fortifies the self, defends the self, promotes the self. As long as the separate self believes the myths, performs the rituals, mouths the prayers, or embraces the dogma, then the self, it is fervently believed, will be “saved”—either now in the glory of being God-saved or Goddess-favored, or in an afterlife that ensures eternal wonderment.
But two, religion has also served—in a usually very, very small minority—the function of radical transformation and liberation. This function of religion does not fortify the separate self, but utterly shatters it—not consolation but devastation, not entrenchment but emptiness, not complacency but explosion, not comfort but revolution—in short, not a conventional bolstering of consciousness but a radical transmutation and transformation at the deepest seat of consciousness itself. [1]
This second function is the ultimate goal of all mature spirituality. This is the contemplative dimension of religion. As Thomas Keating says, “The primary purpose of religion is to help us move beyond the separate-self sense to union with God.” [2]
In the weeks ahead, we will focus on the transformational level of the Abrahamic religions where God is central and the goal is to be transformed into God’s likeness, rather than what I would call the transactional level where our ego or false self is central and we are trying to control God.
[1] Ken Wilber, One Taste: Daily Reflections on Integral Spirituality (Shambhala Publications, Inc.: 2000), 25-26.
[2] Thomas Keating and Joseph Boyle with Lucette Verboven, World Without End (Bloomsbury Continuum: 2017), 24.
Sunday, August 26, 2018
Rhor’s meditation
Early Christianity
Thursday, September 6, 2018
A brother was restless in the community and often moved to anger. So he said: “I will go, and live somewhere by myself. And since I shall be able to talk or listen to no one, I shall be tranquil, and my passionate anger will cease.” He went out and lived alone in a cave. But one day he filled his jug with water and put it on the ground. It happened suddenly to fall over. He filled it again, and again it fell. And this happened a third time. And in a rage he snatched up the jug and broke it. Returning to his right mind, he knew that the demon of anger had mocked him, and he said: “Here am I by myself, and he has beaten me. I will return to the community. Wherever you live, you need effort and patience and above all God’s help.” —Story of a desert father [1]
As the Christian church moved from bottom to top, protected and pampered by the Roman Empire, people like Anthony of the Desert (c. 250-c. 356), John Cassian (c. 360-c. 435), Evagrius Ponticus (c. 345-399), Syncletica (c. 270-c. 350) and other early Christians went off to the deserts of Egypt, Palestine, and Syria to find spiritual freedom, live out Jesus’ teachings, and continue growing in the Spirit. It was in these deserts that a different mind called contemplation was taught.
As an alternative to empire and its economy, these men and women emphasized lifestyle practice, psychologically astute methods of prayer, and a very simple spirituality of transformation into Christ. The desert communities grew out of informal gatherings of monks or nuns, functioning much like families. A good number also became hermits to mine the deep mystery of their inner experience. This movement paralleled the monastic pattern in Hinduism and Buddhism.
The desert tradition preceded the emergence of systematic theology and formal doctrine. Christian faith was first a lifestyle before it was a belief system. Since the desert dwellers were often formally uneducated, they told stories, much like Jesus did, to teach about essential issues of ego, love, virtue, surrender, peace, divine union, and inner freedom.
Thomas Merton described those early Christians in the wilderness as people “who did not believe in letting themselves be passively guided and ruled by a decadent state,” who didn’t wish to be ruled or to rule. He continues, saying that they primarily sought their “true self, in Christ”; to do so, they had to reject “the false, formal self, fabricated under social compulsion ‘in the world.’ They sought a way to God that was uncharted and freely chosen, not inherited from others who had mapped it out beforehand.” [2] Can you see why we might need to learn from them?
References:
[1] Western Asceticism, ed., trans. Owen Chadwick (Westminster John Knox Press: 2006, ©1958), 92.
[2] Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert(New Directions: 1960), 5-6.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Dancing Standing Still: Healing the World from a Place of Prayer(Paulist Press: 2014), 51; and
“Desert Christianity and the Eastern Fathers of the Church,” The Mendicant, vol. 5, no. 2 (Center for Action and Contemplation: April 2015), 1.
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The underlying messages that different religions and denominations use are often in strong agreement, but they use different metaphors to communicate their own experience of union with God. (Sunday) One way to summarize the substance of perennial wisdom (paraphrasing Aldous Huxley) is:
Our goal is to illustrate both the image and the likeness of God by living in conscious loving union with God. (Tuesday) Everything you see, think, feel, and imagine is part of and never apart from the same Source. We call this Source by such names as God, Reality, Brahman, Allah, One, Krishna, the Absolute, and the Nondual. The list of names is long; the reality to which they all point is the same. —Rami Shapiro (Wednesday) Awakening is the expression of that grace in which we see through our apparent separation and notice that we are already one with divine Presence and with all that is. All that is missing is awareness. —David G. Benner (Thursday) What do you want? If it’s union with Love, then listen to that longing and it will be a reliable guide to truth and intimacy. (Friday)
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