The Mystery of Christ
The Liturgy as Spiritual Experience

by Father Thomas Keating

Chapter 2

The Easter-Ascension Mystery

    On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. The one who obeys the commandments one has from me is the one who loves me; and the one who loves me will be loved by my Father. I too will love that person and reveal myself to that person [John 14:20 - 21]

Introduction

    The theological ideas of divine life and love, anticipated in Epiphany, the crowning feast of the Christmas-Epiphany Mystery, now come into clear focus. Once again, there is a prolonged period of preparation (lent) for the principal feast which is Easter. The Sundays after Easter develop the significance and fruits of Christ's resurrection, culminating in the crowning feast of the season, which is the Ascension.

Lent and the Human Condition

    The Spirit sent Jesus out toward the desert. He stayed in the wasteland forty days, put to the test there by Satan. He was with the wild beasts, and angels waited on him.

    After John's arrest, Jesus appeared in Galilee proclaiming God's good news: "This is the time of fulfillment. The reign of God is at hand! Reform your lives and believe in the good news!" 
[Mark 1:12 - 15]
Gospel of the First Sunday of Lent

    Easter, with its grace of interior resurrection, is the radical healing of the human condition. Lent, which prepares us for this grace, is about what needs to be healed.

    According to the evidence of developmental psychology, each human being recapitulates the pre-rational stages of development toward full reflective self-consciousness that the human family as a whole has undergone in its evolutionary ascent. In the first six months of life, the infant is immersed in nature and has no awareness of a separate identity. As the infant begins to differentiate a body-self, its emotional life clusters around its instinctual drives for survival/security, affection/esteem, and power/control. Image patterns, emotional reactions and behavior gravitate around these instinctual needs and create elaborate and well-defended programs for happiness (or programs to avoid unhappiness) that might be called "energy centers."  With the gift of language, the child begins to internalize the values of parents, peers and the prevailing culture, drawing its self-image, self-worth and value system from the values and expectations of the group. This process of socialization compounds the complex networking of the energy centers.

    The greater the extent to which the infant or child feels deprived of instinctual needs, the more its energies are invested in emotional programs designed to satisfy one or all of these needs. When these programs for happiness are frustrated, upsetting emotions such as grief, apathy, greed, lust, pride or anger instantly arise. If these emotions are painful enough, one is prepared to trample on the rights and needs of others, as well as on our own true good, in order to escape the pain. This leads to the behavior that we call personal sin. Personal sin is the symptom of a disease. The disease is the false-self system: the gradual building up of the emotional programs for happiness initiated in early childhood and expanded into energy center around which one's thoughts, feelings, reactions, mindsets, motivation and behavior gravitate. As each new stage of developing human consciousness unfolds, an increasing sense of separation emerges, along with the corresponding feelings of fear and guilt. We come to full reflective self-consciousness with the pervasive sense of alienation from ourselves, other people, and God. We feel more or less alone in a potentially hostile universe. We may even look back with longing to more primitive levels of awareness when we were able to enjoy life without self-reflection and hence without guilt feelings.

    As we approach the age of reason, our developing self-consciousness finds itself at a crossroad: on one hand, the urge toward personhood and consequent responsibility; on the other, fear of increasing responsibility and the guilt feelings associated with it. But instead of evaluating our emotional programs for happiness, our rational faculties justify, rationalize and even glorify them. Into the human predicament--and the liturgical season  of Lent--Jesus comes proclaiming, "Repent, for the reign of God is at hand."

    Genuine human growth incorporates all that is good on the more primitive levels of consciousness as one ascends to higher levels. Only the limitations of the earlier levels are left behind. For example, the need for security and survival, a biological necessity for the infant, has to be integrated with other values as the organism experiences the unfolding of its human potentialities. For a human being in whom the desire for security  has never been moderated by reason, there is never enough security no matter how much wealth or power is accumulated. Similarly, one who has not integrated the desire for affection and esteem, in the face of one critical remark, may require a week's vacation with tranquilizers to recover from the blow.

    Here is a parable from another tradition that might throw light on the meaning of repentance in the Christian perspective. 

    A Sufi master had lost the key to his house and was looking for it on the lawn outside, running his fingers through each blade of grass. His disciples came along and asked the master what had happened. "I have lost the key to my house," he said. "Can we help you find it?" they asked. "I'd be delighted!" he replied. With that  the disciples got down on their hands and knees beside him and started running their fingers through the grass, too. After some hours, one of them asked, "Master, have you any idea where you might have lost the key?" He answered, "Yes, of course. I lost it in the house." The disciples looked at one another in astonishment. "Then why are we looking for it out here?" they exclaimed. The master replied, "Because there is more light here!"

    This parable speaks to the human condition. We have all lost the key to happiness and are looking for it outside ourselves where it cannot possibly be found. We search outside because it is easier or more pleasant; there is more light there. There is also more company. If we look for happiness in emotional programs that promise happiness through symbols of security/survival, affection/esteem, or power/control, we can find plenty of help, because everyone else is trying to do the same thing. When we look for the key where it can be found, we may find ourselves alone, abandoned by friends and relatives who feel threatened by our search. Lack of support for the spiritual journey, not to mention positive opposition is one of its heaviest trials.

    When we decide to follow the call of Christ, we soon find our emotional programs for happiness in opposition to the value system of the Gospel which we have embraced. The false-self system, firmly in place from early childhood, does not drop dead upon request. Paul describes this experience poignantly when he writes,

    No matter which way I turn, I can't make myself do right. I want to, but I can't. When I want to do good, I don't; and when I try not to do wrong, I do it anyway. Now if I am doing what I don't want to, it is plain where the trouble is: sin still has me in its evil grasp. It seems to be a fact of life that when I want to do what is right, I inevitably do what is wrong. I love to do God's will, so far as my new nature is concerned; but there is something else deep within me, in my lower nature, that is at war with my mind and wins the fight, and makes me a slave to the sin that is still within me. In my mind I want to be God's willing servant, but instead I find myself still enslaved to sin. My new life tells me to do right, but the old nature that is still inside me loves to sin. Oh, what a terrible predicament I am in! Who will free me from my slavery to this deadly lower nature? Thank God! It has been done by Jesus Christ the Lord. He has set me free.
Romans 7:18 - 25 (The Living New Testament, Tyndale House Foundation, Wheaton, Ill.)

    The struggle between the old and the new self is a constant theme in the New Testament. The false self easily adjusts to the circumstances of the spiritual journey as long as it does not have to change itself. Thus, it manifests its radical self-centeredness in various expressions of human activity: in material pursuits such as wealth and power; in emotional satisfactions such as status and prestige; in religious aspirations such as fasting and acts of piety; and even in spiritual commitments such as prayer, the practice of virtue and every form of ministry.

    The Gospel calls us forth to full responsibility for our emotional life. We tend to blame other people or situations for the turmoil we experience. In actual fact, upsetting emotions prove beyond any doubt that the problem is in us. If we do not assume responsibility for our emotional programs influenced by them to the end of our lives. As long as these programs are in place, we cannot hear other people and their cries for help; their problems must first be filtered through our own emotional needs, reactions and prepackaged values. No amount of theological, scriptural or liturgical study can heal the false-self system, because as long as our emotional programs for happiness are firmly in place, such studies are easily co-opted by them.

    The heart of the Christian ascesis--and the work of Lent--is to face the unconscious values that underlie the emotional programs for happiness and to change them. Hence the need of a discipline of contemplative prayer and action.

More information can be obtained by reading the book The Mystery of Christ by Fr. Thomas Keating.  It is offered in our Book Store.