St. Paul says, "If anyone is in Christ He or she is a new creature" (2 Cor. 5:17). As we dismantle the false-self system, the new self arises with the awakening of the true self. That is the new creation that Paul refers to. The old creation that is passing away is the world of the false self.

The means that the Spirit uses to purify our conscious and unconscious lives are called the Seven Gifts of the Spirit. They are distinguished from the charismatic gifts of prophecy, healing, speaking in tongues, interpretation of tongues; inspired preaching, discernment of spirits, administration, speaking with wisdom and knowledge, and working miracles (1 Cor.l2:4-11). These special gifts are designed to encourage the Christian community, but do not themselves transform the person who has such gifts. The Seven Gifts of the Spirit, on the other hand, are acts and movements of the Spirit that purify and raise us to a divine mode of knowledge through the growth of the theological virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity (Divine Love), which are the transforming virtues in the Christian scheme of things. Isaiah 11:2 lists these gifts as Wisdom and Understanding, Counsel and Fortitude, Knowledge and Fear of the Lord. The Septuagint and Vulgate versions of the Bible add Piety.

The Holy Spirit, through the Gifts, is especially our guide in the practice of Centering Prayer and in accompanying programs to bring its effects into daily life. The presence of the Holy Spirit within us is always inviting us to listen to the delicate inspirations that gradually take over more and more aspects of our lives, and to transform them from expressions of our false self into manifestations of our true self and of the infinite goodness and tenderness of the Father.

The Seven Gifts of the Spirit are intimately connected with the growth of the theological virtue of Charity within us, not only through acts of love of God but also through the way that we relate to other people. As Charity grows stronger, all the Gifts become more and more in evidence. They are like the fingers of a child's hands, which are not capable of much except to reach out and touch your nose. Given a little time and development, however, these same fingers grow and may become capable of incredible skills, such as playing Rachmaninoff on the piano or creating a great piece of art. They become incredible instruments for beauty, goodness, and truth.

So it is with the Seven Gifts. They are infused into our inmost being at the moment of Baptism or the desire for Baptism. We can assume that every genuine seeker of God has them. In the sacrament of Confirmation, the activity of the Gifts is enormously enhanced. Every time we receive the Eucharist, which is a reaffirmation of all that is contained in the sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation, we also receive an increase of the Gifts of the Spirit.

The Seven Gifts of the Spirit are habitual dispositions. A habitual disposition is a way of acting that is permanent, easy, and delightful. The habits infused by the Holy Spirit enable us to enjoy God in some degree and enjoy being like God. The ripe fruits of the Gifts are the Beatitudes, which mean literally, "Oh, how happy you will be," or, as another translation puts it, "Congratulations!"

What are you really doing when you sit down in Centering Prayer and open yourself to God's presence and action within you? You are opening to God's presence and consenting to God's activity. God's activity is the work of the Holy Spirit in your particular embodiment in this world. Jesus refers to the Father's gift of the Spirit in the following passage: "Who among you if your child asks you for a piece of bread would give him or her a stone?" Two thousand years ago in Palestine, bread was designed like flat stones, as is pita bread today Again, Jesus says: "Which one of your children if he or she asked you for a fish, would give him or her a snake?" Around the Sea of Galilee some fish looked like snakes because they had the shape of eels. Jesus concludes: "If you with your limitations know how to give good things to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him" (Luke 11:11-13).

There are two ways of asking. One is to put our request into words: "Give me this." Another is to hunger with our entire being, to be a bundle of desperation asking for what we most need or desire. The latter is the basic attitude we assume in Centering Prayer. We are pleading for the supreme gift of the Spirit simply by consenting to God's will and action.

There is another place in the gospels that seems to refer to Centering Prayer in a special way. It is when Jesus said to his disciples in the Sermon on the Mount, "If you want to pray, go into your private room and pray to your Father in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you" (Matt. 6:6). In those days, very few people had any room at all, let alone a private room. Ordinary people lived in one-room houses where the whole family had to make do. Thus we can presume that this passage is meant to be taken metaphorically. When we are told to enter into our private room, we are being invited to enter our inmost being and there pray in secret. Secret from whom and from what, you may ask? Secret from external things, from our thoughts, and from ourselves. St. Anthony the Great is recorded as saying that the only perfect prayer takes place when we do not know that we are praying. Such is the most secret kind of prayer. It brings us into the presence of the Hidden God, the God who is in secret.

Abba Isaac, one of the Desert Fathers and member of a fourth-century lay contemplative movement, has an important commentary on this text, which is quoted in the Ninth Conference of Cassian. Cassian was a Western monk who visited the monasteries of Egypt in the fourth century and later carried their spiritual wisdom to the West. Much of that wisdom eventually found its way into the Rule of St. Benedict and continues today in Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries, and I might add, in all who practice Centering Prayer. Here is Abba Isaac's commentary:

We need to be especially careful to follow the Gospel precept which instructs us to go into our private room and shut the door so that we may pray to our Father. And this is how we do it. We pray in our private room whenever we withdraw our hearts completely from the tumult and noise of our thoughts and worries and when secretly and intimately we offer our prayers to the Lord.

In letting go of all our thoughts in Centering Prayer, we follow this advice and enter into our private room. We close the door on our ordinary mental activities such as feelings, images, memories, reflections, as well as perceptions of sensory details from outside such as people and noises in the room or physical things going on inside us. With regard to all the functioning of our ordinary psychological awareness, we simply close the door. In fact, Jesus said, according to some translations, "bolt the door," emphasizing how completely we are to let go of our ordinary level of psychological awareness in order to open ourselves to the spiritual level of our being and to the Divine Indwelling present in secret at the root of our being.

Abba Isaac explains further: "We pray with the door shut when, without opening our mouths and in perfect silence, we offer our petitions to the One who pays no attention to words, but looks hard at our hearts." In other words, God looks at our intention much more than our attention. In Centering Prayer our basic disposition is "Fill me with your Holy Spirit, the supreme Gift, according to your promise. I don't know how to ask rightly, so I sit here waiting, asking you to pray in me, asking for what you most want to bestow, your Holy Spirit."

Finally, Abba Isaac concludes:

We pray in secret when, in our hearts alone (not in our imagination, memory, reasoning and sensations) and in our recollected spirits (with our intentionality directed to God's presence), we address God, and reveal our wishes only to Him and in such a way that the hostile powers themselves have no inkling of their nature. (Italics mine.)

Our openness to the Spirit might be compared to baby birds opening their beaks for the worm that one of their parents is bringing. Practically half the baby bird is its wide-open mouth. The early monastic Fathers and Mothers believed that if you entertain a thought or image, the demons can tell what you are thinking about and can insinuate just the right kind of temptation to withdraw you from the original purity of your intention. We might also look at it in the light of what we call "the unloading of the unconscious."

Thoughts that emerge from our unconscious as a result of the deep rest of contemplative prayer could easily be interpreted as temptations because of their intense and disturbing character. When they come from repressed memories, emotions arise just as we experienced them in early childhood, so it sometimes feels as if we are being tempted. In fact, we are simply invited by the Spirit to accept the fact of these primitive emotions and to let them go. By coming to consciousness, the feelings' negative energy is released. Hence, we are now more open to the free flow of grace and the positive energies of the unconscious. Until the storehouse of the body is emptied of repressed material and the undigested emotional junk from early childhood, our capacity to respond to the Spirit is limited. When that evacuation occurs through the process of contemplative prayer, our bodies themselves become more cooperative and support the movement of the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit within us.

Continued . . .

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Excerpted from Fruits and Gift of the Spirit by Fr. Thomas Keating

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