The Gift of Understanding is the penetration of the truths of faith. This may come during prayer, but is just as likely to come outside the time of prayer. The inspirations of the Gift of Understanding are not ordinary thoughts but rather spiritual impressions or insights that arise spontaneously. Although the time of prayer is not normally the time to think about them, the effect of these inspirations remain with us after the time of prayer. We can then certainly enjoy and relish the penetrating knowledge of the mysteries of faith that they inspire. You may suddenly realize through such an experience what the Communion of Saints means. Or you may get a deeper penetration into the words "The Word was made Flesh." The truths of faith are like the surface of the ocean pointing to the depths, but they do not show us what is underneath the surface, unless the Spirit illumines their deeper meaning. The Gift of Understanding reveals what is hidden in the major truths of Christian doctrine.

The Gift of Understanding perfects, deepens, and illumines faith as to the meaning of revealed truth, adding new depths to the mystery to which we consent. For instance, it could be some aspect of the Holy Trinity or the greatness of God. It could be the presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. It could be the infinite mercy of God in the Sacrament of Reconciliation. In other words, it is not merely the affirmation of something we believe and assent to. A characteristic of the Gift of Understanding is that it provides a kind of living experience of the mystery One or two of those experiences can last a lifetime and make such a deep impression as to reorient one's whole spiritual life once and for all.

The plank of wood in our own eye to which Jesus refers is a hint that the Gift of Understanding will reveal to us the basic character of our nothingness. This is not a disaster but simply the truth. We are created out of nothing. Given who we are, we have no basis whatever to judge anyone else. The reference to the speck in our neighbor's eye and the beam in our own is a humorous way of inviting us to a deeper understanding of ourselves and enabling us to accept ourselves as we are, whatever that may be.

How does the Gift of Understanding work? Or what are the psychological effects of its direct activity? To answer these questions I will share a personal experience. Perhaps it will jog your memory into some similar experience of your own that enlightened you to the nature of the precious Gift of Understanding and how it enlarges one's perspective of God and the mysteries of faith.

When I was a young man at Yale University I experienced a deep spiritual conversion. I found in the Sterling Library there a set of books on the four Gospels by the Fathers of the Church called the Catena Aurea, "The Golden Chain."

Those commentaries opened my eyes once and for all to the fact that the contemplative dimension of the Gospel is the most important aspect of the Christian religion. The Fathers of the Church interpreted the Gospel from that perspective. They called their interpretation the "spiritual sense" or the "allegorical sense" of scripture. There have been different words for this understanding of scripture in different times.

The Second World War was just beginning when I graduated from boarding school. Bombs were falling on Britain and the Blitz was on. Our graduation was overshadowed by the fact that we might not have a future. I had to drop out of Yale because of previous commitments when the course was accelerated because of World War II.

I went to Fordham University for a few months, waiting to be drafted. During the holidays I used to visit the family home on Long Island, and I walked a couple of miles to Mass every day because of the gas shortage. The dear old housekeeper of the local rectory, who was in her eighties, saw this devout young man walking to church and decided he should be in a seminary. She accosted me one day and said, "You must really see the Monsignor. He is very fatherly."

I had no interest in seeing the Monsignor, because I wasn't at all attracted to being a diocesan priest. But I had nothing to lose, so I went to see him, and he did indeed have a fatherly concern for me. He was also a saintly person. He said, "Let me arrange an interview for you with the Bishop."

The Monsignor made the arrangements and I went to see an auxiliary bishop in Brooklyn, who found no difficulty in registering me as a pre-theological student in the diocesan seminary. I received a deferment. As it turned out, my draft number had come up and it was at the very last moment that I received the deferment. Still, I felt uneasy because my friends were all being drafted and some were getting killed. The Monsignor, who himself was dying of cancer, sensed my anxiety and said to me, "This war is not meant for you." For some reason, his words lodged in my heart and gave me a deep peace, in spite of the fact that I seemed to be a draft-dodger to all my relatives, friends, and to myself.

Because I was under twenty-one, I could not enter a monastery without written permission from my parents. They were vigorously opposed to the idea, so I waited until the required date approached and entered the Cistercian monastery in Valley Falls, Rhode Island in January 1944. That was about the time of Anzio Beach and the Italian campaign. I entered the monastery specifically to pray for the soldiers and victims of the war. I was well aware that I had been spared from this terrible war through no merit of my own. I chose the Trappists because they were the strictest order I could find. In those days it was believed that the more austere way of life you practiced the more likely you were to become a contemplative. I no longer hold that view, but since I strongly held such views at that time, I entered into the full rigors of the life with a willing heart.

Twenty-one years later I was abbot of the monastery and the Second Vatican Council was concluding. Religious orders were called upon to review their rules in the light of the Gospel and modern life. For the first time in 900 years, the observances of the Cistercian order were being reviewed. This was extremely upsetting for many monks. The Trappist life was very austere. We rarely spoke to anyone except the abbot and the novice master. We got up at two o'clock in the morning, engaged in vigorous fasting, heavy manual labor, and long hours chanting the Divine Office in church. We rarely wrote home or received family visits and never went home even for sickness or a funeral in the family. It was a kind of death. My father described it as entering a tomb. He thought that was the end of all the efforts and expense he had put into my education.

With the prospect of a number of profound changes in monastic lifestyle, many cloistered communities were severely polarized. Some monks wanted to be faithful to their original commitments and were profoundly disturbed by any suggestion of change. Others were more liberal and wanted to implement the experiments that were now available to each community. Some abbots at the renewal chapter were like racehorses at the gate, waiting for the signal to take off and implement all the approved experiments. When the permission came, the race was on.

I was in Rome on one occasion with a number of abbots discussing the burning questions of change. They were all more or less distraught. The abbot in a monastery at the time was the man responsible for the final decision in any discussion. Since the monks all wanted different things, it was a no-win situation. There was a sense of frustration, and even desperation, as to what specific choices should be made in the way of experimentation. There also was no time to review issues carefully enough to decide whether it was prudent to change or not. Sometimes life puts one in impossible situations that no novelist could possibly think up. Reality is more unpredictable than any book!

During this meeting, several weary abbots suggested that we take an afternoon off. We drove south and visited Anzio Beach. From there, we stopped at the American cemetery where thousands of American soldiers from the Italian campaign are buried. As I walked into the cemetery with my monastic companions, I looked at the crosses and the stars of David as we made our way down one seemingly endless row of graves. Suddenly I felt as if I was surrounded by friends. It was as if I had come home to a warm welcome among people who greatly loved me. I felt an increasing surge of gratitude that mysteriously surrounded me. I just could not believe what was happening and I tried to conceal my emotions from those who were with me. As I lingered there, I realized unmistakably that these soldiers were my special friends. It was as if they were saying: "Here is the guy who prayed for us when we were going up the Po Valley to be shot to pieces. Thanks for helping us with your austere life and prayers when we desperately needed them."

At that point the words of the Monsignor came back to my mind and I understood in a flash of recognition their profound meaning: "This war is not meant for you." The war from which I was mercifully spared did not mean that I did not have a different kind of war waiting for me. It was as if these friends were saying, "You are now in a war that is going to last even longer than ours. We will help you to get through it." I realized I would owe them much more than they ever owed me.

Every now and then a doctrinal formula explodes into experience. I guess the one I received on that occasion was a vivid experience of the Communion of Saints. That doctrine affirms that those whom we have known and tried to serve in this life and who have gone before us are still close to us and are now trying to help us so that we can join them in due time. In any case, everything in human affairs is interconnected. Whatever we do for others now will someday be returned. Even modern physics tells us that, in the physical universe, everything is interconnected. Human beings are one family; we come from one source and are destined for one end. Some are a little further along, and some are falling back and trying again. That experience taught me that everyone is interrelated and that the veil between us and the next life is very thin indeed. That experience gave me the courage to fight the battles assigned to me. Indeed, the war for which God reserved me has lasted a long time. I'm not sure it is over yet.

Words that are casually dropped, as were the words of the Monsignor, but lodge in the heart are called "words of wisdom." They are one of the charismatic gifts described by Paul in I Corinthians 13 and convince you that through them God is communicating something important to you.

Death is only a part of the process of living. If the Communion of Saints has become real for us, then every funeral is a celebration of eternal life. That is the great insight of the Mass of the Resurrection, the new funeral rite. Death is not an occasion only for sorrow, but an occasion of rejoicing that our friends or relatives have moved to a deeper level of union and that we will be with them again. We may not think often of these relationships, but when the chips are down we have lots of friends, and they will never forget us.

The Gift of Understanding may illuminate any of the great truths of faith such as those that we assent to in the Apostles Creed. All of a sudden we penetrate their meaning experientially Then we know that the Gift of Understanding is working in us and is pushing our faith to new levels of penetration and beyond.

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

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