Spring/Summer 2001 Newsletter

The Theological Foundations
of Contemplative Outreach

A Commentary by Thomas Keating
(Part One of a Two-Part Series)

1. Contemplative Outreach is a spiritual network of individuals and small faith communities committed to living the contemplative dimension of the Gospel in everyday life through the practice of Centering Prayer.

    Contemplative Outreach is a spiritual network and a living organism. Like any living organism it needs nurturing and guidance. At each level of its growth an appropriate response is called for. The resources that people need will shift as they grow because their needs will be different. It is the responsibility of the leadership to listen to these needs, and then find creative solutions for what people say that they need. Thus, the mutual listening throughout the whole spiritual network is one of the fundamental principles to which we are committed.

    In the words of the Vision Statement, we are "a network of individuals and small faith communities committed to living the contemplative dimension of the Gospel in everyday life." One of the chief concerns of most people who begin the practice of Centering Prayer is how to live the contemplative life in their everyday world. They want to know how to work contemplative prayer and action into the realities of a society that is moving at an ever faster clip, with more and more noise, busyness and less and less respect for periods of solitude and silence. There is a lack of spaciousness in our culture. Western society is characterized by the increasing speed of communication. We don't have time to sit down and read a letter quietly because the writer wants an email in return. It is because of this sort of pressure that many people ask themselves, how can we possibly make a commitment to the Centering Prayer practice in daily life? Where can we find twenty minutes twice a day? How can we take a day of retreat when all our family, relatives, and friends want us to do something else? How can we pursue the spiritual journey if our spouse or other members of the family are jealous of the time we give to God? All these are practical problems that need to be addressed. The small faith community is a place where those who are committed to the Centering Prayer practice can find support and encouragement.

2. The contemplative dimension of the Gospel manifests itself in an ever-deepening union with the living Christ and the practical caring for others that flows from that relationship.

    "The contemplative dimension of the Gospel" refers to the spiritual meaning and significance of sacred scripture. From this perspective, enlightened by the inspirations of the Holy Spirit, we do not read the text like a newspaper, book, even a sacred book, but as an interaction with the word of God present not only as the source of the text, but also present in us. Centering Prayer awakens us to the Eternal Word of God dwelling within us. The external word of scripture reinforces our conviction of the presence of the Word of God within us. We begin to read scripture with the perspective and inspiration of the ones who wrote it. Under the influence of the Spirit we penetrate the meaning of the text and the significance of the symbols of the Old and New Testament, especially the meaning of the wisdom sayings of Jesus, his example, and the wonderful richness of the stories taken from John's Gospel which are paradigms of God's grace in our own spiritual journeys.

    Scripture, from the contemplative perspective, is the penetration of the meaning of the sacred text as an expression of our own experience of grace. We perceive that the same grace that was offered to the people in the Gospel is the source of our own experience of prayer and of daily life. We confidently identify with Peter, James, John, Mary of Bethany, Martha, and Lazarus. As we perceive our interior life described in those stories, we begin to relate to Christ in a new way. The Spirit inspires us to listen as the Spirit inspired the sacred writer to write. Scripture is so profound that everybody's private life is laid out there. The awareness that the Spirit is within us inviting us to live in imitation of Christ, empowers us to be Christ in the world, to become a kind of fifth gospel, manifesting the goodness and tenderness of God in our daily lives. We become the word of God through the contemplative dimension of scripture.

    As we penetrate the scripture through contemplative prayer, we awaken to the Spirit's movements within us more and more. This awareness leads to an ever-deepening union with Christ, living our lives with us and sometimes for us, extending the message of the Gospel to the people in our particular circle of loved ones, friends, and the people we work with.

    The contemplative dimension of the Gospel changes the way we live daily life. This is what is meant by the phrase "the practical caring for others" which is the complementary side of the contemplative dimension of the Gospel. Caring for others in this sense is sharing the Fruits of the Spirit: charity, joy, peace, meekness, faithfulness, goodness, patience, self-control, and gentleness, through which the Spirit manifests the mind of Christ in our lives. The Beatitudes are even more profound assimilations of Christ's teaching and example flowing from the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit - reverence, fortitude, piety, counsel, knowledge, understanding, and wisdom. The Fruits of the Spirit and the Beatitudes are the signs that Christ is actually living in us. They continue to grow and manifest themselves in various ways. One of these ways is the purification of the unconscious and the consequent liberation from our false selves. Every time we move to a new relationship with Christ, every other relationship goes through a paradigm shift so that we relate in a new way and at new depths to God, ourselves, other people, the cosmos, and to the events in daily life.

3. Centering Prayer consists of responding to the call of the Holy Spirit to consent to God's presence and action within. It furthers the development of contemplative prayer by preparing our faculties to cooperate with this gift.

    This principle distinguishes the practice of Centering Prayer from the gift of infused contemplation. The question might be asked: How do we know when Centering Prayer becomes infused contemplation in the strict sense of the word? We don't necessarily know. And it is not the best question to ask because it focuses our attention on ourselves. Certainly this much is true; Centering Prayer cannot be judged on the basis of the psychological content of a particular period of the prayer. Centering Prayer is rather a discipline to prepare us for the kind of silence that leads to the experience of the presence of God at ever-deepening levels through the deep rest conveyed by the practice. Centering Prayer will hasten the Night of Sense, which, according to St. John of the Cross, is the beginning of infused contemplation. The length of the Night of Sense cannot be predicted because it is different in every person. God decides how much time it will take depending on one's vocation and preparation. It is a spiritual rite of passage that moves us away from an over-dependence on our psychological experience and lets go of our desire for sensible consolation in prayer that comes from the false self and its constant search for satisfaction. The Night of Sense over time lays that desire to rest. Our experience may then open out in one of two directions. One is an exuberant mysticism in which consolations of a spiritual kind tend to multiply. Or we may encounter what St. John of the Cross calls the "hidden ladder" or the "hidden staircase," which is perhaps a quicker path to divine union than the other, but which is in a rather bare, boring and sometimes dry-as-dust experience. It takes a lot of determination to wait it out.

    Both of these experiences move into another interior rite of passage that is called the Night of the Spirit in which the Holy Spirit searches the deepest recesses of our unconscious and heals the psychological wounds of a lifetime. The Spirit also awakens the spiritual capacities that are hidden in the unconscious. These are the Fruits and Gifts of the Spirit and, above all, the presence of our Creator and Redeemer who is the source of our being at every level and whose presence is manifested in varying degrees according to the purifying and liberating process of the dark nights. Centering Prayer is primarily for beginners. Beginnings may take a long time for many of us because we can't give it our full attention or because there is a significant amount of psychological disturbance due to our false selves. This is a time when we need to be faithful to the basic practice and to experience its effects in daily life. These are often quite subtle or even hidden from us. The Fruit of the Spirit called patience enables us to get used to the experience of waiting upon God and to grow in ever-increasing confidence in God. A subtle peace arises in the Night of Sense that is not so much a consolation as a growing attraction for solitude and silence even in the midst of activities that may be very demanding.

4. The source of Centering Prayer, as in all methods leading to Christian contemplative prayer, is the indwelling Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Its focus is the deepening of our relationship with the living Christ. Its fruits are ecclesial: it builds communities of faith and bonds the members together in charity.

    Centering Prayer, like all methods leading to contemplative prayer, has its source in the divine indwelling of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That is the fundamental principle on which contemplative prayer is based. Faith in the divine indwelling changes our whole perspective. Instead of beginning the spiritual life with ourselves and reflecting unduly on our sins or false selves and all the things we need to do to try to establish peace in our psyche, it starts out with the fact that God is already here. We have everything we need in order to begin, continue, and complete the spiritual journey. The New Testament celebrates a right relationship with God. The realization grows that the divine presence is within us and the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are living their own interior life within us. At the deepest level we are more God than ourselves. The divine indwelling also needs to be recognized and affirmed in various ways that are helpful in daily life. The promise of Jesus to those who believe in him is that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit will come and make their permanent abode in them. Actually, God is already present to us as the source of our being before the issue of grace arises. When we sit in Centering Prayer we are sitting with our life's companion who is always available to us. Unfortunately, we are not always available to God. The goal of the journey is to manifest God both in the deep rest of contemplative prayer and in activity: to experience his presence in prayer, and then to move into activity without losing the sense of the Source of all that is. As the contemplative dimension of our prayer increases, we perceive the presence of God in everything and everything in God. The divine indwelling becomes a living relationship within and evident in everyone else who also enjoys the divine indwelling.

    The focus of Centering Prayer is the deepening of our relationship with the living Christ, that is, the glorified Christ risen in our hearts and abiding forever in the Christian community. We enter into Christ's passion, death, resurrection, and ascension by consenting to God's affirming and purifying action within us. As we sit in Centering Prayer, we identify with Christ on the cross and are healed of our emotional wounds. The final point of this theological principle is the fruits of Centering Prayer, which we say are ecclesial. This is an important dimension of Centering Prayer. One cannot have a deep contemplative life without its being social at the same time. The way that we express this relationship to others, this interdependence with others, will differ according to our state in life. The tendency of the prayer is to bond with others who practice it. The community is not just people gathered together visibly.

    What is a Christian community? It is a place where we find like-minded people joined together to help each other grow into divine union. A contemplative community is focused on the essence of what church really is, that is, a community of people called together by God to experience the fullness of the divine life as a community and not just privately. Hence, the need to celebrate it together through various forms of ritual and worship as well as in periods of silence.

5. A commitment to the regular practice of Centering Prayer is the primary expression of belonging to the spiritual network.

    Everybody who practices Centering Prayer regularly is part of the spiritual network of Contemplative Outreach. Among all the things we may do by way of service, the greatest is to practice the prayer. Service does not take the place of the two daily periods of Centering Prayer. The greatest service we give each other is actually being faithful to our commitment because in doing it we are invisibly reinforcing it and putting the vibrant energy of contemplative prayer into the community. That is more valuable than any other service, however generous it might be. Without that, you will find that service will begin to diminish in its effectiveness. It needs to be said over and over again that the first expression of belonging to the spiritual network is to be available to God on a daily basis. St. John of the Cross used to say, "If you find you are too busy to give time to a daily period of prayer, double it!" If you do it regularly, you will find that you actually have more leisure time and you see that there are a lot of things that you don't have to do that you used to think were necessary. Busyness diminishes because of a new perception of what is important. By our daily fidelity to the prayer, life begins to change of itself.

    There are also practices to bring the effects of Centering Prayer into daily life. Contemplative prayer is allowing God to become the center of our lives rather than maintaining the false self and ourselves as the center of the universe. At some point there is a paradigm shift in everything we do. Sometimes we did things for ourselves or simply because they had to be done. Take daily work for instance. Nobody is saying to stop doing that. What I am saying is to start doing it for a different reason, namely, as a manifestation of our experience of Christ and not just as a way of earning a living. Centering Prayer is a way of bringing Christ and our experience of divine wisdom into everyday life, family, professional career, business, or whatever we are doing. That is why we call service in the Contemplative Outreach milieu, "contemplative service". The motive and inspiration of our activity comes from the insights we are receiving in Centering Prayer and our service to others is thus gradually being reinforced by its regular practice.

 (to be continued)

Other Spring/Summer 2001 News Articles

Fr. Keating's Commentary | President's Letter  |  Spanish Corner  |  A Poem  |  Book Reviews  |  Updates