Thomas Keating - The Heart of the World: An Introduction to Contemplative Christianity

All Biblical quotations are taken from

T HE R EVISED S TANDARD V ERSION OF THE B IBLE ,

Old Testament Section, Copyright 1952;

New Testament Section, First Edition,

Copyright 1946; Second Edition

1971 by Division of Christian Education of the

National Council of the Churches of Christ

in the United States of America.

Journey to the Center

Meditations on the Parables of Jesus

Intimacy with God:

An Introduction to Centering Prayer

Crisis of Faith, Crisis of Love

Open Mind, Open Heart

The Mystery of Christ:

The Liturgy as Spiritual Experience

Invitation to Love:

The Way of Christian Contemplation

Awakenings

Reawakenings

The Kingdom of God Is Like

The Fruits and Gifts of the Spirit

Manifesting God

The Human Condition:

Contemplation and Transformation

The Better Part: Stages of Contemplative Living

A s a member of a community of Cistercian monks since 1944, I have had the rare opportunity to absorb the contemplative tradition of Christianity within the context of monastic practice and experience. In recent years, my position in the community has brought me into contact with many Christians who remain almost totally unaware of the spiritual potential contained in their own tradition. They had turned to the East in the hope of finding a teaching and practice that would satisfy their hunger for spiritual experience. My own exposure to Eastern methods of meditation began in the 1960s. It awakened in me a deep appreciation of these values. These Eastern methods have expanded my understanding of the mystery of Christ and the message of the Gospel. Moreover, they mirror aspects of Christian mysticism overlooked in recent centuries. The contemplative dimension of life, present in all the great religions, is the common heart of the world. There the human family is already one.

In our time, Pope John XXIII said on his deathbed, we should emphasize what unites rather than what divides. It is only with Vatican II that the Catholic Church explicitly embraced the values of the non-Christian religions and officially recognized in them the face of Christ; hidden no doubt, but truly present and revealing the mystery of God.

Although the recognition of the values of the non-Christian religions is a step forward, it is only the beginning. It is a fact that the message of Christ has never really been preached in a non-Western frame of reference. We inherited the Greco-Roman worldview, and it was through the Fathers of the early Church, most of whom were Neoplatonists, that the mystery of Christ was originally explained in theological terms. It was explained in the Middle Ages by St. Thomas Aquinas and others in terms of Aristotelian philosophy. More recently, efforts have been made to express Christianity in terms of phenomenology, existential philosophy, and Marxism. But up until very recently it has not been presented in terms that would be understandable to Eastern culture and tradition.

The genuine traditions of spirituality of the East and Christianity are coming together in a confrontation that should be complementary rather than contradictory. Christianity and the great religions of the East have developed distinctive approaches to the Absolute that could significantly enrich each other. The aspects of Eastern spirituality which could be of special value to Christianity today are: the importance of contemplation as the source of action, the illusory nature of our subjective view of the world, the experience of non-duality, and the practice of techniques which help to integrate the mind and body.

We will be in a better position both to examine the religious experience of the East and to represent our own tradition if we can first rediscover the forgotten richness of contemplative Christianity. The transcendent as well as the imminent dimensions of Christ must be recovered from ancient and medieval Christian tradition.

This book emerges from the conviction that the tradition of Christian spirituality and mystical wisdom needs to be presented today as an integral part of the proclamation of the Gospel and of Christian education. It is news to most of our contemporaries that there is such a thing as a Christian spirituality that can be experienced.

This book is an attempt to outline the principles of that spirituality for those in the Christian community who are eager to incorporate a contemplative dimension into their lives. This book is also for Christians who have turned East for spiritual experience and who now would like to integrate that experience into their Christian background. Finally, it is addressed to those of other spiritual traditions who are interested in dialogue with the Christian tradition.

The original inspiration for this book came from John Osborne in the fall of 1977. As a student at Yale Divinity School and of Eastern methods of meditation, he visited me in the hope of discovering ways of integrating his studies and meditation practice into his Christian training and background. He was representative of many others I had already met who were students of Zen, Insight Meditation, Transcendental Meditation, and other Eastern practices. My interest in Johns concerns prompted him to make a tape recording of two of our conversations. Later he circulated these among friends and colleagues who were also looking for an expression of their Christian faith in terms of spirituality and experience. Their favorable reaction, along with encouragement from other sources, prompted me to think that this material might be useful as an introduction to contemplative Christianity. With Johns assistance, I edited the original taped conversations and expanded them from their question and answer format to the present form of this book.

Thomas Keating

M onastic life has been the guardian of much of Christian spirituality throughout the ages. Christian monasticism dates from the early part of the fourth century. It sprang up almost simultaneously in Egypt, Syria, and Asia Minor. While it expressed its inspiration in various concrete forms, all of them shared the same fundamental dedication to the search for God through silence, solitude, simplicity of lifestyle, and a discipline of prayer. These spiritual values were generally lived within a community that provided an environment conducive to the search for God.

Spiritual development is the birthright of every man and woman, not only of cloistered monks and nuns. Monastic life is simply a professional way of going about it. While the world as a whole tends to neglect and forget the knowledge of how to pursue and live a spiritual life, the monastic world has been occupied through the ages by trying to preserve that knowledge. At this moment of history, there are large numbers of genuine seekers after truth. Many of them never had a specific commitment to one of the Christian denominations, or even to any religion. Others, who were raised as Christians or Jews, never heard any challenge to lead an interior life of prayer and union with God in their local churches or church-related schools.