It sounds like a strange self-help book, and on a lot of levels it seems like a strange self-help book, but Keating is striving for something deeper, and at moments he achieves it. A proponent of contemplative prayer, Keating was instrumental in reestablishing a mode of Christian worship that had been lost in all the Enlightenment mess for hundreds of years. Keating's description of the practice is simple: Spend twenty to thirty minutes twice a day clearing your mind of thoughts. That's it. It's not a visionary or ecstatic experience: "What is the essence of contemplative prayer? The way of pure faith. Nothing else. You do not have to feel it, but you have to practice it" (11).
Keating is at times trite and spacey, but he drifts into clarity and insight at moments: "Contemplative prayer is a way of tuning into a fuller level of reality that is always present and in which we are invited to participate" (37). He draws on the disciples' waiting in the garden: "Jesus said, 'Watch and pray.' This is what we are doing in centering prayer. Watching is just enough activity to stay altert. Praying is opening to God" (39). And he says the effects of this practice are subtle but life-altering: "[Y]ou must look for the fruit in your ordinary daily life, after a month or two. If you are becoming more patient with others, more at ease with yourself, if you shout less often or less loudly at the children, feel less hurt if the family complains about your cooking—all these are signs that another set of values is beginning to operate in you" (38-39).
Keating's emphasis on the everyday, his deep conviction that the contemplative life does not need to be lived out in a cloister, pushes forward the immediacy of his thought. And despite the looseness and the therapyness (and the spotty copyediting), he at times almost convinces me:
"The union that one discovers in contemplative prayer will not be reserved to that time. Moments of silence will overtake you in the course of daily life. Reality will tend to become more transparent. Its divine Source will shine through it. . . . As the unconscious is emptied out, the awareness of the deepest level in us is also an awareness of the deepest level in everyone else. This is the basis for the commandment to love one's neighbor as oneself. . . . Augustine had a phrase for it: 'One Christ loving himself.' That is a good description of a mature Christian community. You are aware that a power greater than you is doing everything. Then everything begins to reflect not only its own beauty but also the beauty of its Source. . . . Divine love is not an attitude that one puts on like a cloak. It is rather the right way to respond to reality. It is the right relationship to being, including our own being" (102-103).
No comments:
Post a Comment