Born To Mystery

"Just by the very nature of our birth, we are on the spiritual journey...

Once you have been born into this world you never die...

Seekers are people of faith even if they do not belong to a particular religion. Faith in this sense is deeper than one’s belief system. Belief systems belong to the level of pluralism; faith to the level of unity. Faith is constitutive of human nature itself. It is openness to Ultimate Mystery before it is broken down into various belief systems. It is the acceptance of authentic living with all its creativity and the acceptance of dying with its potential for a greater fullness of life.”

“When all striving ceases I awaken to behold ever-present Awareness keeping silent watch.”

“We may enjoy an experience of God that is so delightful that we may think all our troubles are over and we have at last completed the journey. Then after a few hours or a few days we find ourselves on the spiral staircase again and cannot even remember the pleasures of that transient experience of divine union. The whole purpose of this alternation is to bring the soul to the total transformation of love.”

“God is everywhere. The animals and flowers all manifest God’s presence, as does the marvelous ecological balance we’re becoming more aware of in recent times. Everything seems to work together over time to produce a certain consciousness of God’s presence.”

“Love has given humans very real gifts. The chief one is the divine indwelling, God’s own presence within us, sustaining us by this creative action and embracing us, or trying to heal or transform us through the redeeming love that is distinctively motherly. As the spiritual journey progresses, one comes face to face with the divine presence.”

“The ordinary circumstances of daily life bring back the same routines, and often the sense of going nowhere! But “nowhere” is where God is most active. God and daily life are always in dialogue and sometimes in a state of war. There is a struggle to figure out what god is saying in the events and circumstances of daily life and how daily life is meant to transform us… Listening to God in silent loving attentiveness, enables us to let go of our preconceptions and over-identifications with the events of daily life, which tends to dominate our emotional reactions rather than invite our free response.”

-- Father Thomas Keating is one of the foremost teachers of contemplative prayer in the Christian tradition. He was born in New York in 1923 and converted to Catholicism while a student at Yale University in the 1940s. He entered a cloistered Roman Catholic monastery of the Cistercian order. Keating is the former abbot of St. Joseph's Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts, and has resided at St. Benedict's Monastery in Snowmass, Colorado.