Love Is Who We Are

"Nothing reduces pride more than self-knowledge. If we are discouraged by it, we have misunderstood its meaning.
~ Thomas Keating

Oh Father Thomas, I’m such a failure. I’ve had ten thousand thoughts! ~ “How lovely, Ten thousand opportunities to return to God.”

“Everybody is culturally conditioned to some degree. Even the greatest saints only reach a certain degree of freedom from cultural over-identification. That over-identification is challenged in Centering Prayer. We spend the first part of our lives finding a role—becoming a mother or father, a professor, a doctor, a minister, a soldier, a business person, an artisan, or whatever. The paradox is that we can never fully fulfill our role until we are ready to let it go. Whoever we think we are, we are not. We have to find that out, and the best way to do so, or at least the most painless way, is through the process that we call the spiritual journey. This requires facing the dark side of our personality and the emotional investment we have made in false programs for happiness and in our particular cultural conditioning... To be really healed requires that we allow our dark side to come to full consciousness and then to let it go and give it to God…

If we don’t allow the Spirit of God to address the deep levels of our attachments to ourselves and to our programs for happiness, we will pour into the world the negative elements of our self-centeredness, adding to the conflicts and social disasters that come from over-identifying with the biases and prejudices of our particular culture and upbringing. This is becoming more important as we move into a global culture and into the increasing pluralism of religious beliefs.

What are we going to do when we are surrounded with people whose belief systems are quite different from our own? Where will our support come from? Instead of finding support that will back up our own belief system, we might look more profitably for the self-differentiation that enables us to be fully ourselves, with the acceptance of our limitations. As we become more aware of the dynamics of our unconscious, we can receive people and events as they are, rather than filtered through what we would like them to be, expect them to be, or demand them to be. This requires letting go of the attachments, aversions, “shoulds,” and demands on others and on life that reflect the mentality of a child rather than that of a grownup. The latter, under normal conditions, is responsible for his or her choices.

This is a big project, but it is not yet spiritual maturity... None of us knows until we have been through difficult problems and tragedies what we would do in a challenging situation.

Once I attended a panel discussion of people who had suffered during the Holocaust. One woman had survived the Holocaust, but her parents had been killed. She started a humanitarian organization to prevent such horrors from being repeated and mentioned casually, “You know, I couldn’t have started that organization unless I knew that, with the situation just a little different, I could have done the same things that the Nazis did to my parents and the others in the concentrations camps.” This woman, it seems to me, possessed true humility—the knowledge of one’s self that clearly perceives that with just a little change of circumstances, one is capable of any evil. The spiritual journey is not a career or a success story. It is a series of humiliations of the false self that become more and more profound. These make room inside us for the Holy Spirit to come in and heal. What prevents us from being available to God is gradually evacuated. We keep getting closer and closer to our center. Every now and then God lifts a corner of the veil and enters into our awareness through various channels, as if to say, “Here I am. Where are you? Come and join me.”

In the Near East, centuries ago successive cultures built new cities on top of the last ones. For some reason, people didn’t bother using new space; they just burned down what was there when they defeated an enemy and built something new. The ruins of these ancient cities built one on top of the other are called “tells.” The spiritual journey is like an archaeological dig through the various stages of our lives, from where we are now back through the midlife crisis, adult life, adolescence, puberty, early childhood, infancy. What happens if we allow that archaeological dig to continue? We feel that we are getting worse. But we are really not getting worse; we are just finding out how bad off we always were. That is an enormous grace. From a vertical point of view, our conversion begins at the place we are now in our relationship to God. First we clear off the brush, stones, and debris at the top of our interior “tell.” Our agreement with the divine therapist is to allow the Holy Spirit to bring us to the truth about ourselves. This initial period of conversion corresponds to the springtime of the spiritual life, when prayer is easy, and we have great energy in pursuing practices of self-denial, various forms of prayer, ministry, and other forms of social service. As we begin to trust God more, we enjoy a certain freedom from our vices and may often experience great satisfaction in our spiritual endeavors.

When God decides we are ready, he invites us to a new level of self-knowledge. God withdraws the initial consolations of conversion, and we are plunged in darkness, spiritual dryness, and confusion. We think that God has abandoned us. Because we don’t enjoy the same emotional experiences as before, we think that God must have departed for the next universe and couldn’t care less about us. This is especially poignant for people who have felt rejection in early life; now they feel they have been rejected by God, and that is the ultimate rejection. The dark nights are especially tough on them. But if they can wait them out, they will be completely healed of their sense of rejection for good when they rediscover God at a deeper level of faith. Instead of going away, God simply moves downstairs, so to speak, and waits for us to come and join him. Perhaps God wonders what the grumbling is all about. What makes us think God has gone away? The divine presence can’t go away. God is existence and fills everything that exists (St. Thomas Aquinas). The Gospel teaches that Christ is present in the storm, not just emerging from the storm.

Some films are like the parables in the Gospel; they bring to our attention moral, social, and spiritual issues that we wouldn’t otherwise learn about through the medium of ordinary words. I remember seeing the movie Love Story and for three days afterward, I was in tears. The plot is simple enough. It concerns a young man and woman who are totally in love with one another, live for each other, and are everything to each other. Then she is diagnosed with an inoperable cancer and in a few months is dead. The whole meaning of his life is wiped out. In the last scene, we see the man after leaving the hospital where his wife died, walking slowly into the fog, which gets thicker and thicker. He sits down on a park bench. As the movie’s theme song plays in the background, the screen just gets darker and darker.

I realized that this was a parable of my experience after putting everything into seeking God and finding more and more delight in the embrace of God’s presence in contemplative prayer. Then God seemed to walk out of my life, abandoning me in a church pew, so to speak. In the dark nights, consolations on the spiritual journey, including the rituals and practices that previously supported our faith and devotion, fail us. Faith becomes simply belief in God’s goodness without any taste of it. It is trusting in God without knowing whom we are trusting, because the relationship we thought we had with God has disappeared.

Here the great wisdom saying of Jesus comes to mind: “He who seeks only himself brings himself to ruin, whereas he who brings himself to nothing for my sake discovers who he is” (Mt 10:38). To bring oneself to nothing—no thing—is to cease to identify with the tyranny of our emotional programs for happiness and the limitations of our cultural conditioning. They are so strong in our culture that even our language reflects them. We say, “I am angry.” But you are not angry; you just have angry feelings. You may say, “I am depressed.” No, you are not depressed; you have feelings of depression. It is not feelings that are the problem, but what we do with them that matters. The freedom to deal with them and to confront them with reason and faith is what makes us fully human. The beginning of our spiritual conversion is followed by a transition period that is always dark, confusing, and confining. Then comes a period of peace, enjoyment of a new inner freedom, the wonder of new insights. That takes time. Rarely is there a sudden movement to a new level of awareness that is permanent. What happens when we get to the bottom of the pile of our emotional debris? We are in divine union. There is no other obstacle.

As long as we are identified with some role or persona, we are not free to manifest the purity of God’s presence. Part of life is a process of dropping whatever role, however worthy, you identify with. It is not you. Your emotions are not you. Your body is not you. If you are not those things, who are you? That is the big question of the second half of the spiritual journey. The process of spiritual growth is like a spiral staircase. It goes down, and it also goes up. Every movement toward the humiliation of the false self, if we accept it, is a step toward interior freedom and inner resurrection. This new freedom is not control; it is the freedom not to demand of life whatever we used to feel was essential for our particular idea of happiness. The divine therapy is an extraordinary project. Only God could have thought it up, and only God can persuade people to do it. I don’t say that this will necessarily happen to everyone. But we are offered the opportunity. The priority we give to the invitation is up to us.

There is an impressive story in the Zen Buddhist tradition, which I presume to paraphrase here, about a meeting of the Buddha toward the end of his life with eighty thousand disciples at a place called Vulture Peak. When they all had gathered there and meditated together for a long time, the Buddha stood on a platform and lifted up a lotus flower with his two hands high above his head. As he did so, all the monks entered into a profound state of oneness with the lotus flower and with all creation. The silence grew deeper and deeper as they all transcended their personal self-awareness and became lost in the consciousness of the Ultimate Reality. Suddenly, a monk standing next to the Buddha started to laugh. His raucous laughter resounded off the mountaintops and shattered the sacred silence, creating instead in the vast assembly a stunned immobility. The Buddha slowly lowered the lotus flower and turned to the monk. He immediately handed him the lotus flower, the symbol of imparting to him the fullness of the dharma. Or, in handing him the lotus flower, did the Buddha simply recognize that this monk, by his laughter, manifested a more sublime state of unity with the Ultimate Reality than all the other monks?

The ultimate abandonment of one’s role is not to have a self as a fixed point of reference; it is the freedom to manifest God through one’s own uniqueness... God leads some people through the most terrible anguish and pain to the same place. Here is an example.

A young man with AIDS was dying in a hospital, and he was literally shaking from the fear of death. What had been communicated to him as a child was an emotionally charged idea of God as an implacable judge ready to bring down the verdict of guilty, or a harsh policeman ever on the watch— someone you would want to avoid encountering. The young man was afraid of dying and going to meet this hazardous God whom he had heard about in early childhood. One of the nurses came into his room, and he asked her, “Can you do something to help me?” She said, “I can give you a treatment called therapeutic touch.” He replied, “Please do.” The nurse began the gentle treatment. At one point his eyes rolled back, and the nurse thought he was going to die, but she kept on with the treatment. When she finished, he opened his eyes and said, “You’ll never know what you just did for me. I have experienced unconditional love.” About an hour later, he died. If we have not experienced ourselves as unconditional love, we have more work to do, because that is who we really are.”

~ The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation ~ Father Thomas Keating is a 94 year old Trappist monk known as one of the architects of Centering Prayer, a method of contemplative prayer, that emerged from St. Joseph’s Abbey in 1975. Keating has published 36 books, including his most recent title, REFLECTIONS ON THE UNKNOWABLE, in 2014.