I began my sabbatical last week with three days of retreat at a friary. Amidst the rhythms of prayer and seaside walks, I read Fr Thomas Keating’s Invitation to Love. I haven’t read any of his work before, but I wanted to deepen my practice of centring prayer and a quick bit of research suggested that this book would be a good place to start. I say deepen my practice of centring prayer; it would be more honest to say resuscitate. There have been times when I’ve got into something of a rhythm with periods of 10-20 minutes of silent, contemplative prayer (charismatics might be more familiar with the language of soaking or sitting in the presence or abiding) but since parenthood arrived, I have barely managed a handful of unhurried stints of resting in God.
The book draws fairly heavily on mystics like St Anthony, John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, as well as some psychology. I feel the need to check the psychology in with friends who know about that sort of thing, I’m not sure how well it has aged since the early nineties. Regardless, it was a good, challenging read.
Keating speaks particularly into a dilemma I have tried to articulate before: the challenge of change and spiritual growth when my go-to methods of change and growth – discipline, self-help and hard work – are exactly the things that I want to change.
Much of the book is about the journey from the false self to the true self. Keating describes the false self as the ‘emotional programs for happiness’ that we learn from a young age – those motivations, patterns, values, and practices that we learn in order to survive and to meet unmet needs.
Crucially, we cannot take the journey from the false self to our true, in-Christ selves by relying on the methods provided by the false self:
‘The conscious resolution to change our values and behaviour is not enough to alter the unconscious value system of the false self and the behaviour they engender’
This hits against the same dilemma I’ve been wrestling with. Keating’s solution?
‘Only the passive purification of contemplative prayer can affect this profound healing’
In previous posts I’ve wrestled with the idea of surrender – and the danger that the language of surrender can be Christian-ese for abdicating responsibility for my own discipleship. Keating seems to be suggesting that contemplative practices – and especially centring prayer – are how we surrender, how we learn to depend on God and not on the ‘emotional programs for happiness’ of the false self.
A sabbatical seems like a good time to try this out, so I’m aiming to sit in silence, to rest in God ‘beyond thoughts, feelings and commentaries,’ for at least 20 minutes a day. So far, I’ve mostly found the practice quite frustrating – I’m confronted with the sheer volume and mundanity of my internal chatter, and with my discomfort for silence. But Keating would urge caution with expecting quick results from the practice. I think he’s right when he warns that ‘our expectations of what should happen and our commentaries about what is happening are the causes of most of our anxiety and distress.’ The goal is communion with God: becoming the integrated, calm, non-anxious person of love I have been created to be. But Keating is clear that God will inevitably surprise and subvert our methods of getting there.
Let’s see how it goes.
Notes From the Potting Shed 