It might be even more explicit. We may begin to be aware that God, the Word made flesh, is dwelling at the very center of our being. In any case, the movement toward interior silence triggers a phenomenon that might be called centering. St. John of the Cross has a few words about this that are enlightening. He says that we are attracted to God as to our center, like a stone toward the center of the earth. If we remove the obstacles, the ego-self with all its paraphernalia, and surrender to God, we penetrate through the various layers of our psyche until we reach the very center or core of our being. At that point there remains one more center to which we may advance. This center is the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who dwell at the inmost center of our being. It is out of that Presence that our whole being emerges at every moment. To be at this center is eternal life. To remain at this center in the midst of activity is what Christ called the reign of God.¹

Once we are thoroughly established in interior silence, it accompanies or pursues us through our daily routine. While conversations with God on other levels will still arise spontaneously, interior silence is the essential conversation. However, because we are human, we need to conceptualize and express that experience. There must be a conceptual framework in order to verbalize and share this wonderful life with other people; and for a Christian that conceptual framework has to be a Christian framework. It is like learning a trade. By exercising a trade, we benefit other people and gain great satisfaction for ourselves. Every faculty is designed to enjoy its own exercise. So it is in the spiritual life. There is nothing more delightful than being concretely spiritual. Still, communion with God must be integrated into all the levels of our being so that this communion is experienced, not only on the level of interior silence, but on the level of thought, feelings, and action. Thus, if a Christian is meditating in the sense of transcending, he or she should at other times read and ponder the scriptures, trying to interiorize the word of God and conceptualize it, so that the word heard inwardly in silence is confirmed by the word heard outwardly. These two "words" are not contradictory. They are complementary and form one whole. They balance and reinforce each other. Thus, a Christian avoids falling into excessive subjectivity or excessive objectivity. Moreover, he or she will know how to express and stabilize the spiritual experiences thus received.

This is an important point. One young man I knew was in great anguish because he was having spiritual experiences of a profound character, but nothing in his religious training had given him any way of verbalizing them. He was like a man who was tongue-tied. He desperately wanted to find out whether his experiences were true or not. The only way he could recognize what he was talking about was through the expressions of negativity that he was using. This was a good indication that his spiritual experience had come to that level of deep faith that cannot be conceptualized. But his particular Christian background had not prepared him for that experience.

There are a lot of Christians, as well as other people, roaming about in the world today, who experience the unexpected invasion of God's presence every now and then, but do not know what to make of it. It can be scary. They are even more scared to tell their friends for fear they might be told, "You must be nuts. Better go see a psychiatrist."

In any case, Christians who are experiencing interior silence need to have a Christian conceptual frame of reference. There is one. If we can get acquainted with it, we will feel much more at ease, because we will be able to express our experience in terms of our faith. Even though we feel more at home at that silent level of communication with God, we will not be constricted in expressing it in other forms when these are appropriate. We will feel ill at ease at religious services that are superficial, perfunctory, and which do not provide adequate opportunities for silence, but faith must triumph over these human limitations. The Christian religion must be presented as a process of spiritual growth, an interior evolution toward eternal values which are to be experienced to an extraordinary degree here and now. Otherwise, the Gospel is not being preached in its entirety.

Unfortunately, human limitations have too often prevailed over the presentation of the Gospel in its entirety. The purity and simplicity of the Gospel have been diluted by the inroads of the secular culture, with its almost exclusive emphasis on analysis and on the use of technology in order to dominate nature, the world, and other people. Yet, it is at just this present moment that the world is on the threshold of a great spiritual confrontation between the East and Christianity. This confrontation could be one of the greatest moments in history. Never before have the Vedic and Buddhist traditions confronted the Christian tradition on so broad a scale. Unfortunately, what they are confronting is not Christianity in its primitive unity, but forms of Christianity which have been debilitated by four centuries of division among the various denominations, and by the consequences of the analytical approach.

The analytical approach can be very good in developing one aspect of the human potential. It has led to the advantages of the technological age, most of which we enjoy. Yet, it also has had the effect of stifling our intuitive faculties, at least in their contemplative dimension. It has made Western culture very one-sided. Apart from a few geniuses, the intuitive side of most men, and I suppose of most women too, has been truncated. And now, with the burgeoning interest developing in the values of transcendent experience, many Christians are unaware of the fact that their own tradition is rich in spirituality and mystical wisdom. Christian mysticism was highly developed in previous centuries and can be called upon at this time, both to understand the Christian experience and the spiritual traditions of the East.

Where are we to learn these truths? A good start would be to take steps to provide adequate training in seminaries so that priests and ministers would be able to understand and transmit them. There are historical reasons why training in the area of spirituality has not been adequate. In the not-too-far-distant past, the general teaching in seminaries and novitiates was that one would be guilty of presumption or might even endanger his salvation, if he practiced anything but discursive meditation. The impression was given that it was almost better not to pray at all than to practice contemplative prayer. While this situation has greatly improved, much work still remains to be done in novitiates and seminaries to renew the traditional spiritual teaching of the Church. Preaching the Gospel will never come to life unless priests, ministers, and seminarians, early in their training, have a profound awareness that Christianity is a life to be lived--an interior life that is incredibly rewarding and which has marvelous potential for development and growth. They cannot reach the fullness of their vocation without growing in interior prayer and spiritual development; nor can they make the Gospel alive for others without the gift of wisdom, which penetrates the meaning of scripture and grasps what Christ is actually saying. Today large numbers of people are looking for genuine spirituality, and unless they find it articulated precisely where they are--on the parish level or on college campuses-they will just go down the street in search of someplace else.

There should be a center of Christian spirituality somewhere in every diocese-a place where people who are well instructed in prayer are available. Clergy who do not have special training or the necessary experience could then refer people to these places. Such centers might also be places where people trained in Eastern practices could be helped to integrate this knowledge into a Christian frame of reference.

Without the presentation of the contemplative dimension of the Christian religion, the Gospel is not being fully proclaimed, because the most important part of it is being left out. Until now, Christianity has made next to no inroads in the East because it did not bring the contemplative dimension of Christianity to peoples whose traditions are profoundly contemplative.

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1} St. John of the Cross, Living Flame of Love (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971), Stanza I, 12.
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Excerpted from The Heart of the World by Fr. Thomas Keating

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