As a member of a community of Cistercian monks since 1944, I have had the rare opportunity to absorb the contemplative tradition of Christianity within the context of monastic practice and experience. In recent years, my position in the community has brought me into contact with many Christians who remain almost totally unaware of the spiritual potential contained in their own tradition. They had turned to the East in the hope of finding a teaching and practice that would satisfy their hunger for spiritual experience. My own exposure to Eastern methods of meditation began in the 1960s. It awakened in me a deep appreciation of these values. These Eastern methods have expanded my understanding of the mystery of Christ and the message of the Gospel. Moreover, they mirror aspects of Christian mysticism overlooked in recent centuries. The contemplative dimension of life, present in all the great religions, is the common heart of the world. There the human family is already one.

"In our time," Pope John XXIII said on his deathbed, "we should emphasize what unites rather than what divides." It is only with Vatican II that the Catholic Church explicitly embraced the values of the non-Christian religions and officially recognized in them the face of Christ; hidden no doubt, but truly present and revealing the mystery of God. *

Although the recognition of the values of the non-Christian religions is a step forward, it is only the beginning. It is a fact that the message of Christ has never really been preached in a non-Western frame of reference. We inherited the Greco-Roman world view, and it was through the Fathers of the early Church, most of whom were Neoplatonists, that the mystery of Christ was originally explained in theological terms. It was explained in the Middle Ages by St. Thomas Aquinas and others in terms of Aristotelian philosophy. More recently, efforts have been made to express Christianity in terms of phenomenology, existential philosophy, and Marxism. But up until very recently it has not been presented in terms that would be understandable to Eastern culture and tradition.

The genuine traditions of spirituality of the East and Christianity are coming together in a confrontation that should be complementary rather than contradictory. Christianity and the great religions of the East have developed distinctive approaches to the Absolute which could significantly enrich each other. The aspects of Eastern spirituality which could be of special value to Christianity today are: the importance of contemplation as the source of action, the illusory nature of our subjective view of the world, the experience of non-duality, and the practice of techniques which help to integrate the mind and body.

We will be in a better position both to examine the religious experience of the East and to represent our own tradition if we can first rediscover the forgotten richness of contemplative Christianity. The transcendent as well as the immanent dimensions of Christ must be recovered from ancient and medieval Christian tradition.

This book emerges from the conviction that the tradition of Christian spirituality and mystical wisdom needs to be presented today as an integral part of the proclamation of the Gospel and of Christian education. It is news to most of our contemporaries that there is such a thing as a Christian spirituality which can be experienced.

This book is an attempt to outline the principles of that spirituality for those in the Christian community who are eager to incorporate a contemplative dimension into their lives. This book is also for Christians who have turned East for spiritual experience and who now would like to integrate that experience into their Christian background. Finally, it is addressed to those of other spiritual traditions who are interested in dialogue with the Christian tradition.

The original inspiration for this book came from John Osborne in the fall of 1977. As a student at Yale Divinity School and of Eastern methods of meditation, he visited me in the hope of discovering ways of integrating his studies and meditation practice into his Christian training and background. He was representative of many others I had already met who were students of Zen, Insight Meditation, Transcendental Meditation, and other Eastern practices. My interest in John's concerns prompted him to make a tape recording of two of our conversations. Later he circulated these among friends and colleagues who were also looking for an expression of their Christian faith in terms of spirituality and experience. Their favorable reaction, along with encouragement from other sources, prompted me to think that this material might be useful as an introduction to contemplative Christianity. With John's assistance, I edited the original taped conversations and expanded them from their question and answer format to the present form of this book.

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*Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to NonChristian Religions, in The Documents of Vatican II, ed. Walter Abbott (New York: Herder and Herder, 1966), p. 660.

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Excerpted from The Heart of the World by Fr. Thomas Keating

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