Adapted from a talk originally given to the National Faculty of Contemplative Outreach, Ltd., at its annual meeting at Chrysalis House, Warwick, N.Y., January 1993.

I Envisioned Contemplative Outreach as an experiment to see if the fruit of the contemplative experience that I received in a Cistercian monastery could be made available to people who want to lead a life of prayer outside a monastic context. It was not with a view to forming a community that we started offering Centering Prayer retreats at Spencer back in the late 1970s. Rather we began in the usual way that retreats have been given for centuries. A preacher is selected, gives a few excellent lectures, and then nobody ever sees him again. Next year the community chooses another retreat master.

My conviction grew that we could not introduce the contemplative life for people without some ongoing formation or support system. Actually that was the original purpose of primitive monastic life, whether it was conscious or not. The idea of the first monastics was, "Let's get out of this noisy world, this corrupt Roman civilization, and find the best possible milieu in which we can be quiet with the Lord and develop both our prayer and the ascetic life." So following the inspiration of the great St. Anthony of Egypt, thousands of people headed into the deserts of Egypt and Palestine. They figured if he did it, they could do it too. Thus, the monastic lifestyle began. As a lifestyle it was directed entirely toward the developing of the contemplative dimension of the gospel. The first monastics understood their vocation as the following of Christ in a comprehensive way that involved both deep prayer and the practice of asceticism. The two were embraced together.

Observing the great influx of Eastern masters and the great attraction they had for people in the 1960s and 1970s, a few of us at St. Joseph's Abbey, in Spencer, Massachusetts, started asking ourselves whether it would be possible to put our own contemplative monastic tradition into a form that ordinary people could understand and practice. Encouraged by the Second Vatican Council, which had urged the Church to try to express theology and Christian doctrine in modern terms and contemporary language, it seemed to us that something similar should be done for the contemplative tradition of the Church. It was then that Fr. William Meninger worked out a "how-to" method that was aimed at expressing the richness of The Cloud of Unknowing, an anonymous fourteenth-century classic, in a form that would make it accessible to people in our day. Without some how-to method of contemplatively oriented prayer, people were being attracted in great numbers to the well-thought-out and well-presented methods of Eastern masters who were arriving in increasing numbers in this country. This search for a spiritual dimension to life was no passing fancy in those days. Though thousands were going to India every summer in search of spirituality and a guru, very few of them thought of inquiring at a Benedictine or Cistercian monastery about whether they could find a form of spirituality there. The Christian contemplative tradition was believed to be locked up in cloisters. Even there, it often existed in a truncated form with an overemphasis on monastic observances rather than on interior transformation. I felt that the situation cried out for some response from contemplative monks and nuns. Although we started off in the early 1970s imagining that our method would be of interest to clergy and those in religious orders, we did not envisage that it would be of much interest to lay people. They had been thoroughly convinced by their Catholic education that any aspiration for contemplative prayer could be realized only in a cloister. What an irony that the original movement toward contemplative prayer, which had come from lay people looking for a structure to support their spiritual aspirations, had wound up over the centuries as the exclusive preserve of an institution. The unquestioned assumption was that contemplation could not be found anywhere except in a cloister, if indeed it could be found there.

This has left us in our time without a sense of the immense possibility that the gospel opens out to lay persons and indeed almost commands them to pursue. Evelyn Underhill is one of the outstanding writers on mysticism of our era. She offers a parable of the spiritual journey that might be apropos here. She wrote that the spiritual journey is like the migration of English sparrows, each weighing about an ounce and a quarter, who twice each year take off into the unknown, committing themselves to the air and flying over the ocean where there are no landmarks to give them any guidance. And yet without any hesitation, every fall thousands of them take off, and in the spring thousands return undergoing the same hazards. This migration, she claims, is a good example of what the spiritual journey is all about. We have no idea of where we are going. There are all kinds of difficulties we cannot foresee. The birds commit themselves to the elements by way of blind trust in their instinct. The spiritual journey is basically a surrender in blind trust to our conviction that what we hope to find on the journey we either already have or will certainly find. But there is no guarantee that we will arrive safely on the basis of the evidence or our circumstances. We must let go and let the wind (the Holy Spirit) take us where we hope to go.

One of the reasons why contemplatives have always been in the minority in this world is because contemplation involves a surrender of one's whole self, not just a period of time set aside each day for some form of prayer or meditation. It is a commitment of immense proportions and requires an eminent trust that God will bring us where we hope to go if we submit to this inner conviction or urging that we have to start. It does not matter how many difficulties there are, we have to go. There is no turning back once we have started because the sky is a big place, and we had better stay with the flock. The image of these little English sparrows fighting storms and winds to get to their destination is a moving symbol of our own situation. In our case, however, taking to the air is not based on instinct, but rather on the theological virtue of hope. The movement, call, or attraction that God has given us is a promise that is just as reliable as the instinct of the birds as they surrender to their migratory instinct. Instead of surrendering to a migratory instinct, we surrender to God's transforming process.

In the early days of teaching Centering Prayer, I perceived that people had to have some kind of adequate support system if they were going to persevere in the practice. One of the great supports of migration, I suppose, is flying in flocks. A dangerous and long journey to nowhere needs company.

Naturally a lot of initial enthusiasts lose interest when they get the message that Centering Prayer is not a shortcut to bliss. At best, it may provide a few months of peace before the real trials and difficulties begin. Recently someone did a thesis on Centering Prayer along with several forms of Eastern meditation, recommending them as means to lessen anxiety. It was found (but based on too small a selection of people to be convincing) that meditation in general, including Centering Prayer, reduces anxiety. I wrote to this man, "Centering Prayer will reduce anxiety perhaps for the first three months. But once the unconscious starts to unload, it will give you more anxiety than you ever had in your life." The spiritual journey requires dedication; hence, some people are going to back out. It involves a commitment of the whole person--body, soul, and spirit. Centering Prayer is totally in the service of sustaining us in a transforming process which is anything but secure, easy, or certain. The theological virtue of hope is the anticipation of the end, here and now. According to Jesus, we already have eternal life if we believe in him. We just have not realized it yet because we have not completed the flight.

Continued . . .

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Excerpted from Intimacy with God by Fr. Thomas Keating

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