Spring 2000 Newsletter

THE SEVEN GIFTS OF THE SPIRIT

by Thomas Keating, ocso

Saint Paul says, "If anyone is in Christ, he or she is a new creature."  As we dismantle the false self system, the new self arises with the awakening of the true self.  That is the new creation that Paul refers to.  The old creation that is passing away is the world of the false self.

The means that the Spirit uses to purify our conscious and unconscious lives are called the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit.  They are distinguished from the charismatic gifts of prophecy, healing, speaking in tongues, interpretation of tongues, inspired preaching, discernment of spirits, administration, to speak with wisdom, to speak with knowledge, and working miracles (I Cor. 12:4-11).  These special gifts are designed to encourage the Christian community but do not themselves transform the person who has such gifts.  The Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit on the other hand, are acts and movements of the Spirit that raise every Christian to a divine mode of knowledge through the growth of the theological virtues of Faith, Hope and Charity (Divine Love), which are the transforming virtues in the Christian scheme of things. Isaiah 11:2 lists these Gifts as wisdom and understanding, counsel and fortitude, knowledge and fear of the Lord.  The Septuagint and Vulgate versions of the Bible added piety.

THE GIFTS OF THE SPIRIT AND CENTERING PRAYER

The Holy Spirit, through the Gifts, is especially our guide in the Centering Prayer practice and in accompanying programs to bring its effects into daily life.  The presence of the Holy Spirit within us is always inviting us to listen to the delicate inspirations that gradually take over more and more aspects of our lives, transforming them from expressions of our false self into manifestations of our true self and of the infinite goodness and tenderness of the Father.

The Seven Gifts are intimately connected with the growth of the theological virtue of charity within us, not only through acts of love of God but also through the way that we relate to other people.  As charity grows stronger, the Gifts become more and more in evidence.  They are like the fingers of a child's hand which are not capable of much except to reach out and touch your nose.  Given a little time and development, however, these same fingers grow and may become capable of incredible skills, such as playing Rachmaninoff on the piano or creating a great piece of art.  They become incredible instruments for beauty, goodness and truth.

So it is with the Seven Gifts of the Spirit.  They are infused into our inmost being at the moment of Baptism or the desire for Baptism.  We can assume that every genuine seeker of God has them.  In the Sacrament of Confirmation, the activity of the Gifts is enormously enhanced.  Every time we receive the Eucharist, which is a reaffirmation of all that is contained in the sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation, we also receive an increase of the Gifts of the Spirit. 

The Seven Gifts of the Spirit are habitual dispositions.   A habitual disposition is a way of acting that is permanent, easy and delightful.  The habits infused by the Holy Spirit enable us to enjoy God in some degree and enjoy being like God.  The ripe fruits of the Gifts are the Beatitudes which mean literally, "Oh, how happy you will be!", or as another translation puts it, "Congratulations!"

What are you really doing when you sit down in Centering Prayer and open yourself to God's presence and action within you?.  Jesus refers to the Father's gift of the Spirit in the following passage, "Who among you if your child asks you for a piece of bread would give him or her a stone?"  In the Palestinian times, bread was designed like flat stones, as is Pita bread today.  Again, he says, "Which one of your children if he or she asked you for a fish, would give him or her a snake?"  Around the Sea of Galilee some fish looked like snakes because they had the shape of eels.  Jesus concludes, "If you with your limitations, know how to give good things to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him" (Luke 11:13).

There are two ways of asking.  One is to put our request into words:  "Give me this."  Another is to hunger with our entire being for what we most need or desire.  This is the basic attitude that we assume in Centering Prayer.  We are pleading for the supreme Gift, the Gift of the  Spirit, just by consenting to God's presence and action.

There is another place in the Gospels that seems to refer to Centering Prayer in a special way.  That is, when Jesus said to his disciples in the Sermon on the Mount, "If you want to pray, go into your private room and pray to your Father in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you. (Matt.6:6)" In those days, very few people had any room at all, let alone a private room.  Ordinary people lived in one-room houses where the whole family had to make do.  Thus we can presume that this passage is meant to be taken metaphorically.  When we are told to enter into our private room, we are being invited to enter our inmost being and there pray in secret.  Secret from whom and from what?  Secret from external things, from our thoughts, and from ourselves.  St. Anthony the Great is recorded as saying that the only perfect prayer takes place when we do not know that we are praying.  Such is the most secret kind of prayer.  It brings us into the presence of the Hidden God, the God who is in secret.

Abba Isaac, one of the Desert Fathers belonging to  a fourth century lay contemplative movement, has an important commentary on this text, which is quoted in the 9th Conference of Cassian.  Cassian was a Western monk who visited the monasteries of Egypt in the 4th Century and later translated their spiritual wisdom into the West, much of which eventually found its way into the Rule of St. Benedict and continues today in Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries, and I might add, in all who practice Centering Prayer. Here is his commentary.  "We need to be especially careful to follow the Gospel precept which instructs us to go into our private room and shut the door so that we may pray to our Father.  And this is how we do it. We pray in our private room whenever we withdraw our hearts completely from the tumult and noise of our thoughts and worries and when secretly and intimately we offer our prayers to the Lord."

In letting go of all our thoughts in Centering Prayer, we follow this advice and enter into our private room.  We close the door on our ordinary mental activities such as feelings, images, memories, reflections, as well as perceptions of sensory details from outside like people and noises in the room, or physical things going on inside of us.  With regard to all the functioning of our ordinary psychological awareness, we simply close the door.  In fact, Jesus said according to some translations, "bolt the door," emphasizing how completely we are to let go of our ordinary level of psychological awareness in order to open ourselves to the spiritual level of our being and to the Divine Indwelling present in secret at the root of our being.

Abba Isaac explains, "We pray with the door shut when, without opening our mouths and in perfect silence, we offer our petitions to the One who pays no attention to words, but looks hard at our hearts."  In other words, God looks at our intention much more than at our attention.  In Centering Prayer our basic disposition is, "Fill me with your Holy Spirit," the supreme Gift, according to your promise.  I don't know how to ask rightly, so I sit here waiting, asking you to pray in me, asking for what you most want to bestow, your Holy Spirit."  Our openness to the Spirit might be compared to baby birds opening their beaks for the worm that one of their parents is bringing.  Practically half the baby bird is its wide-open mouth.

Finally, Abba Isaac concludes, "We pray in secret when in our hearts alone (not in our imagination, memory, reasoning and sensations) and in our recollected spirits (with our intentionality directed to God's presence), we address God, and reveal our wishes only to Him and in such a way that the hostile powers themselves have no inkling of their nature."  Italics mine.  The early monastic Fathers and Mothers believed that if you entertain a thought or image, the demons can tell what you are thinking and can insinuate just the right kind of temptation to draw you from the original purity of your intention.  We might also look at it in the light of what we call the "unloading of the unconscious."  Thoughts that emerge from our unconscious as a result of the deep rest of contemplative prayer could easily be interpreted as temptations because of their intense and disturbing character.  When they come from repressed memories, emotions arise just as we experienced them in early childhood, so it sometimes feels as if we are being tempted.  In actual fact, we are simply invited by the Spirit to accept the fact of these primitive emotions and to let them go.  By coming to consciousness their negative energy is released.  Hence, we are now more open to the free flow of grace and the positive energies of the unconscious.  Until the storehouse of the body is emptied of repressed material and the undigested emotional junk from early childhood, our capacity to respond to the Spirit is limited.  When that evacuation occurs through the process of contemplative prayer, our bodies themselves become more cooperative and support the movement of the Seven Gifts within us.

THE CONTEMPLATIVE GIFTS 

Let us relate the experience of Centering Prayer to the contemplative Gifts of the Holy Spirit, which are three; Knowledge, Understanding and Wisdom.  Those who do this practice regularly will notice at times that they have at least two tracks going on simultaneously in their minds.  There is the ordinary flow of thoughts passing along the surface of consciousness, somewhat reduced from the ordinary hustle and bustle of daily life, but nonetheless confronting us when we try to be silent.  Interior silence is always relative, especially in the beginning.  Because we are aware of various thoughts and perceptions going by, we introduce a sacred symbol (e.g.a sacred word) as an expression of our consent to God's presence and action within us.  Emotionally charged thoughts are attractive or repulsive and stir up desires or aversions in the unconscious as well as in our habitual ways of reacting to reality.  The three basis instinctual needs of human nature are survival and security, power and control, and affection and esteem.  Thoughts or perceptions that appeal to one of those instinctual needs may pull us out of our original consent to God's presence and action within us.  It is as if we open the door of our private room and start to come out.  When one or more of these instinctual needs has been withheld in early childhood, we tend to repress them into the unconscious or to develop compensatory means of surviving or of reducing the pain of frustration.  If we are interested in a big way in security symbols and along comes the thought or image of a nice new car, house, or insurance policy, we may feel a spontaneous interest to reflect on this material.  If we consent to the attraction, we are pulled out of our original intention to consent to God's presence.  Since the time of prayer isn't over yet, we have to start the process again by shutting the door, and maybe bolting it this time.  Then we gently introduce the sacred symbol we have chosen to express our original intention.  We need to be prompt but gentle in returning to the sacred symbol whenever we notice we are getting interested in one of the thoughts, and especially when we find we are immersed in one of them.  We never succumb to self-recrimination.  Simply, without attending to what we have been thinking, we return at once to our private room by the gentle movement of the sacred symbol that manifests our intention to be in the presence of God and totally open to God's will.

A friendly attitude toward unwanted thoughts is helpful in order to put up with the constant solicitation going on in our imagination or memory.  We have spent a lifetime with unruly habits of thinking and self-reflection, so it will take us a few months, to say the least, to get used to this new way of relating to God, not through our rational faculties, but, as Abba Isaac suggests, by offering God our hearts, the symbol in Hebrew understanding of our inmost being. 

To repeat, it is our hearts that we are offering to God in Centering Prayer, hearts that are pleading for the Holy Spirit, and at the same time, putting up with the weakness of human nature and our own personal melodrama, for the love of God.  As we return to the sacred symbol again and again, we gradually become aware that we are cultivating the spiritual level of our awareness.  In this sense, every time we move from a thought into the place of interior silence we are renewing our love for God.  We do not judge our prayer by how many thoughts we have, however much we are bombarded by them.  Rather we judge it by how promptly we go back ever so gently to our sacred symbol.  Thus we may have made hundreds of acts of love to God in the course of a single period of Centering Prayer!  The Gifts of the Spirit grow in direct proportion to the depth and sincerity of our love.

We can't go wrong with this practice except in the following two ways.  One is deliberately to engage in some interesting thought, perception, or feeling that is going by; the other is to get up and leave.  The latter seems to be the favorite response of people who never quite get rooted in this practice.  When you are rooted in the practice, you cannot not do it.  This is precisely one of the signs of the Gift of Knowledge at work in us.  We no longer have to find time to do the prayer; the prayer finds us, so to speak.  Doing Centering Prayer twice a day becomes second nature. That is the direct work of the Spirit.

An even more certain sign of the work of the Gift of Knowledge arises when, during prayer, along with the thoughts going by and our occasional or even frequent pursuit of them, a third level emerges.  This track distinguishes itself from the first two by the feeling of not wanting any thoughts, or more precisely, of simply being aware that we do not want them.  In other words, there seems to be an interior built-in detachment from following the thoughts and perceptions going by on the superficial level of consciousness.  When this awareness is in place, we no longer need the sacred symbol to reaffirm our intention because secretly, as Abba Isaac would say, we are established in our request for the Holy Spirit; we just want God and nothing else.  We are delicately aware of  a disinclination for any kind of thought or perception that comes by.  Notice I say disinclination, not a resistance to some kind of thought, which would be a choice, but the freedom to ignore or disregard all thoughts.   This again is a fruit of the Gift of Knowledge which is strengthening our weakness.  The value of being with God during this particular time of prayer is perceived to be so precious that there is no inclination to pursue any thought, or, if there is, one quickly drops it. The Spirit, through the Gift of Knowledge, is gently attracting our spiritual will without our knowing it.  We are practicing very subtle but real interior acts that come from the spiritual level of our being.

To sum up, when we experience ordinary thoughts, we gently return to our sacred symbol.  But we are also aware at times that God has grasped our will in such a way that we do not want to do anything but stay in his Presence.  The latter is manifested by an ease in letting go of thoughts or perceptions as they arise.

There is a fourth level in Centering Prayer that you may have experienced.  This occurs when you let go of all self-conscious effort to remain in the Presence of God and there is little or no self-reflection.  On the other levels you may have occasional thoughts like "prayer is going well today", or "I'm very peaceful."  In the gift of divine union, the Spirit, through the Gift of Wisdom, grasps our imagination and reflective apparatus and suspends them temporarily, so that we may be filled with the divine presence without any hindrance from our fragile nature and the false self.  This is like a kiss.  One is totally absorbed in the delight of God's presence.  At times there is no reflection of self at all.  The wise practitioner of contemplative prayer will not try to prolong this experience, but simply welcome it with gratitude.  In this prayer there is no room for pride because one sees intuitively that only God matters.  There is nothing to be proud about.  The Spirit initiates us into the reality of who God is, e.g., immense, humble, tender, close. 

The Gift of Wisdom is communicated in contemplative prayer and brings it to perfection.  It is also the source of inspired ministry.  We can do the best we can, help other people in different ways, but the Gift of Wisdom enables us to help people in God's way, or to be an instrument through which God directly speaks to peoples' hearts, always with a view of initiating them into contemplative prayer that opens them more and more to the presence and action of God within them.

The contemplative Gifts of the Spirit are active within us from the moment that we seriously begin to do a regular practice of Centering Prayer.  The Spirit then begins to communicate the Gifts of Knowledge, Understanding and Wisdom.  The Gifts are interrelated as we saw, like the fingers of your hand.  Each finger has a special shape and capacity.  Each is important and useful, but they all work together.  If one of them grows, they all grow.  The contemplative Gifts of the Spirit are God's way of grasping our entire being so that the whole of us may belong to God: body, soul and spirit.

The active Gifts of the Spirit - Fear of the Lord, Fortitude, Piety and Counsel - are just as important and necessary.  They are designed to enable us to bring the contemplative experience that we have had in deep prayer into all of our activities and indeed in ever-greater detail.

THE EFFECTS OF CENTERING PRAYER

Let's take a look now at the effects of Centering Prayer.  Obviously the effects are going to be different depending on the tracks that we have experienced during the prayer and how often.  To get people started on this journey, we need to encourage them in the beginning to return to their sacred symbol almost continuously; but always gently, always open to the fact that there may be a few moments in which they may be drawn into interior silence.  Since our imagination is so habituated to non-stop thinking, it takes a while for the human organism to readjust to a kind of thinking that is simply aware of thinking, but without thinking about the content of one's thoughts.

Little by little the influence of the Gift of Understanding manifests itself by introducing us to the Night of Spirit.  Spiritual consolations cease and we feel plunged into an abyss of spiritual darkness bordering on a feeling of alienation from God.  The divine light reveals our bottomless weakness and powerlessness in the face of God's apparent withdrawal.  Great doubts regarding faith and trust arise.  The desire to return to moments of union that we enjoyed in the previous track causes an acute sense of loss and grief.  Saint John of the Cross teaches that the pains of the Night of Spirit are the result of the infusion of Divine Love which confronts and dissolves everything in us that is opposed to the love of God.  The theological virtues of faith, hope and charity are liberated from the human props on which they might have overly depended.

There is a fifth track of Centering Prayer beyond the level of occasional experiences of union and the anguish of the Night of Spirit. In this fifth track one is totally immersed in the presence or absence of God.  This level is the work of the Gift of Understanding and the purification of the unconscious.  It is not relational in the sense of conversation or even in the sense of communion, but is a presence in everything we do, even in our thoughts and perceptions during prayer. It is simply the awareness of God experienced but not reflected upon.  This awareness is so subtle and so present that it accompanies us into daily life.  Until that happens we need to make daily efforts to be constantly reminded of the presence of God. Saint Therese of Lisieux taught that to pick up a pin for love can convert a soul. Why not pick up two pins?  Or why not have the same loving intention when you brush your teeth, take a walk, have a cup of tea?  We can do everything in our daily life with this same intention.

The conviction of being greatly loved by God grows through the Seven Gifts.  There is no use moaning because you have too many jobs, too many children, or old folks to take care of.  Right where you are, the Spirit's Gift of Piety is suggesting how to transform the situation into a moment of union with God.  I don't think you can do it without a daily practice of contemplative prayer in order to immerse yourself in the reality of the mercy of God's Presence within, which we call the Divine Indwelling.  The Divine Indwelling has always been one of the great truths of faith but it needs to be emphasized over and over again in our day.  It is the radical source of the spiritual life.  God's Presence is sheer gift. This presence, as we saw, that has been transmitted to us in Baptism, reinforced in Confirmation, and greatly enhanced in every reception of Holy Communion.

If we emphasize what God is doing for us, as we do in Centering Prayer, we start the spiritual journey from a different place than has been traditional in the past.  We begin the journey not with ourselves and what we are going to do for God, but with God and what God is doing for us.  We consent to God's Presence, letting God decide what he wants us to do.  God seems to want to find out what it is like to live human life in us, and each of us is the only person who can ever give him that joy.  Hence our dignity is incomparable.  We are invited to give God the chance to experience God in our humanity, in our difficulties, in our weaknesses, in our addictions, in our sins.  Jesus chose to be part of everyone's life experience, whatever that is, and to raise everyone up to divine union.

CONTEMPLATIVE OUTREACH UNITED IN PRAYER DAY

We invite you to join us for the Annual United in Prayer Day, Saturday, March 18, 2000.  This day is one way of inviting the entire Contemplative Outreach Network to unite in a silent bond of prayer across the globe.  

The new videotape, The Fruits of the Spirit by Fr. Thomas Keating, is about the connection between Centering Prayer and the Fruits of the Spirit.  "Centering Prayer is the seedbed in which the life of the Spirit takes root, grows and in due time produces the Fruits of the Spirit: charity, joy, peace, and the rest."  Thomas Keating.

If you wish to host the day in your local area for your Centering Prayer Group or enjoy the day with a few friends simply fill in the form below and we will send you the videotape and the format in time for the event.  The special price of $19.95 plus $4.00 for postage and handling will only be available until March 18th - after March 18th the tape will be $24.99 plus postage and handling.  The tape is available in the PAL version for foreign countries - shipping will be slightly higher.