Enter Mentors
[Bourgeault, Cynthia, Thomas Keating: The Making of a Modern Christian Mystic. Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 2024. Bourgeault, OSB, is an Episcopalian priest, theologian, and practitioner of centering prayer; Keating, OCSO (d. 2018), was a Roman Catholic monk, abbot, and chief founder of the centering prayer movement.]
O Lover,
Since being gifted with a copy of Bourgeault’s work Advent last, I have been schooled in spirituality issues which have haunted me for years. The apophatic impulse of Christian mysticism, Juan de la Cruz chief exemplar, speaks of passive (receptive) prayer as moving beyond intellect, words, images, representations of all kinds. Particularly among followers of Juan this exploration of the transcending of depiction of You is strewn with terms categorized as vía negatíva or “un-images”: darkness, emptiness, silence, even absence. In what he calls the “dark night of the soul” the potential for the idolatrous absolutization of our notions of You is subtly undercut by such self-negating “un-images.”
In my own practice of prayer I have over the past decade sought to allow my prayer to be drawn into such trans-depiction expressions. The result has been, by my lights, uneven. While what occasions this post is the awareness that I have embraced but the edges of such transformation, I am being aided by Keating-via-Bourgeault. I explore here two aspects of their pointing me in the direction of You.
First, I begin with the theme of silence, both the exterior and interior sorts. Granted, I am still inclined to slip into the longing for “loud” confirming consolations involving sense and intellect. Yet of late I have also experienced more frequently moments of luminosity in the silence; a longing to respond to its gravity-like draw; a presence, Your Presence, precisely in the perceived absence. Of course, my skepticism taunts me: “amid your propensity for spiritual goodies you are still trying to concoct lemonade from lemons!” Yet, what is one of make of moments when emptiness, silence, darkness, nonlinearity and absence are experienced as an opening horizon, a vast aqua-vista of light, an alluring albeit inexpressible splendor? How do I respond to the fact that what to some is a contentlessness of this glimpse is increasingly being transfigured from mere void into Your jaw-dropping splendor? Do not silence, emptiness, darkness, and absence in the eye of this beholder ever potentiate consciousness of Your very Presence? Is vacuity but Your ubiquity viewed from my perch of solipsistic finitude? Might not the apophatic “un-images” then be the least deficient of all pointers toward You? Might not the apophatic be but a small albeit important step toward You as You really are? Indeed, are You not ever morphing our experience of the absence of You into Presence?
A second area in which Keating and Bourgeault are helping me involves the “self.” I suspect that the clutching of the “self,” whether attending adjective be “false” or “true,” is the final challenge; stated otherwise, self-emptying kenósis (“self-outpouring” [Phil 2:7]) a la the Christ remains an acquired taste. Self-grasping cannot but obstruct Your “all in All” (I Cor 15:28) on multiple fronts: most basically, it provides cover for an egoic core in any spiritual tradition; it causes us to neglect the collective/cosmic scale of Your Mystérium; it frequently shifts attention from the “eternal now” (Tillich) to an individualistic and egoic hereafter.
In his later years Keating, assisted by collaborationist Bernadette Roberts, wrote and spoke of the “no-self” as transcending all paradigms, even unítas Déi of either the distinguishable or merged sorts. I long to be loosed from my fabricated centrifugality and drawn up into what Hadewijch termed Your brooding “Totality.” Both Keating and Bourgeault courageously explore this no-self aspect of the journey while refusing to relinquish the reality of Your personal warmth and intimacy which permeates the vast portion of the saga of Christian mysticism. Together they aid me in more nearly embracing You as both Passionate Lover and the Abyss sans abyss.
These two spirituality issues—being open to being drawn by You beyond all depiction, and being willing to let go of a structure out of which I as subject objectify all else, You not excepted—are intermittently evidenced across the last 800 years of Christian mysticism. Thank You, O Lover, for the aid which Keating and Bourgeault have afforded me in this regard in the first half of this tumultuous year 2025. Lead on, O mentors.
