Session 73 From Contemplation to Action

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Session 73    From Contemplation to Action

Father Keating begins this session with a reminder of how we develop our attitudes and behaviors as humans, “One of the most important facts of the human condition to keep up front in our time is the amount of cultural conditioning that each of us has absorbed and is subjected to and which prevents us from responding to the values of the Gospel. In other words, we bring unconsciously to human problems, to social problems, to our attitudes to family, world, church, nation, preconceived ideas, pre-packaged values that are very deeply laid up in us. And it’s precisely this Beatitude that hungers and thirsts for justice that addresses that over-identification, that naive loyalty to our so-called traditions, and fails to take account of the living tradition of the Gospel, which is a call to personal response to Christ as a new form of world view, a new self-image in relation to Christ’s Gospel values and the Beatitudes. And this is what frees us to take responsibility for our attitude to God, to other people, to the earth, and to the great social problems of our time.”

Father Keating uses the movie “The Mission” to explore the values of the Gospel when those values are in direct contradiction to what is “legal.”  He uses examples from the Civil Rights Movement and even notes that what the Nazi’s did in the Holocaust was “legal” at the time.  He notes that as one is on the spiritual journey, one begins to question what is taken for granted about how people are treated in our culture.  And the idea of the Mythic Membership begins to fade for the individual.

Father Keating asks, “WHO IS RESPONSIBLE? If people are starving in the ghettos of South America and India, who is responsible? As globalization takes place around the world, which is absolutely inevitable given the mass media and the interconnectedness of nations on every level of human exchange, unfortunately except spirituality, which would be the catalyst that would provide a perspective to discuss, negotiate and resolve some of these world problems; we simply have this inevitable interaction and networking. And it’s spotlighting and focusing the injustice of mass populations that are accustomed to one way of seeing reality and settling differences by violence. Nothing could be more inhuman than to try to settle or resolve problems by violence. It’s ridiculous.”

Father Keating believes that religions in the world have a responsibility to work together to end the violence we see every day happening throughout the world.  He says “And so, they (world religions), perhaps, more than any other category of human institutions, have an obligation in our time to do something together to address these great world problems of hunger, but especially of peace, and to emphasize the great, common human values that they all share, and preach, and teach. And yet they have not yet a networking process or place where they could speak as one voice about the deepest human values and in which their collective conscience could challenge the nationalistic interests of powers of the world and perhaps make war socially unacceptable.”

Although he acknowledges that world religions have yet to form a cohesive group to help the sufferings of the world, Father Keating notes of those on the spiritual journey “These are the ones who are beginning to perceive the necessity to be a human being of harmony, negotiation, forgiveness, compassion. Those dispositions will become more clarified, more urgent, more powerful as humanity moves to the intuitive level, or as more and more individual people through the spiritual journey access the energy that we call the intuitive level of consciousness, and at that level we perceive intuitively the oneness of the human family.”

Father Keating knows that letting go of the mythic membership connections and acting in a new way can be disruptive to others whom we are in relationship with, “If we take personal responsibility, make our judgments about the injustices that are perpetrated all over the world, then we might be excluded from our group. Hence the Beatitude corresponds to the virtue of fortitude, because it takes courage to walk away from our preconceived ideas and our group, if that group is a hindrance to our following the values of the Gospel.”

Father Keating reminds us that there are enough resources for all to be fed and for no one to go hungry and he believes this happens because “unconscious greed.”  He says, “It’s a greed that comes from a mindset that doesn’t ask the right questions; that is still living in a world view that is totally out of date, and unhistorical, antiquated, and is totally incapable of dealing with the problems of our time, which have to be dealt with creatively and from the inner freedom to rethink things anew. Even the world religions must rethink their ethical principles in the light of the new consciousness that is coming into the world, with its sense of personal responsibility made acute by the intuitive vision of Christ suffering in the oppressed and the hungry.”

Father Keating concludes this week’s session, in which he emotionally asks us to change what is unjust, “Now this is a concern of a person of prayer, of contemplative prayer, whose journey, of its very nature is evolving into personal responsibility and a sensitivity not only to act in a human way, but under the higher gifts of the Spirit which give the energy to work, not just to accept what is, but to change what is unjust.”