Session 87 The Divine Dance Part 2

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Session 87  The Divine Dance Part 2

Centering Prayer is rooted in several theological principles.  The first theological principle is the grace we receive through Baptism.  This grace is experienced from our practice of Centering Prayer.  Father Keating notes “Along with the divine indwelling goes a package, you might say, or a trousseau, a kind of wedding trousseau that includes all of the potentials that we need – I spoke of it before as DNA – in order to be transformed in our inmost nature. Thus the trousseau consists of the four infused moral virtues of justice, prudence, temperance and fortitude, and the three theological virtues of faith, hope and charity, and the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, enumerated in Isaiah, which lead to the Beatitudes, actually, when they are activated, and the eight or nine Fruits of the Spirit that Paul enumerates in Galatians 5: charity, joy, peace, gentleness, self-control, patience, goodness, and fidelity.

All of these precious treasures are signs that Christ is truly risen in us. In other words, this is the positive expression of the grace we received in baptism, and it’s unfolding within us manifests itself in a great variety of acts and constitutes our kind of spiritual poise. So that the divine Spirit can guide this body, soul and spirit through the intricate steps that the divine action may wish to take with us depending upon our vocation. And God doesn’t look for an audience. He enjoys this game with each of us. There’s this playful character about God. You only have to look at some animals, like a penguin and a few other things, or lambs gamboling, to realize that this creator has a delightful sense of humor. And if you see how Jesus sometimes dealt with his disciples you see that their faults didn’t disturb him much but that he sometimes made a gentle fun of them in order to gently bring to their attention that there was something in their behavior that reflected a selfishness that had to be confronted and let go of.

So, the divine indwelling is the basic root, the most radical in the sense of deeply rooted, root of contemplative prayer. It needs to be constantly refreshed by doing a practice that focuses its attention on consenting to God’s presence and action. This, of course, as you know, is the main focus of the Centering Prayer practice. Another way of looking at it: it’s a way of learning God’s language, which is silence.”

The second theological principle is the Paschal Mystery, Christ’s passion, death and resurrection.  We experience this through our practice of Centering Prayer.  Keating says, “The Paschal mystery, then, is a sharing in Christ’s redemptive activity so that when we sit down in Centering Prayer, for instance, we think of ourselves as sitting on the cross with Christ.”

Keating continues, “What we are experiencing, then, in Centering Prayer, is God’s presence affirming our goodness, but at the same time, leading us towards an ever-deeper self-knowledge so that we may give up those things in us that are basically selfish and that look to the ego as the great “I” of the universe, which, of course, it is not. And so, people need to realize that the sense of being unworthy of God is neurotic. It should be put in the waste basket as an idea. Everybody needs God. It’s not a question of being worthy or not. The issue is ... will you, like those people in the third category of the great banquet, whether you’re willing to come in and sit down with the one who joins us. And it’s that joint endeavor, that joint sharing of the human condition with its joys and sorrows, its ordinariness, its profane character, its endless waiting, its deprivations – this is not just our suffering, if we experience that, but rather the experience of the prayer is gradually educating us in what contemplative prayer really is, an education in undeserved mercy. And so, everybody is not getting there on the basis of their deserts but on the basis of God’s generosity and gratuity and other parables seem to say the same thing too.”

In addition Keating adds, “As we look at what Christ has taken upon himself in his passion, death and resurrection, our realization of what the salvation of the world has cost both him and God because in a certain sense God dies in the crucifixion. If Jesus is God, then in a sense, God dies, or he experiences what death is. Of course, he can’t stay dead and of course there is no time sequence in God. But it means that he’s taken into himself all our pain and that means the ultimate pain for most people which is death itself. And so God is not just an onlooker or is applauding our efforts from the bleachers. He’s come down, sat down with us right in the sufferings that are most acute.”

And Keating explains, “And so what Jesus has taken upon himself, in the great saying of Paul – that God made him who knew not sin into sin – is precisely the consequences of our failure to follow our conscience or in obvious acts of misbehavior that trample on the rights of others and our own true good in order to get what we want or to get away from what we don’t want. And so personal sin is that kind of experience, but it’s not the sin itself that causes God pain or offense. It’s the consequences in us of guilt feelings, humiliation, shame, discouragement, despair, feeling no good, hopelessness, desolation, loneliness. It is those terrible dispositions which are the natural sanctions of going against our conscience. This is what hurts God, because it hurts us!”

And he continues, “And so, rather than feeling unworthy of God, the right disposition for the contemplative is to recognize that God is totally joined to us in our difficulties and that the difficulties don’t reflect God’s displeasure but only the desire he has to assimilate us to his redeeming passion and perhaps to invite us beyond our own healing process to share our pain for the redemption of the whole human family; because the whole human family is the object of God’s desire for transformation and it’s into this project that he invites us the farther we go into the spiritual journey and the more intimate the dance becomes. The contemplative prayer, then, is really a profound, and the profoundest, perhaps; participation in Christ’s passion, death and resurrection.”

And Keating concludes, “This is a window or a door into the very heart of God in which he could give up his only begotten son, the son of his bosom, in whom he lived as God, more than in himself. And to allow this to happen for people who had declined the invitation to the banquet or whom nobody else would have ever thought of inviting. His divinity laying down his life for the poorest and most desperate and needy of creatures, creatures who have enough freedom to experience the fullness of human desolation. On the cross, then, Jesus finds himself in agony, and notice he calls God no longer Father but God: My God why have you forsaken me? ME, the son of your bosom, the one who knows you the best? And finally, following the Greek Orthodox liturgy which believes that he then descended into the state of mind or the state of consciousness of hell means that Christ took upon himself the ultimate of human misery in the way of feeling, consciousness, and the depths of the spirit, even lost his identity as the Son of God in some degree that seems ... so, so mysterious. And hence this experience of desolation and hellishness is the moment of redemption in which everybody’s sins are taken away as if they never existed. And it’s out of that place where Christ passively, who cannot save himself (he’s dead) cannot make an act of self-surrender, he has absolutely nothing but the Father’s pure confidence and trust. And it’s out of that place that he rises to the glory, later fulfilled in the Ascension, of the vindication of God’s love and God’s humility.”

Resources for Further Study: You may wish to read Chapters 8 and 9, "The Divine Indwelling" and "The Cost of Christ's Redemptive Activity" from Manifesting God. 

You also may wish to read Chapter 12, "From the Inside Out" from Intimacy with God (latest edition), or Chapter 3, "The Theological Basis of Centering Prayer" (in older editions).