The following is a mix of direct quote and paraphrasing of some statements I was listening to recently by Fr. Thomas Keating OCSO:
The Contemplative tradition is concerned with God’s love for us, and of dwelling in and being transformed by that love… Part of “The Divine Therapy” (cf. Thomas Keating) is going to be concerned with awakening in us what it means to be the image of God, that “image” being the indelible presence of God, Christ-in-us. We don’t lack the “image” but we lack the “likeness”; it’s the likeness that is missing and this absence is what we experience as feeling “incomplete”. We also experience it as human brokenness, frailty, and that which dehumanizes us and makes us less than God’s loving, healing, and transformative intentions for us.
So a big part of “Divine Therapy addresses the human-condition head-on by trying … little-by-little to create an atmosphere of trust, acceptance and humility so that we’re willing to allow ourselves to be drawn from unconsciousness to consciousness; willing to allow the repressed and the emotional woundedness of a lifetime to be healed by God. “The contemplative tradition is a very well-thought-out course of psychotherapy and as such its not just limited to a ‘method of prayer’”, but is in actual fact a “way of life”; an orientating and a bending of oneself toward grace, life, and love.
Ironically this is the heart of the Christian life. It’s just not experienced this way by most people because the contemplative dimension of the gospel is largely neglected or unknown.
There needs to be a personal assimilation by practice of the grace being given by God… It is the lack of deep relationship with God, with our own deepest selves, and the lack of “Divine Therapy, or “contemplative psychotherapy” is the source of most human misery, lostness, suffering, and unhappiness.
It’s a big claim isn’t it, but the more I learn and experience, the more I’m inclined to side with 80+ year old Keating. The contemplative touches the essential, deepest, and sadly most neglected dimensions of our humanity. Contemplation is not about a retreat from life; its about the place from which we launch ourselves into life in all its richness: contemplation + action.
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