World Without End

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WORLD WITHOU T END Thomas Keating OCSO and JOSEPH BOYLE OCSO with

Lucette Verboven

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

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Bloomsbury Continuum An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London wc1b 3dp uk

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www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury, Continuum and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 Main text © Father Thomas Keating and Abbot Joseph Boyle 2017 Editor’s Materials © Lucette Verboven 2017 Photographs © Lucette Verboven 2017 Illustration from Johann Hevelius’s star atlas, p. 143 © Gettyimages / DEA / G. CIGOLINI Thomas Keating and Joseph Boyle have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work.

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No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication data has been applied for. isbn: pb: 9781472942487 epdf: 9781472942463 epub: 9781472942494 2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1 Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon cr0 4yy

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‘Once you have been born into this world you never die’ Thomas Keating

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Part two ‘To enter into the unveiled presence of God’: conversations with Father Thomas Keating

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A Lonely Time

Let us take a minute of silence to open our hearts to the mystery of the divine indwelling within us

T he longing for the sacred was already present in Thomas when he was a child. His early sensitivity would lead the young boy to sneak out of the family’s comfortable apartment in New York to go to early Mass, without anybody knowing, without being able to talk about his yearnings with anyone.

This awareness deepened as he became a freshman at Yale University. He stopped attending social events as he had found something far more interesting. Instead of the club he was drawn to the chapel; instead of attending the lessons he was absorbed in books about the Christian mystics.

His family expected him to become a lawyer but he became a monk and a theologian instead, developing internationally into one of the most renowned spiritual teachers but not without feeling lonely at times.

What attracted you towards prayer when you were young?

What attracted me to prayer at the time of my conversion was my desperate need for spiritual help. I didn’t have 17

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World Without End anyone to speak to, and my friends could not figure out what I was doing. I found all my direction in the first three years in reading and studying the well-known Christian mystics, especially St Teresa of Avila and St John of the Cross.

Were books your sole inspiration? Didn’t you need some kind of spiritual director?

There was none I could find in the area I was living until the second year after my conversion. In the library of Yale University, I found the four volumes of the Homilies of the Church Fathers, commenting on the four Gospels line by line. It gave me the conviction that the Christian religion has an important contemplative or mystical dimension. The Church Fathers wrote from that dimension, and their theological reflections and explanation of the gospel seemed to emerge from personal experience of the Christian mysteries.

St Augustine of Hippo and the Cappadocian Fathers of the East are prime examples. I found this perspective immensely attractive and started reading some of the later mystics like St Teresa of Avila and St John of the Cross, who describes his spiritual journey in Dark Night of the Soul. I loved the poetical approach to the Bible of St John of the Cross, especially his description of silence: ‘The eternal Father spoke only one Word and He spoke it in an eternal silence and it is in silence that we hear it.’

You were raised as a Roman Catholic. Nevertheless you experienced a kind of conversion towards ‘a deeper Catholicism’ when you were a freshman at Yale University.

What conversion are you referring to?

I have been through many conversions. The one that took place at Yale in my first year there was the result of 18

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a lonely time questioning the Catholic faith that I had brought with me from early life.

At the time of my conversion, I was leading the usual worldly life that adolescents are prone to. At Yale, I was challenged by the modern philosophers that we had to read.

The chief book that influenced me was Leo Tolstoy’s book about the kingdom of God and the Beatitudes, entitled The Kingdom of God is Within You.1 It alerted me to the fact that many people who think themselves Catholics are not really catholic; at least, they are not following the gospel model, which is essentially, as Pope Francis teaches, the religion of the poor.

The poor are not just those who have few resources of a material kind. There are also those who are spiritually poor and morally bankrupt. The spiritually poor are those who lack the greatest resource of all, which is the conviction of God’s presence within them as a loving God, healing their emotional and mental wounds, and inviting them to share the divine life, light and love. This is where true happiness is.

The spiritually poor are those who lack the conviction of God’s presence within them as a loving God

Unfortunately, we are born into this world without this knowledge of God’s interior presence. We have to survive in social environments that are less than ideal. We have to live with our own incompleteness. The way into 19

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World Without End the fullness of union with God that the Bible speaks of is through the experience and acceptance of our weakness. All people feel incomplete. We are all desperately searching for happiness but in the wrong places. Even religious people, instead of manifesting God, a lot of the time manifest their false selves.

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Verboven’s insightful questions probe at the depths of Father Keating’s spirituality...

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