Thomas Keating is a teacher known to our readers. A Trappist Christian monk, longtime abbot, cofounder of the Centering Prayer movement (a form of sitting meditation made popular in the 1970s but with origins in a late medieval text, “The Cloud of Unknowing”), and gifted retreat leader, he was one of the three or four most important public figure Christian mystics of the last fifty years.
Cynthia Bourgeault is also known to our readers, and one of the most influential public figure Christian mystics of the present. She was Thomas’s student and friend (hence she refers to him throughout as “Thomas”) and sets out in this loving and penetrating book to understand what happened in the final third of Keating’s life.
She explains how Keating’s audience and attention was largely institutionally Roman Catholic at the start and how “his influence and the breadth of his vision” grew “in quantum leaps.” She also explains how Keating’s thought utilized the psychological and the therapeutic in early decades of his public ministry, then turned toward the nondual and unsayable. There is much in the book about the “unitive threshold” and “subtle nondual waters” and “direct perception of the Unmanifest.”
Part One is called “The Evolving Thomas Keating.” These discussions will not surprise readers of Bourgeault, but they may surprise some of Keating’s thousands of students in Contemplative Outreach, the worldwide organization he founded and headed for many years.
Many of Keating’s famous one-liners are here, as well as some of the “oral tradition” carried by his students — including a younger cohort of “new monastics” that Thomas cultivated from Colorado in his final decade — revealed in book form here for the first time.
We should also point out that some of this book originated in an e-course Bourgeault taught here, “Thomas Keating's The Secret Embrace,” in 2021, based on a mystical unitive poem written by Thomas. Part Two of this book is Bourgeault’s extensive spiritual commentary on those lines.
She writes about Keating as one who achieved a kind of full realization or enlightenment. For example: “Thomas arrived with increasing solidity on the threshold of unitive consciousness.” This is highly uncommon language for a Christian, and Bourgeault discusses in her final chapters whether or not Thomas ultimately left Christianity. The answer is sort of yes and no. He clearly “outgr[e]w the traditional theological forms of his Christian home base,” she concludes, but one can also see this as a moving beyond Christianity’s theological boundaries in ways that still embrace its habitat and center.
Go Deeper:
Thomas Keating's The Secret Embrace: An e-course of reflections by Cynthia Bourgeault on Fr. Keating's final eight poems.
