Fr. Thomas Keating was the keynote speaker at the 15th Annual Conference for Contemplative Outreach of Colorado. He was in residence at St. Benedict Monastery in Snowmass, Colorado.
Over 30 years ago at the sizeable Cistercian monastery St. Joseph’s Abbey, in Spencer, MA, then Abbot Fr. Thomas Keating and monks, Fr. William Meninger, and Fr. Basil Pennington, began to distill the Christian contemplative tradition of the desert fathers, Eastern meditation techniques and the prayer method laid out in the fourteenth century English classic, The Cloud of Unknowing. The result was the method of Centering Prayer we practice today.
Fr. Keating gives three presentations on the Human Condition. His first talk lays the foundation of the Human Condition in the context of God’s creation of the world and all life, culminating in the creation of human life. Secondly, he describes how we formed our programs for happiness because of our illusion of being separate from God. Finally, in our world of science, technology, space exploration, and the explosion of the Information Age, we find the search for God becoming one of the primary focuses of many people today. He paints the picture with Chardin’s image of the Cosmic Christ in our universe, especially within us, and of God’s tremendous love and care for us; this is one of the best summaries of the Human Condition that Fr. Thomas has given. The summary challenges us to continue our Centering Prayer practice in our Journey to God and cooperate with God’s grace to become one with God and with one another.
