{"id":19424,"date":"2020-10-22T10:20:00","date_gmt":"2020-10-22T14:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=19424"},"modified":"2020-10-22T10:29:44","modified_gmt":"2020-10-22T14:29:44","slug":"thomas-keating-the-secret-embrace-part-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=19424","title":{"rendered":"Thomas Keating: The Secret Embrace Part One"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/x7WEYwZrrs4\" allowfullscreen=\"\"><\/iframe><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><br><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>The Dark Nights<\/strong><br>Thursday, \u202fOctober 22, 2020<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>His silence is a kiss,<br>His presence an embrace.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>But now he is fading, fading.<br>And I am alone<\/em>&nbsp;. . .<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u2014Thomas Keating, \u201cLoneliness in the Night\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>I don\u2019t think anyone can get to my (Richard\u2019s) age without deeply empathizing with the sense of loss and grief\u2014personal and spiritual\u2014that Thomas Keating articulates in this poem. Cynthia Bourgeault does an excellent job of describing the spiritual dark nights that both Thomas and John of the Cross (1542\u20131591) put so beautifully into poetry. Cynthia writes:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The sense of joyful, flowing oneness that so marks the final years of Thomas Keating\u2019s life didn\u2019t \u201cjust happen.\u201d For most of us\u2014including for Thomas himself\u2014it comes at the end of a painful season of stripping and purification that has classically been called \u201cthe Dark Night of the Spirit.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The name itself comes from the 16th-century Carmelite mystic St. John of the Cross, who up until this point has been the unquestioned authority on this excruciating passage. In this series of poems, Thomas Keating presses boldly into this forbidding terrain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John\u2019s classic spiritual roadmap actually specifies&nbsp;<em>two<\/em>&nbsp;dark nights. The first, called \u201cthe Dark Night of Sense,\u201d typically comes fairly early in the journey. John saw its purpose chiefly as strengthening our capacity to endure temptation and weaning us from our dependency on spiritual consolations (the sweetness and even sensuous pleasure that often accompanies those early days of conversion). In Thomas\u2019 contemporary psychological rendition, this first dark night relentlessly exposes our \u201cemotional programs for happiness,\u201d the hidden agendas and compensatory needs that drive our \u201cfalse self system.\u201d It thus accomplishes the first stage in the dismantling of the false self.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The second dark night comes much later in the journey and entails a much more radical and painful stripping that cuts to the very roots of the \u201cfalse self system,\u201d overturning the fundamental psychological and neurological hardwiring that drives the illusion of a separate selfhood. Its painful cost is that everything goes dark\u2014\u201cfor the duration\u201d\u2014as we become increasingly unable to steer by the old binary operating system in our brains that always wound up turning God into an object (albeit a holy object) and in fact prioritized our&nbsp;<em>experience<\/em>&nbsp;of God over direct, unmediated union. Until the new operating system fills in, we are rather helpless, like chickens in molt, unable either to fly or lay eggs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Believe it or not, this poem comes from a time far earlier in Thomas\u2019 life. He once joked to me that he hadn\u2019t written a poem since grade school.&nbsp;<em>This is the poem!<\/em>&nbsp;Even then, he was able to name the experience of the loss of tangible presence and withstand his solitude.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Something at first so concretely, robustly present is suddenly \u201c<em>fading<\/em>,&nbsp;<em>fading<\/em>.\u201d The substantial becomes insubstantial, presence fades to absence, and loneliness and longing dominate the emotional color palette. He is already intuiting, even as a young teenager, that the release from the loneliness and longing will not come from fulfillment of the original desire, but rather,&nbsp;<em>through a mysterious inner alchemy that draws apparent opposites into an inner symbiotic unity<\/em>. These are indeed the classic dark night waypoints, which Thomas returns to again and again\u2014fundamental insights first glimpsed when he was still hardly more than a child.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Story from Our Community:<\/strong><br><em>As I read today&#8217;s message [on Celtic Spirituality], I was transported back in time and distance to the cliffs of Tintagel [England], where I stood many years ago, looking westward. . . Reading today&#8217;s offering, I wept\u2014it was so familiar and I haven&#8217;t heard it in so long! Reclaiming my role as a mystic, at 82, after a lifetime of &#8220;being in the world&#8221; with what that involves, I&#8217;ve always been drawn to the spiritual dimension of life. Now thanks to the most recent CAC meditations, I am closer to Home than I&#8217;ve ever been before in this lifetime.<\/em>\u00a0\u2014Sarah K.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" width=\"500\" height=\"311\" src=\"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/Screen-Shot-2020-10-22-at-10.28.50-AM-500x311.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-19427\" srcset=\"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/Screen-Shot-2020-10-22-at-10.28.50-AM-500x311.png 500w, http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/Screen-Shot-2020-10-22-at-10.28.50-AM-300x187.png 300w, http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/Screen-Shot-2020-10-22-at-10.28.50-AM-768x478.png 768w, http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/Screen-Shot-2020-10-22-at-10.28.50-AM.png 2006w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Dark NightsThursday, \u202fOctober 22, 2020 His silence is a kiss,His presence an embrace. But now he is fading, fading.And I am alone&nbsp;. . . \u2014Thomas Keating, \u201cLoneliness in the Night\u201d I don\u2019t think anyone can get to my (Richard\u2019s) age without deeply empathizing with the sense of loss and grief\u2014personal and spiritual\u2014that Thomas Keating [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19424"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19424"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19424\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19428,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19424\/revisions\/19428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}