{"id":19416,"date":"2020-10-20T10:27:51","date_gmt":"2020-10-20T14:27:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=19416"},"modified":"2020-10-20T10:31:18","modified_gmt":"2020-10-20T14:31:18","slug":"thomas-keating-the-secret-embrace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=19416","title":{"rendered":"Thomas Keating: The Secret Embrace"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><br><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<figure><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/RZYpzXjdtwg\" allowfullscreen=\"\"><\/iframe><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>The Sound of Silence<\/strong><br>Tuesday, \u202fOctober 20, 2020<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>The silence of the Creator is thunderous,<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Drowning out everything else,<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>And hiding in endless creativity.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u2014Thomas Keating, \u201cOut of a Stone\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>One of Thomas Keating\u2019s greatest legacies will surely be his development and teaching of Centering Prayer, a Christian form of silent meditation. It has been my (Richard\u2019s) preferred method of prayer for decades and I recommend it to anyone seeking to enter more deeply into the mystery of God. In today\u2019s meditation, Cynthia Bourgeault explores a profound teaching on silence found within Keating\u2019s poem \u201cOut of a Stone,\u201d excerpted above.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A theme that continues in all the poems contained in&nbsp;<em>The Secret Embrace<\/em>&nbsp;is that silence is not absence, but presence. It is a \u201csomething,\u201d not a nothing. It has substantiality, heft, force. You can lean into it, and it leans back. It meets you; it holds you up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That\u2019s hardly how it\u2019s understood in our culture at large, of course, where silence is typically seen as \u201cvacant space,\u201d waiting to be filled up with content. We try to cram every \u201cempty\u201d moment full. Even when we begin a meditation practice, this preference for content remains, and we will often approach silence as a kind of inner desert, a place of inner uncovering, which we enter to hear \u201cmessages from God.\u201d It\u2019s the messages that most grab us at the start; we\u2019re all ears for whatever new insight emerges out of the silence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Gradually, as we progress in Centering Prayer\u2014or in any meditation practice, for that matter\u2014we begin to reorient. Centering Prayer\u2019s instructions to let go of all thoughts, regardless of content, directs us back to the silence itself, and we gradually learn the shape of the new terrain. As we stop grabbing for content, we gradually discover that silence does indeed have depth, presence, shape, even sound. As we mature in Centering Prayer, the perception that the emptiness is in fact the presence becomes more and more palpable. Thomas Keating encourages us that this \u201csound of silence\u201d keeps right on growing. By his own later stage in the journey, it has become \u201cthunderous.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In fact\u2014says Thomas\u2014this \u201cthunderous\u201d silence is actually the most intense, concentrated \u201cdosage\u201d of divine presence we can bear face-to-face. In a paradoxical way, the dance of creation, beautiful and enchanting as it is, is like a veil over the face of the naked presence of God\u2014like the veil that hides the Holy of Holies in the temple. These two faces of God\u2014veiled and unveiled\u2014live in symbiotic unity, and out of that unity everything pours into existence in a cascade of sheer delight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For Thomas, creativity is \u201cthe diffuse shining of God\u201d (to borrow a striking image from that other celebrated contemporary Thomas, Thomas Merton). [1] It\u2019s what allows us to know our Creator not only in the \u201cthunderous\u201d silence of [God\u2019s] direct presence, but in the dance of life itself. Either or both ways are fine, for they spill unceasingly into one another. From this \u201cveiled embrace\u201d between pure silence and joyful creativity at the very heart of all creation, flows life in all its beauty, goodness, fluidity, and magical wonder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" width=\"500\" height=\"296\" src=\"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/Screen-Shot-2020-10-20-at-10.30.43-AM-500x296.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-19419\" srcset=\"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/Screen-Shot-2020-10-20-at-10.30.43-AM-500x296.png 500w, https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/Screen-Shot-2020-10-20-at-10.30.43-AM-300x178.png 300w, https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/Screen-Shot-2020-10-20-at-10.30.43-AM-768x455.png 768w, https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/Screen-Shot-2020-10-20-at-10.30.43-AM.png 2012w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" \/><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Sound of SilenceTuesday, \u202fOctober 20, 2020 The silence of the Creator is thunderous, Drowning out everything else, And hiding in endless creativity. \u2014Thomas Keating, \u201cOut of a Stone\u201d One of Thomas Keating\u2019s greatest legacies will surely be his development and teaching of Centering Prayer, a Christian form of silent meditation. It has been my [&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":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19416"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19416"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19416\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19420,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19416\/revisions\/19420"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}