Thomas Keating: The Making of a Modern Christian Mystic
Cynthia Bourgeault
Boulder, Colo.: Shambhala, 2024. 264 pp., paper, $24.95.
Father Thomas Keating (1925‒2018) is well on his way to challenging his Cistercian confrere, Thomas Merton, as the best-known Trappist monk of our time. Father Thomas (along with fellow Trappists William Meninger and Basil Pennington) was one of the three originators of Centering Prayer, a method of contemplative prayer based on the fourteenth-century mystical treatise The Cloud of Unknowing, but presented in a way accessible to modern lay practitioners. He was also the author of many books (as well as creating other media), and a noted participant in interspiritual dialogue. His work attracts an ever-growing circle of students both within and outside the Christian tradition.
Cynthia Bourgeault, Episcopal priest, teacher, and author, was a close student and friend of Father Thomas for decades, even living for a time on the property of the Snowmass, Colorado, monastery where he spent his later years. The current volume was prepared with the participation of other friends and relatives of Father Thomas. It utilizes hard to find and unpublished source material, from newsletter articles to recorded cell phone conversations. We owe the author a great debt for sharing her sources (some of which are reproduced in their entirety), as well as her considerable insight, with us.
Although she provides key reference points for Father Thomas’s life along with citations for those who wish to delve further, Bourgeault is not attempting a biography. Rather, her focus, circling in from various directions, is Father Thomas’s spiritual growth and teachings in the final years of his life, from around 2012 to 2018. During this period of “late Thomas,” he ventured beyond the map of traditional Christian mysticism as well as of his own earlier teaching.
Father Thomas was certainly steeped in the traditional path of Christian mysticism: the purgative, illuminative, and unitive ways. In his early teaching, which still provides the backbone of much training in Centering Prayer, he added a valuable awareness of contemporary psychology. God was the Divine Therapist, working through contemplative prayer to unload and heal the unconscious. With time, Ken Wilber’s model of the evolution of consciousness was added, with its understanding of ascending states and stages.
But with “late Thomas,” we have gone beyond the map, beyond the transforming union, beyond a “dark night of the self,” where the self-reflexive mechanism, which typically runs our consciousness, dissolves. We are entering a realm of Christian nondual mysticism which has rarely been committed to writing. Bourgeault mentions the late Bernadette Roberts as another example, and one might also point to the often misunderstood “celestial phase” in the Canadian mystic Marie-Paule Giguère. Father Thomas speaks of a “unity consciousness,” which Bourgeault describes as a “dynamic, flowing oneness.” Here immanence and transcendence, manifest and unmanifest, embrace in giving birth to all that is.
Bourgeault sensitively examines the question of whether, in the end, Father Thomas grew beyond Christianity. Despite his deep participation in interspiritual dialogue, his path remained marked by the kenosis or self-emptying of Christ. At the time when he was growing into a radical level of nondual awareness, he was devoted to Mary, receiving the Eucharist, and reciting Charles de Foucauld’s abandonment prayer (“Father, I abandon myself into your hands; do with me what you will. Whatever you may do, I thank you: I am ready for all, I accept all”).
Hence in Father Thomas’s Western, Christian way, nonduality did not mean heading into the pure unmanifest and leaving traditional devotion behind. In fact, the two do not contradict one another at all, instead belonging together in flowing wholeness. The personal is not a regression from the transpersonal: both are always available structures of consciousness. “The personal, far better than the impersonal, is the vehicle of choice for tenderness, intimacy, and selfless devotion; for making one’s final, warm-blooded surrender.”
Father Thomas wrote, “The notion that God is absent is the fundamental illusion of the human condition.” Both he and Cynthia Bourgeault have gone a great distance in lifting that veil.
John Plummer
John Plummer is an independent theologian and TS member currently living in Nashville, Tennessee.