Listening to a Saint

Ken calls Father Keating the world’s foremost living saint. This sounds like a farily nice recommendation.

Back in the day if you told your priest you were interested in contemplation he might recommend that you shut yourself up in a monastery so that society would be protected from you. After narrowly escaping from a burning monastery building Father had the insight that maybe God was not as interested in strict ascetic rules as he was.

He sees the contemplative way not as a special blessing but as a necessity in life because it is our relationship with God; our most needed relationship. Contemplation is a more intimate relationship with the Divine; the pure transforming Love. Father has brought this teaching to over 55,000 persons.  Ken says that without the eye in the cyclone the cyclone will drive us nuts.

Ken tells us that ignoring either the apparent or the transcendent is a problem. We need to have the quiet, peaceful, unified, empty contemplative heart and if anyone else is interested we need the rational mind to be able to express it in at least some type of limited sense.  Father Keating does this beautifully and teaches us that God can be thought of as the mysterious peaceful silence Who is absolutely irresistibly calling us to an intimate communion with Him; not to remain in the silence but to be continually reborn in our lives filled with more and more life, energy, power, light, good, peace, and love. Fathers vision for humanity is that violence and war be replaced by peace and love.

God can be thought of as the all pervading Loving Goodness Who is surrounding and filling us right now.  And a question Father asks is how can we help more young people become interested in this God? Any ideas?

Some thoughts that come to my mind are that young people seem to like to have fun and the God depicted by traditional religion is a God as killjoy. Also it seems that young people prefer excitement to peace so trying to get them to sit still and quiet might be difficult.