MyOutSpirit.com Gay Spirituality Blog

Centering Prayer Course with Father Thomas Keating

Prayer As a Path to Deepen Your Relationship with God

BEGINNING JANUARY 20, lesbian-owned spiritual recording company, Sounds True, presents Father Thomas Keating in an eight-week interactive, in-depth training in Christian contemplative prayer.

Centering Prayer is a silent prayer practice that can move you toward profound relationship with the Spirit of God within. It is a way of praying that opens the door to the Divine Indwelling—the ground of our being. With Centering Prayer, Father Thomas Keating and his colleagues Gail Fitzpatrick-Hopler and Father Carl Arico present the first online course in this method for deepening your intimacy with God and ultimately consenting to the presence and action of the Divine in all aspects of your life.

A Prayer Practice Inspired by the Christian Mystics

Father Thomas Keating, answering a life calling, sought to renew a prayer practice that goes beyond asking for aid or offering praise—one that invites you to enter into a deeper relationship with God. Based on the wisdom sayings of Jesus and inspired by teachings from the classic 14th-century text The Cloud of Unknowing, Saint John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Thomas Merton, and others, Centering Prayer is a method of four guidelines that has sparked the modern renewal of contemplative Christianity. “Centering Prayer does not replace other types of prayer,” teaches Keating. “Rather, the practice gives a new depth of meaning to all forms of prayer.”

Training from a Respected Voice in the Revival of Contemplative Christianity

This interactive eight-session intensive-learning program is highlighted by four live audio-teaching sessions with Father Thomas Keating and his colleagues from Contemplative Outreach, Gail Fitzpatrick-Hopler and Father Carl Arico. If you can’t make one of the live sessions, the audio will be available for download shortly after the session’s conclusion. The course also includes private journaling, along with an online discussion group to foster community. You will also receive over nine hours of downloadable audio and video instruction, plus a rich selection of written exercises and information that you can fill out on your computer or print at home.

Centering Prayer provides precise, direct training in contemplative practice—as well as a treasury of wisdom from Father Keating himself. His teachings, stories, and insights reveal the fruits of fully engaging in this path of complete consent to God's presence and action within. Join him as you learn this simple yet transformative method for taking prayer to its deepest level—and inviting the grace of the Divine to live through you.

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A Third Fire: Andrew Harvey's Sacred Activism

Andrew Harvey, contemporary gay mystic, scholar, and author of Son of Man, The Direct Path, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, discusses the Divine, the Shadow, Gay Activism and his newly released book, The Hope: A Guide to Sacred Activism, in this exclusive, in-depth interview with MyOutSpirit contributor, Rev. Tom Cummiskey.

HIGHLIGHTS

(full interview follows)

"At a time that is as dreadful and challenging as this, the greatest courage we need is to plunge into our Divine nature and start to live it out with its fearlessness and truth and passion for justice on every level and in every realm of the world."

"This narcissism and these shadows that afflict both the activist and the mystic can only really be healed when the fire of the mystic’s passion for God is united with the fire of the activist’s passion for justice to form a third fire, which is Divine love and wisdom in action."

"This radical transformation of human nature...can only take place when people really risk the death into life, the dark night of the soul, the stripping and burning down of the agendas and illusions of the ego."

"What is called for is a wholly new level of power.  And this power does not belong to the ego, it cannot be wielded by the ego, it cannot be streamed by the ego and it can only stream through someone who has died into life."

"Because we have not been allowed to believe in the holiness of our sexuality and in the holiness of the desires of our love, many of us have given ourselves over to mindless promiscuity which makes the birth of the authentic tantra impossible...

"The sexual meaninglessness of the gay world is now a kind of epidemic where people pretend to be living wildly liberated lives, but are in fact living lives in which energy is being leaked off at every level, in lives without any authentic connection."

"All these years of sexual, so called sexual liberation, haven't really gone down deep enough to heal the self-loathing and sense of isolation and sense of meaninglessness and sense of desperation that, unfortunately, we as homosexuals have inherited." 

"The very people who need the direct connection with the direct Beloved, beyond dogma, are prevented by their own wild and completely justifiable rage at religion from using the pain that they have been through to help them plunge into an authentic spiritual path."

"Gay people, in their search for their legitimate rights, come across as spoiled and entitled and consumerist in their vision of reality instead of placing their claiming of these rights in a much larger, more powerful context."

"If you follow your heartbreak, what you will find at the core of the heartbreak is a fountain of burning and deathless passion that will never run dry."

"The more we see gay people emerging with this kind of broad generosity of soul and wild commitment to transformation and profound love and compassion for all beings and justice for all beings, the more the fears of the straight community about gay people will be healed."

"As victims of separation and victims of division and as victims of unbelievable cruelty, it is up to us to really manifest the kind of compassion, the kind of all embracing understanding and the kind of commitment to love that will truly transform others.  Take the darkness we’ve been given and transform it into golden light."

Click below to read MyOutSpirit's entire interview with Andrew Harvey.

Conversations with angels and toasters

By Joe Perez

In the Jewish Renewal online magazine Zeek, Jay Michaelson discusses the theme of "Religion and Insanity." Actually, his concern isn't with insanity but mysticism. It's more to dispell the notion that doubt and cynicism are the peak of sophistication (a belief Michaelson says it a fixture in the contemporary literary culture). Michaelson finds doubt and cynicism mere defense mechanisms, revelations of our shame, fear, and ignorance. He writes:

So then, with whom do I have more in common -- the Evangelicals who trust their inspiration, or the literate atheists with whom I like to go to dinner? Really, I and people like me are split down the middle: I am aligned with the atheists on matters of science and cosmology, but aligned with the religionists on questions of spirit and subjectivity. Maybe that's why I feel myself increasingly distanced from my angel-channeling friend -- because he's not split down the middle, but has instead gone over to the other side. Or rather, to a side, as opposed to my have-my-cake-and-eat-it-too perch, astride the fence of doubt. With my meditation practice, I can feel grounded anywhere -- but perhaps that sense of groundedness prolongs my indecision. Whereas, if I trust my experience, then I, too, must admit that I am on the side of the Tarot cards, the evangelicals, and the New Agers -- without all their myth, but necessarily open to the possibility that the myth contains deep and useful symbolism for the unconscious mind.

And why, exactly, do I not believe the myth? Because it is more accurate to interpret my devekut as a mindstate, and condescendingly look down on the 90% of the people in the world who mistake their mindstate for a real, live deity? Their inspiration for divrei elohim chayim, the words of the living God? Is that really wisdom?

This post continues on Joe Perez's Until blog.