Father Thomas Keating

Nowhere to Go

Today is Father Thomas Keating’s sixth yahrzeit (death anniversary). Thomas was the co-creator of Centering Prayer, a silent meditation practice for experiencing God “closer than breathing, closer than thinking, closer than consciousness itself” (www.contemplativeoutreach.org). He had been my priest since 1984 when he invited me—out of the blue and for reasons he never explained—to join the first Snowmass Conference at St. Benedict’s Monastery in Snowmass, CO, a gathering of a dozen contemplatives exploring the mystical dimension of religion. It was from this decades-long series of gatherings that he created the Snowmass Conference’s Eight Points of Agreement:

• The world religions bear witness to the experience of Ultimate Reality, to which they give various names.

• Ultimate Reality cannot be limited by any name or concept.

• Ultimate Reality is the ground of infinite potentiality and actualization.

• Faith is opening, accepting, and responding to Ultimate Reality. Faith in this sense precedes every belief system.

 • The potential for human wholeness – or, in other frames of reference, enlightenment, salvation, transcendence, transformation, blessedness – is present in every human being.

• Ultimate Reality may be experienced not only through religious practices, but also through nature, art, human relationships, and service to others.

• As long as the human condition is experienced as separate from Ultimate Reality, it is subject to ignorance and illusion, weakness and suffering.

 • Disciplined practice is essential to the spiritual life; yet spiritual attainment is not the result of one’s own efforts, but the result of the experience of oneness with Ultimate Reality.

Like Jesus and me, Father Thomas was both a panentheist and a nondualist.

God is present in all creation by virtue of his omnipresence and omnipotence, sustaining every creature in being without being identified with any creature. The latter understanding is what Jesus seems to have been describing when he prays “that all might be one, Father, as we are one” and “that they may also be in us” (John 17:22). Again and again, in the Last Supper discourse, he speaks of this oneness and his intentions to send his Spirit to dwell within us. If we understand the writings of the great mystics rightly, they experience God living within them all the time. Thus the affirmation of God's transcendence must always be balanced by the affirmation of his immanence both on the natural plane and on the plane of grace (Thomas Keating Reader, p.44).

As my friend Cynthia Bourgeault writes in her foreword to Thomas’s book That We May Be One,

[Thomas’] argument in a nutshell is that Non-duality cannot be attained at our familiar, rational level of consciousness and by the ego-selfhood joined at the hip to it. It requires the shift to a higher level of consciousness—unity consciousness—which for Thomas is the direct perception of the oneness of everything.

Given our shared understanding of existence as the manifesting of Ultimate Reality, I readily agreed when Fr. Thomas invited me to receive Communion during Mass one Sunday when we were teaching at La Casa de Maria in Montecito, CA. For me, it was the spiritual equivalent of taking the Red Pill in the Matrix movie, allowing me to see the world as it is: the happening of God. Sadly, the Church has no Gluten-Free option regarding the Body of Christ, and Jesus and I soon parted company.

When Father and I were together again the following year, I expected another invitation to receive Communion and dreaded explaining that the previous year’s transubstantiation was a celiac disease-driven disaster. Luckily, his Bishop heard that Thomas had given me Communion and ordered that he not do so again.

My most cherished memory of Father was my last. Just weeks before he died, and shortly before he moved back to St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, MA, where he had been abbot, I visited Thomas at St. Benedict’s.

We met in a small meeting room. Thomas sat in a wheelchair, and I sat opposite him in an upholstered guest chair. He was dressed in his off-white wool cassock and black knit cap. I had been told to keep my visit to fifteen minutes: plenty of time to tell him how much I loved him and to say goodbye. When I rose to leave, he bade me stay. We talked for another half hour.

It occurred to me that I was being offered a precious opportunity to speak to a God-realized teacher in his last days on Earth. I moved my chair closer to him and said, “Father Thomas, how are you dying?” He smiled and said, “I’m dying the way I lived.” Cupping his hands in his lap, he raised them to his eyes and let gravity drop them back into his lap. He did this several times, saying, “Whenever Thomas comes up, I let Thomas go. Whenever Thomas comes up, I let Thomas go. Soon Thomas will come up, I will let Thomas go, and Thomas will not come up again.”

“And where then will you go?” I asked, wondering if he still clung to the idea of Heaven.

“Go?” he said. “There is nowhere to go. You are That which is always here, and That is all there is.”

People only talk about going when they don’t know who and where they are.

Father Thomas was the last of my mentors to die. His longtime friend and my rebbe, Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, died four years earlier. Twenty years ago, Cathy Zheutlin, her husband Edis Jurcys, Joan Borysenko, Sister Bernadette Teasdale, and I brought these two sages together at the Center for Contemplative Living in Denver, CO., to chat with one another. Please watch a video of their conversation, “The Kiss of God,” at