Spiritual Journeying

"The spiritual journey is a gradual process of enlarging our emotional, mental, and physical relationship with the divine reality that is present in us, but one not ordinarily accessible to our emotions or concepts. The spiritual journey teaches us: first, to believe in the Divine Indwelling within us, fully present and energizing every level of our being; secondly, to recognize that this energy is benign, healing, and transforming; and thirdly, to enjoy its gradual unfolding step-by-step both in prayer and action."  
Thomas Keating, Fruits and Gifts of the Spirit

The spiritual journey is an exploration of our deeper consciousness, our interior self, which is where God waits for us. The spiritual journey is about waking up and diving deep. It begins as we awaken to God's presence within us.  
The spiritual journey is living life with awareness of the divine and the firm intention to grow beyond our earlier attempts at living life. Life might be compared to floating in the ocean, where our experience may range from floating effortlessly on gentle, caressing swells and enjoying light sea breezes to being violently tossed about and battered by heavy waves breaking over us and pierced by spray from howling winds. 

But no matter what the surface of the sea is like, we can always find calmness if we dive deep enough. Slipping below the surface we abruptly find silence. Go a little deeper and we feel the even periodicity of swells slowly lifting us and gently lowering us. Go deeper still and there is only the steady lateral motion of the current that carries us but which we can't even detect because we’ve lost our reference points - we can't see the bottom nor the surface. If we dive yet deeper in search of the bottom, we enter into darkness, both sight and sound are left behind, and we feel a sense of separation; we have entered a strange and foreign world. 

That is the world and experience of contemplative prayer, where we sink deep enough that sight and sound no longer distract us, and we are left only with our thoughts, our consciousness. If we spend enough time in that mode, we begin to realize that there is more than just ourselves inhabiting our consciousness. We find that our consciousness is not just our own. It is our's – an amalgam of mutual reality belonging to everyone and everything. As we sink deeper and longer in silent awareness, we come to know our earth, ourselves, each other, the Divine Presence that interpenetrates everything -- it all dissolves into one ocean of being.

All the world’s major religions contain some form of meditative practice. Our particular form of Christian meditation, Centering Prayer, like those of other religions, opens us and prepares us for communion with the Divine Presence or Ultimate Reality. The mystics of old knew – and modern science has confirmed – that the longer we devote ourselves to this inward practice, the closer we draw to this Presence and the more we are changed by this emerging Reality.  

Father Thomas Keating said that the gifts of Centering Prayer appear more in daily life than in the time of Centering Prayer. In our daily activities, others may notice changes in us before we begin to notice them, especially the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

Researchers Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson, who study people who practice meditation, note that, “The greater the lifelong hours a person practices meditation, the greater the change in that person's thinking, feeling, and acting.”  In other words, the altered state – silent meditation – leads to an altered trait – a new characteristic that arises from a meditation practice but endures apart from meditation itself. 
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Father Keating describes these subtle but cumulative changes as the healing of our heart, mind, and body as we surrender to the Divine Therapist. Every sit, every retreat, every dive that goes deeper still into the ocean of being, transforms us further, beyond our knowing. We are called to find joy in this mysterious journey as it unfolds day after day in our prayers and actions.