Thomas Keating
On October 25, 2018, Thomas Keating died in Spencer, bringing to a close a life that had begun nearly a century earlier in New York City and carried him into religious vocation and theological writing.
Born on March 7, 1923, in New York City, Keating was an American citizen who received his early education at Deerfield Academy. From those beginnings he moved into religious life, becoming a Catholic priest and a monk, and working as a writer who composed in the English language.
As both monk and theologian, Keating occupied roles that drew on different but related forms of commitment — the communal discipline of monastic life alongside the intellectual work of theology. His identity as a writer ran alongside his identity as a priest, and the English language was the medium through which he pursued both. His career brought together the demands of religious practice and the work of sustained theological thought.
He died in Spencer, far from the New York City of his birth. That he lived and worked as a Catholic priest, a monk, a theologian, and a writer across the span of his long life is the shape the facts give to his biography — a life organized around religious vocation and expressed, in part, through writing in English.
Quotes by Thomas Keating
To live in the presence of God on a continuous basis can become a kind of fourth dimension to our three-dimensional world, forming an invisible but real background to everything that we do or that happens in our lives.
The great treasure that interreligious dialogue among the world religions could unlock is to enable people to get to know and love other religions and the people who practice them. The.
Gifts of the Holy Spirit grow in direct proportion to the depth and sincerity of our love.
Your relationship with God, others, yourself, and all creation keeps changing for the better. Most of the world’s religions have developed maps to describe this process.
Technology isn’t fulfilling its promise of unlimited progress and solving every problem through technology. With the Enlightenment and its aftermath, there already was a general loss of confidence in the Western religions.
Science and technology has tried to offer an alternative to religion by making a god out of human reason, but that didn’t work out too well.
Where am I? Where am I in relation to God, to myself, and to others? These are the basic questions of human life.
As the years go by, I find myself experiencing God’s extraordinary concern, consideration, healing, and what I call in my books, the divine therapy.
Contemplative prayer is a deepening of faith that moves beyond thoughts and concepts. One just listens to God, open and receptive to the divine presence in one’s inmost being as its source. One listens not with a view to hearing something, but with a view to becoming aware of the obstacles to one’s friendship with God.
What I really wanted was to fall in love with God. It’s amazing what obstacles there are within us, or at least in me, that seem to slow this process.