The Better Part: Stages for Contemplative Living.

The Better Part: Stages for Contemplative Living
Thomas Keating, O.C.S.O.
Continuum, $14.95, 128 pp.

Many contemporaries aspire to, but few deserve, the honorific term, "spiritual master." One who does is Thomas Keating. Former abbot of the Cistercian monastery in Massachusetts, Keating is now a monk at the Snowmass, Colorado, monastery. He is an indefatigable teacher of "centering prayer," a regular participant in interreligious meetings, and the guiding spirit behind the "Contemplative Outreach" movement.

The Better Part is a modest volume in size but capacious in its wisdom and common (spiritual) sense. Utilizing the gospel story of Martha and Mary to speak of the contemplative life, Keating adds a new twist to an old analogy. Traditionally, Martha is identified with the active life and Mary with the contemplative; the latter has chosen the "better part." That story is a standard topos in patristic and medieval literature. Keating, however, takes a somewhat different--indeed, brilliant--approach by recalling that their brother, Lazarus, died and was raised by Jesus. Keating sees Lazarus as the model for the apex of contemplative prayer: he passes beyond sitting at the feet of Jesus (like Mary) and undergoes a spiritual death and rebirth not unlike the passage through the active and passive night of faith described by John of the Cross.

In brief but dense chapters linking prayer, attentive reading of the Scriptures (lectio divina), and the Eucharist, Keating offers a vision of an ever-deepening life of spiritual transformation. Perhaps the most original part of the book is the last section in which Keating answers frequently asked questions about prayer in general and centering prayer in particular. Here Keating provides new ways to understand prayer in relation to the humanity of Jesus, the character of sin, the problem of suffering, and compulsive thoughts or temptations to evil. It is in this Q&A that one gets a real glimpse of how a great spiritual teacher thinks.

It has been argued that the current interest in contemplative prayer is a middle-class luxury for those who wish to experience some kind of spiritual frisson. To that objection Keating intelligently counters that too many religious people live with a religious "superego," by which he means the tendency to act out what we have been taught to think. This, in a fine phrase of Keating, leads people to shoot people in Northern Ireland. Contemplative practice tames the superego, promotes solidarity, and engenders peace. Neither those looking for "spiritual experience" of an emotional sort, nor those who base their actions on unexamined inherited images of God are on the right contemplative path. He further argues that contemplative living is not a form of spiritual individualism; on the contrary, he shows how the contemplative life is one characterized by deep sensitivity to the needs of the world.

It would be wonderful for someone to interview Keating at length and publish the results as a book. His capacity to say profound things in a relatively brief space is pure gift. The final twenty-seven pages of Q&A are worth the price of the book. I wished only for more.

Lawrence S. Cunningham is the John A. O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.