This meditation was Joyce Gibson’s opening reflection at Durham Friends Meeting on August 31, 2025
Thoughts on The Spiritual Journey
On the drive from Massachusetts this morning, my thoughts turned to my work with my first spiritual advisor Dr. Margaret Benefiel, now head of Shalem Institute, who taught me how to stop and discern how God was leading me; in the middle of our hourly sessions, which were focused on my efforts to stay on the path of my spiritual journey, she would ask that we take a few minutes to be silent for guidance. Figuring out what God would want from me in the everydayness of my life was new to me then. Being present with Him at any time of day was also what I was not doing, or practicing! I now make an effort to be present to God, yet it is ever the struggle.
Today I would like to introduce two of my special people, Father Thomas Keating, known as the Father of Contemplative Prayer, someone I actually experienced in one of his presentations in Boston, and Father Richard Rhor, a Jesuit who founded the Center for Action and Contemplation, (CAC) based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and whose work I follow in daily meditations and through his books. meditations@cac.org
This excerpt is from a lecture Father Keating was invited to give as part of the 1997 lecture at Harvard Divinity School– the Harold M. Wit Lecture on Living a Spiritual Life in the Contemporary Age, and was published by St. Benedict’s Monastery in Snowmass, Colorado in 1999. The book is The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation. Father Keating was the former Abbot of the Trappist Monastery in Spencer, MA, and one of the foremost teachers of contemplative prayer in the Christian world. He begins his lecture with a question, “Where are you?”
The spiritual journey, writes Thomas Keating, is not a career or a success story. It is a series of humiliations of the false self that becomes more and more profound. These make room inside us for the Holy Spirit to come in and heal. What prevents us from being available to God is gradually evacuated. We keep getting closer and closer to our center. Every now and then God lifts a corner of the veil and enters into our awareness through various channels, as if to say, ‘Here I am. Where are you? Come and join me.‘(back cover, 1999)
Today’s meditation from Richard Rohr, Choosing to Become Present, connects quite well with Father Keating’s message in his lecture.
He writes:
Anyone familiar with my writing knows that I believe that immediate, unmediated contact with the moment is the clearest path to divine union. Naked, undefended, and nondual presence has the best chance of encountering Real Presence. I approach the theme of contemplation in a hundred ways, because I know most of us have one hundred levels of resistance, denial, or avoidance….
In my novitiate I was exposed to an early method of silent Franciscan contemplation called pinsar sin pensar or no penar nada as described by the Spanish friar Francisco de Osuna. I didn’t totally understand what I was supposed to be doing in that silence of “thinking without thinking” and probably fell asleep on more than one occasion. Yet it had the effect of moving me away from the verbal, social, and petitionary prayers I had been taught almost exclusively up to that time.
Prayer is indeed the way to make contact with God/Ultimate Reality, but it is not an attempt to change God’s mind about us or about events. It’s primarily about changing our mind so that things like infinity, mystery, and forgiveness can resound within us. (Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations, Week Thirty-Six: Practicing the Presence, Sunday, August 31, 2025)
As we move into waiting worship, consider, “Where are you?”
