Thomas Keating famous quotes

07-13-2025

God's first language is Silence. Everything else is a translation.
-- Thomas Keating

#Silence #Firsts #Language
God will bring people and events into our lives, and whatever we may think about them, they are designed for the evolution of His life in us.
-- Thomas Keating

#Thinking #People #May
For human beings, the most daunting challenge is to become fully human. For to become fully human is to become fully divine.
-- Thomas Keating

#Challenges #Divine #Humans
St. Teresa of Avila wrote: 'All difficulties in prayer can be traced to one cause: praying as if God were absent.' This is the conviction that we bring with us from early childhood and apply to everyday life and to our lives in general. It gets stronger as we grow up, unless we are touched by the Gospel and begin the spiritual journey. This journey is a process of dismantling the monumental illusion that God is distant or absent.
-- Thomas Keating

#Spiritual #Growing Up #Prayer
Psychotherapy is what God has been secretly doing for centuries by other names; that is, he searches through our personal history and heals what needs to be healed - the wounds of childhood or our own self-inflicted wounds.
-- Thomas Keating

#Self #Names #Childhood
The modern world lies under a pervasive sense of anguish, of being abandoned, or at least experiencing God as absent. Yet events that seem to turn our lives upside down and inside out are part of God's redemptive plan, not only for us, but for the world in which we live. God may be preparing a great awakening for the world, if God can find enough people to cooperate in this mysterious plan.
-- Thomas Keating

#Lying #People #World
We rarely think of the air we breathe, yet it is in us and around us all the time. In similar fashion, the presence of God penetrates us, is all around us, is always embracing us.
-- Thomas Keating

#Fashion #Thinking #Air
We are kept from the experience of Spirit because our inner world is cluttered with past traumas . . . As we begin to clear away this clutter, the energy of divine light and love begins to flow through our being.
-- Thomas Keating

#Past #Love Is #Light
The complementary movement towards divine love is growth in humility which is the acceptence of the reality about ourselves, our own weakness and limitations.
-- Thomas Keating

#Humility #Acceptance #Reality
If you accept the belief that baptism incorporates us in the mystical body of Christ, into the divine DNA, then you might say that the Holy Spirit is present in each of us, and thus we have the capacity for the fullness of redemption, of transformation.
-- Thomas Keating

#Dna #Baptism #Redemption
The root of prayer is interior silence.
-- Thomas Keating

#Prayer #Roots #Silence
The chief thing that separates us from God is the thought that we are separated from God.
-- Thomas Keating

#Chiefs
To become who we are as creatures made in the image and likeness of God, we have to be nothing and everything at once, since this is what God is. ... If we accept who we are, we are manifesting God and radiating Christ. The latter unfolding of the divine life within us does not need to go anywhere or do anything special.
-- Thomas Keating

#Special #Doe #Needs
You should not take prayer too seriously. There is something playful about God. You only have to look at a penguin ... to realize that He likes to play little jokes on creatures.
-- Thomas Keating

#Prayer #Play #Looks
Only when we can accept God as he is can we give up the desire for spiritual experiences that we can feel.
-- Thomas Keating

#Spiritual #Giving Up #Desire
The acceptance of all that God has given us and the willingness to let it go - to give it back to him at a moment's notice - that's true human freedom.
-- Thomas Keating

#Acceptance #Giving #Let It Go
Just by the very nature of our birth, we are on the spiritual journey.
-- Thomas Keating

#Spiritual #Journey #Birth
In centering prayer, the sacred word is not the object of the attention but rather the expression of the intention of the will.
-- Thomas Keating

#Prayer #Expression #Attention
While doing centering prayer, the practice is to let go of any thought or perception. The priority is to be as silent as possible and when that is not possible to let the noise of the thoughts be the sacred symbol for a while, without analyzing them.
-- Thomas Keating

#Letting Go #Prayer #Practice
Lent is a time to renew wherever we are in that process that I call the divine therapy. It's a time to look what our instinctual needs are, look at what the dynamics of our unconscious are.
-- Thomas Keating

#Looks #Dynamics #Needs
Perhaps the shortest and most powerful prayer in human language is help.
-- Thomas Keating

#Prayer #Powerful #Helping
One of the values of centering prayer is that you are not thinking about God during the time of centering prayer so you are giving God a chance to manifest. In centering prayer there are moments of peace that give the psyche a chance to realize that God may not be so bad after all. God has a chance to be himself for a change.
-- Thomas Keating

#Prayer #Thinking #Giving
Difficulties arise whenever a committed relationship is succeeding. Love makes you vulnerable. . . . Your defenses relax and the dark side of your personality arises. . .
-- Thomas Keating

#Love #Dark #Personality
God is a tremendous supporter of creation, especially of all living beings.
-- Thomas Keating

#Creation #Supporter
Silence is God's language, and it's a very difficult language to learn.
-- Thomas Keating

#Silence #Language #Difficult

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