During a recent Centering Prayer meeting, we
were practicing Lectio Divina with recording of Fr. Thomas Keating. An excerpt of the recorded message follows.
“What you mean by happiness is pretty
important. Success, fame, fortune and wealth, these tend to get drained of
their excitement as you get older, especially in the mid-life crisis, and not
to mention senility, and in the passage from
life to death which is really a very special
time in peoples lives. Of its nature it is a transformative period because the
process of dying takes away the capacity for every other kind of passing, or,
this world, of satisfaction that we might have hoped for. Everything recedes
and there is nothing left but you, whoever you are. And so the spiritual
journey is really a deliberate anticipation of the passage of death in which
one freely and deliberately makes friends with this process that frees one from
the limitations of happiness in this world and opens ones whole being to the
possibilities that are unknown to us at first but which we finally come to know
in the dying process is not going to work here in this world.”
The phrase that shimmered for me, wasn’t actually spoken.
What I heard and what I took into contemplation was “Senility, the
passage from life to death.” What Fr.
Keating actually said is highlight in red above. Praying with the phrase changed my
relationship with senility which I interpreted as dementia.
