MOVING FROM INTENTION TO CONSENT TO UNION
WITH GOD AND SOLIDARITY WITH ALL THINGS

The Sacred Word expresses your intention to consent to God,
The Ultimate Mystery who dwells within us.

The Sacred Word is a way of renewing our intention
To open ourselves to God and to accept God as God is.

While we can pray in other forms at other times, the time of Centering Prayer is not the time to pray specifically for others.
By consenting to God, we are implicitly praying for everyone past, present, and future.
You are embracing the whole of creation.
You are accepting all reality beginning with God and
With that part of your own reality of which you may not be generally aware, namely, the spiritual level of your being.

The Sacred Word enables you to unite with your Source.
Fr. Thomas Keating, OMOH (2005) p.32



I would like to reflect on the following phrases:

“Your intention to consent to God.”

We are full of good intentions. As I walk to my room dedicated to my time of prayer, I am already expressing my intention to say “Yes” to whatever God has in store for me during my quiet time. Even if God has nothing for me that day, my intention is to accept and surrender to that. Of course, Mother Mary is the paradigmatic example of saying “Let It Be Done to me According to Your Will.” Her consent led her to bear forth the Christ for the world. May our consent to the Presence and Action of God within us also bring forth Christ into the world Who along with the Daddy and the Holy Spirit is

“The Ultimate Mystery who dwells within us.”

We do not embody a mystery to be solved like a “Whodunit” such as an Agatha Christie novel. Rather, we are acknowledging that our finite minds and human faculties cannot grasp God. Our infinite God is so much more than our finite imaginations can express. Whatever our images of God, God is so much more than those. Our images of God do not do justice to God as God is and are inadequate or false images in that sense.

“Poor God!” our Father Vinny used to say because of all the damaging images we humans impose on God. This approach does not deny that we can come to a rational understanding of God’s truth, beauty, goodness, benevolence and love. However, it emphasizes as William Johnston states in the introduction to the Cloud of Unknowing that “God is unlike anything we know: we must keep in mind that the ideas of God are totally inadequate to contain God.”

It is beyond our grasp to understand that this infinitely loving God dwells within us. This indwelling causes us to become a mystery to ourselves in the same way that God is a mystery to us. (Genesis 1:26-27, John 17, Acts 17:18, Romans 5:5, 8:9, Galatians 2:20).

“To open ourselves to God and accept God as God Is.”

Let us loosen our grips on our image of God so that we may embrace God as God Is! Let go of your customary image of God. Perhaps we are accustomed to thinking of God as someone who responds to our every need. We expect God to deliver the perfect answer. We rely on our past experience of God and assume that our future experience should be the same. We think that we have figured out God and God will faithfully deliver in accordance with our expectations.

Have we captured God? Have we gained control of God? If I do this, God will do that? Is it possible that God has been rearing us much as we raise and respond to our babies and little children? Maybe it is time to grow up? Maybe we have confused God with our local parish that we love and suddenly have lost through consolidation or other reasons? Maybe we have other false gods such as material comfort or a successful profession which have suddenly and inexplicably shifted? Has the ground under our feet moved? Maybe a rug has been pulled out from under us? Maybe I am confused and all is suddenly chaotic? Maybe we need to learn to walk in the darkness of faith?

John of the Cross says that faith is the proximate means to union with God. In other words, walking in the dark by faith is the path of coming to a deeper understanding of the embrace of God’s intimacy. An intimacy that fosters the transformation into who it is God calls us to be. It is the way to intuitively grasp by love God as God is and that we are one with God. It is the path to a contemplative state whereby we once again experience God’s Presence and see God as God Is in every direction.

“You are embracing all reality.”

When we are present to God as God Is, we are present to all that God holds. God contains the past, present, and future. God is present to all things and sustains all things including our loved ones wherever they are and whatever their needs. Whether we know it or not, God is present to our concerns, worries, or joys about our loved ones in as much as we bring them as part of ourselves to our prayer before God. As we are present to God, we are in solidarity with all humanity, past, present, and future as well as all things. We are a part of everything and everything is a part of us.

“We unite with our Source.”

Experientially, we understand and intuit that the ground of our being is the Being of God that has overflowed into and sustains all being. We are one with God and all things. While God is our being, we are not God. We participate in God. Even though we experience ourselves as separate beings, we find our true selves in God. We are not isolated but exist in solidarity and oneness with all that is. Apart from God, we are literally nothing and nonexistent.

“In Centering Prayer, by participating intentionally in the Paschal mystery,
our prayer periods become a liturgy without words,
a celebration of one’s own union with Christ,
and of participation in the inner life of the Trinity.
Every little drop of experience is of almost inconceivable value
and vastly transcends ourselves.
In other words, the Divine energy that is accessed by each one’s participation
in Christ’s passion, death and resurrection
becomes a kind of universal prayer for the needs of the whole human family.
It has a radiation that is truly apostolic,
apostolic in the sense of transmitting the grace of Christ into this world.”
–Fr. Thomas Keating OCSO, Intimacy with God

I would like to reflect on parts and pieces of this excerpt.

What does it mean to “participate intentionally?”

An intention is an interior choice to cultivate a certain posture. It is a desire or a choice to be present, open and surrender or offer ourselves with Jesus. We set aside our preoccupations for a moment. In this case, we are “participating intentionally

In the Paschal Mystery.

The Paschal Mystery is the death and resurrection of Jesus. How do we “intentionally participate” in Jesus’s death and resurrection? The process is similar to what we do when we celebrate the Eucharistic. We join Jesus on the cross as we die to ourselves. We die to our personal agenda and projects. We die to having the last word about anything. We die to having power and control over every or any situation. We become one with Jesus on the Cross in the gift of his life to the Daddy and to us. “Not my will but Your Will be done.” We join Jesus in our offering ourselves and our lives to God to dispose of as God wishes.

We all think that we have more control over life than we actually have. For example, in the end or as we age, we will have to say “Yes!” to the process of aging, diminishment and death. But whatever our age, we need to align our spirits with the Holy Spirit and find the path of Life as opposed to expecting God to bless our agendas and projects that may provide us our sense of self-worth and inflate our egos. We lose our life to gain Life.

After dying to ourselves, there may be a liminal period of darkness. We may have to wait for the new life in the Spirit to express itself. It may be so subtle that we miss it initially. We will learn through patient prayer and the action of the Holy Spirit upon us how to calibrate our hearts to the sensitivity of the Spirit and the realization of new life in God. If we patiently wait, listen, hope, we will find and

Celebrate one’s own union with Christ and of participation in the inner life of the Trinity.

We discover what we have. We discover who we already are. We live and move and have our being in God. This experience is tasting or glimpsing the Life of the Resurrection that God is ready and willing to share with us as we die to ourselves having the last word. We are not God, but we do participate in God and God can express God’s self through us. We can be God for others. They (especially our spouses) will be God for us. We become divine instruments of transformation for one another as we show grace and compassion to one another.

Our participation in God is the Ground of our Being or the source of our Life and Being. It is our breath. It is our heart beating. It is our consciousness. Rather than having a relationship with God we are already in relationship to God. We are already one with God and in union with God or we would be nothing. We are nothing apart from God who sustains our life. Thomas Keating says elsewhere (Open Mind, Open Heart (2005), p.33) that “The chief thing that separates us from God is the thought that we are separated from Him. If we get rid of that thought, our troubles will be greatly reduced…The present moment, every object we see, our inmost nature are all rooted in God.”

Our participation in the “Divine energy” becomes a “universal prayer for the needs of the whole human family.”

We start by saying “Yes!” and participate in the Paschal Mystery as we consent to our death to ourselves and begin to experience the Life of the Resurrection. We begin to let go of our self-made worlds, having to have the last word or power or control over every situation that arises. As we sit in this posture of Centering Prayer only present to God as God is, we are present to the needs of the whole human family since that is where God already is present. We bring all our needs, our whole life experience and history, all our loved ones to God. First, our world is present and held before God. At the same time, we then are present to God. In Whom, the world or cosmos is held in being and which apart from God would be nothingness. Our loved ones are loved by us as we carry them within us to God. Our loved ones are loved by God as God sustains them and treats them as God’s beloved. As Fr. Vinny like to say, “they are twice loved.”

Our prayer becomes apostolic as it “transmits the grace of Christ into this world.” Our time of prayer is of “inconceivable value and vastly transcends ourselves.”