The Suffering of Love – The Heart of Hope with Deacon James Keating Ph.D.
Deacon James Keating and Kris McGregor discuss the healing hand of Christ, seeing the will of God, and how we suffer love. Deacon Keating reflects on the tale of the two criminals on the cross next to Christ on Golgotha.
This series explores the work of suffering in the Christian life and how God can use it to transform the heart of the individual and the world.
The “Heart of Hope” tackles a very tough subject…the gift of suffering in the Christian life. Deacon Keating guides us well
Conversion in the Context of Prayer – The School of Prayer: Reflections on the teachings of Pope Benedict XVI
What is the authentic understanding of “conversion” in the context of prayer. Deacon Keating discusses the reflection offered by the Holy Father of the encounter of Elijah with prophets of Baal.
Deacon James Keating, Ph.D., is a professor of Spiritual Theology and serves as a spiritual director at Kenrick Glennon Seminary in St. Louis, MO.
Firstly, is the priority of the first commandment of God’s Law: having no god but God. When God disappears man falls into slavery, into idolatry, as has happened in our time under totalitarian regimes and with the various forms of nihilism which make man dependent on idols and idolatry, which enslave”. Secondly, he continued, “the main objective of prayer is conversion: the fire of God which transforms our hearts and makes us capable of seeing God and living for Him and for others”. Thirdly, “the Church Fathers tell us that this story is … a foretaste of the future, which is Christ. It is a step on the journey towards Christ.
Waiting for God – The School of Prayer: Reflections on the teachings of Pope Benedict XVI
What is the authentic understanding of “intercession” in the context of prayer. Moses speaks to God as friend. The invisibility of God puts deep questions in our hearts. Unless we have the intimacy of relationship with God in our hearts, our fear will overwhelm our faith. We also lose patience when waiting for God. “Waiting” is a dangerous period for human beings; it is literally suffering for us. The virtue of patience is the remedy. “Waiting” causes us to run to other diversions…it happens in worship. “Where are you” “Are you real?” “Can I believe what is in the Word?” “Please help me.” If we go deep into our hearts, the content of our waiting becomes the occasion for our intimacy. But if we just feel the pain of waiting, we will go looking for lost gods. It comes down to trust. The role of our memory is so important.
Deacon James Keating, Ph.D., is a professor of Spiritual Theology and serves as a spiritual director at Kenrick Glennon Seminary in St. Louis, MO.
“Tired of following a path with a God who is invisible now that Moses the mediator has also gone, the people demand a tangible, palpable presence of the Lord and find an accessible god, within the reach of human beings, in Aaron’s molten metal calf. This is a constant temptation on the path of faith: avoiding the divine mystery by building a comprehensible god that corresponds to our own preconceptions and plans”.
Who Are We? Wrestling with God – The School of Prayer: Reflections on the teachings of Pope Benedict XVI
Jacob wrestling with Angel. The mystery of the name. We have to let God ask us who we are or will you resist and remain isolated? Our prayer is only going to be fruitful if we surrender ourselves to the question…who are you? Like Jacob, once we give over our name then God can begin to transfigure that name, or in other words, our persons to be more inline with His will, His love, His power. Eventually, in prayer, we have to enter into the struggle…what is really going on in our souls, in our hearts and are our wrestling with God’s love. We yield our identity to God’s love.
The wounding of Jacob by the Angel. It is the symbol of the wound, the opening of the self, which symbolizes an entryway to vulnerability…God is deeply affecting us. God’s love, concern, and fascination with us is how He enters into our being and “wounds” us. If we could “be still” and allow Him to love us, He becomes victorious within us.
The name we yield to God is our heart…the core of our being. At Baptism, we give over our name, so we give the power over to God over us. How the “wrestling occurs” and if we stay in it long enough God “wounds” us, into His hands we commend our “spirits”. How does Jesus transform even this event?
Deacon James Keating, Ph.D., is a professor of Spiritual Theology and serves as a spiritual director at Kenrick Glennon Seminary in St. Louis, MO.
Dear brothers and sisters, our entire lives are like this long night of struggle and prayer, spent in desiring and asking for God’s blessing, which cannot be grabbed or won through our own strength but must be received with humility from him as a gratuitous gift that ultimately allows us to recognize the Lord’s face. And when this happens, our entire reality changes; we receive a new name and God’s blessing. And, what is more: Jacob, who receives a new name, and becomes Israel, also gives a new name to the place where he wrestled with God, where he prayed; he renames it Penuel, which means: “The Face of God”. With this name he recognizes that this place is filled with the Lord’s presence, making that land sacred and thus leaving a memorial of that mysterious encounter with God. Whoever allows himself to be blessed by God, who abandons himself to God, who permits himself to be transformed by God, renders a blessing to the world. May the Lord help us to fight the good fight of the faith (cf. 1 Tim 6:12; 2 Tim 4:7) and to ask, in prayer, for his blessing, that he may renew us in the expectation of beholding his Face. Thank you.
The Mystery of Intercessory Prayer and God’s Great Mercy- The School of Prayer: Reflections on the teachings of Pope Benedict XVI
Abraham the great Patriarch who prays in intercession for Sodom and Gomorrah. The mystery of intercessory prayer and God’s great mercy. When we persist in prayer, like Abraham, the more we come to know God and trust in His love for us. How sin corrupts our capacity to receive God’s movement of protection and love. How the sacrifice of Christ opens the door to the mystery. If we can learn how to pray, then we learn how to be loved. How do we pray for others?
Deacon James Keating, Ph.D., is a professor of Spiritual Theology and serves as a spiritual director at Kenrick Glennon Seminary in St. Louis, MO.
This is the power of prayer. For through intercession, the prayer to God for the salvation of others, the desire for salvation which God nourishes for sinful man is demonstrated and expressed. Evil, in fact, cannot be accepted, it must be identified and destroyed through punishment: The destruction of Sodom had exactly this function.
Faith and Reason in the Life of Prayer – The School of Prayer: Reflections on the teachings of Pope Benedict XVI
Allowing God to effect our minds, as well as our hearts. If you let God close you will be free…to let him in so close that God prays in you. Letting God’s love be the norm of our culture…in the other and in the poor. The role of silence in prayer and posture of kneeling.
Deacon James Keating, Ph.D., is a professor of Spiritual Theology and serves as a spiritual director at Kenrick Glennon Seminary in St. Louis, MO.
A look at recent history reveals the failure of the predictions of those who, in the age of the Enlightenment, foretold the disappearance of religions and who exalted absolute reason, detached from faith, a reason that was to dispel the shadows of religious dogmatism and was to dissolve the “world of the sacred”, restoring to the human being freedom, dignity and autonomy from God. The experience of the past century, with the tragedy of the two World Wars, disrupted the progress that autonomous reason, man without God, seemed to have been able to guarantee.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church says: “In the act of creation, God calls every being from nothingness into existence…. Even after losing through his sin his likeness to God, man remains an image of his Creator, and retains the desire for the one who calls him into existence. All religions bear witness to man’s essential search for God” (n. 2566). We could say — as I explained in my last Catecheses — that there has been no great civilization, from the most distant epoch to our day, which has not been religious.
Why We Need Prayer – The School of Prayer: Reflections on the teachings of Pope Benedict XVI
“Life without prayer has no meaning or points of reference”. The relationship between the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit is so essential to our understanding of prayer. The meaning of the Church. Suffering the coming of the Holy Spirit. Jesus is the face of God. Do not be afraid, He will teach you happiness.
Deacon James Keating, Ph.D., is a professor of Spiritual Theology and serves as a spiritual director at Kenrick Glennon Seminary in St. Louis, MO.
Human life is a fabric woven of good and of evil, of undeserved suffering and of joy and beauty that spontaneously and irresistibly impel us to ask God for that light and that inner strength which support us on earth and reveal a hope beyond the boundaries of death.
In the examples of prayer of the various cultures which we have considered, we can see a testimony of the religious dimension and of the desire for God engraved on the heart of every human being, which receives fulfilment and full expression in the Old and in the New Testament. The Revelation, is in fact purifying and brings to its fullness man’s original yearning for God, offering to him, in prayer, the possibility of a deeper relationship with the heavenly Father.
At the beginning of our journey in the “school of prayer” let us now so that the relationship with him in prayer may be ever more intense, affectionate and constant. Once again, let us say to him: “Lord, teach us to pray” (Lk 11:1).
In this compelling conversation with Deacon James Keating, a spiritual master of the highest order, we discuss those things that block us from having a closer relationship with God. We also discuss the importance of making time for Lectio Divina, living in the liturgy of the Church, and the danger of letting prayer become too complex.
Abiding in Christ: Staying with God in a Busy World is a wonderful how-to-pray resource. This book helps readers to find a quiet space wherein they can be present to God and offers suggestions of how they can be more open to God’s movement within them. We highly recommend this book to those souls seeking a deeper relationship with God.
Here are excerpts from our conversation in the podcast –
Sin, to some extent, possesses us, usually at the level of pleasure. Even if you think about the sin of anger, it always seems like it’s mayhem, but it’s actually pleasurable. People get a rush out of being angry. They get a rush out of being greedy. There’s a pleasure in sloth, in daydreaming, in fantasizing, in not doing the duty or the work we’re supposed to do right in front of us. There’s a pleasure in sloth.
And so that pleasure is the glue, the adhesive that keeps us in love with our sins. And that’s what God is alwaying fighting. He’s trying to displace that false love that we have set up by the way of pleasure. God knows that pleasure is not the deepest reality of existence. And so he’s not going to play the game back and like trump the pleasure of sin. He is going to attract us away from the pleasure of sin, by the beauty of truth.
As Joseph Ratizinger used to say, “The face of God, is the beauty of God’s face.” What’s that mean? That means that the truth, the radiance of truth will eventually win us over even against the strong undertow of sin’s pleasure. If we give him a chance, spend time with him, open our hearts to be affected by him, then over time, this beauty of his own face, the truth of who God is will move us away from the immediacy, the gratification of the pleasure that’s hiding within all of our sins. And that’s what salvation is. Salvation is finally surrendering to truth and its beauty over and against the fleeting pleasure of self-involvement
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The liturgy is your participation in being loved and loving back. Catechesisis not learning in a classroom style. It’s learning how to pray. If we don’t learn how to pray, we won’t even be interested in the catechism. Why would you be interested in the catechism if you don’t know the person whose voluminous beauty fills the catechism? Why would you want to open that book?
The Catechism at its heart is learning how to be with Him, to receive Him. And then your intellect is a flame to want to know Him. We do it backwards. We’ve always done it backwards. I don’t know for how long, but since my birth, we’ve done it backwards. Reducing the mystery to academics. And that’s inherently boring because to study anybody you don’t know, to study anyone that you have no motivation to learn about, is boredom. So we have to let them be burned by the fire first. This is why to some extent, parishes have to be remodeled. Maybe God is doing this by making our parishes so much smaller.
People are leaving. They’re not saying this. They’re leaving because they’re bored. They’re leaving because they haven’t encountered. They’re leaving because they don’t know God. And they’re looking for God, but maybe we have to make our parishes more like retreat centers than some type of bureaucratic paperwork center where you go through and get certified to receive this sacrament or that sacrament. It has to be more of a retreat encounter so that people will want to know God because they’ve met to God.
Episode 8 – Communion with Christ – Practical Prayer – The “wellsprings” where Christ awaits us. Responding at the moment when the subtle interior movements of the Holy Spirit calls to us. The Word of God becomes a place of encounter. The danger of Scripture becoming all academic. People are converted when the Word approaches them as living. The liturgy is also a place of encounter. The heart is an “altar” in the liturgy.
Deacon James Keating, Ph.D., is a professor of Spiritual Theology and serves as a spiritual director at Kenrick Glennon Seminary in St. Louis, MO.
The book addresses their mutual dedication to remain with Christ in prayer even in the service of parishioners. Once prayer finds a place in the heart, compassion grows for those who look for God “like sheep without a shepherd.” Through interior prayerfulness, clerical unity in ministry can be better ensured Remain in Me is for priests and deacons to use as prayer, on retreat, or during the holy seasons of Lent and Advent.
Episode 7 – Communion with Christ – Practical Prayer – The will to pray. To listen, to search, to see Him…to become prayer ourselves. You know are progressing by the fruit of your life. The parish is the “school of prayer” and the pastor as a teacher of prayer, the spiritual father. The disordered demands we may place on the priest. What is the remedy?
2650 Prayer cannot be reduced to the spontaneous outpouring of interior impulse: in order to pray, one must have the will to pray. Nor is it enough to know what the Scriptures reveal about prayer: one must also learn how to pray. Through a living transmission (Sacred Tradition) within “the believing and praying Church,”1 The Holy Spirit teaches the children of God how to pray.
2651 The tradition of Christian prayer is one of the ways in which the tradition of faith takes shape and grows, especially through the contemplation and study of believers who treasure in their hearts the events and words of the economy of salvation, and through their profound grasp of the spiritual realities they experience.2
Deacon James Keating, Ph.D., is a professor of Spiritual Theology and serves as a spiritual director at Kenrick Glennon Seminary in St. Louis, MO.
The book addresses their mutual dedication to remain with Christ in prayer even in the service of parishioners. Once prayer finds a place in the heart, compassion grows for those who look for God “like sheep without a shepherd.” Through interior prayerfulness, clerical unity in ministry can be better ensured Remain in Me is for priests and deacons to use as prayer, on retreat, or during the holy seasons of Lent and Advent.
