Do all religions lead to one reality?
For devout Catholics, that question is a no-brainer. Judaism and Christianity were revealed by God. Other religions are attempts by humans to understand the transcendent and achieve some kind of salvation. While, as Nostra Aetate taught, other religions do contain some goodness and truth, they also contain much error. Some of them are even influenced by demonic powers, as both the Old and New Testaments clearly teach (see 1 Cor 10:14-22, for example).
The CDF says of non-Christian religions:
one can take from them what is useful so long as the Christian conception of prayer, its logic and requirements are never obscured. (On Some Aspects of Christian Meditation, no. 16)
Yet, in this video (below), Fr. Thomas Keating says, “Faith, when it becomes contemplative, begins to perceive the oneness behind all religions.” Religious doctrine, he says, no matter from which religion, is necessary “as a stepping stone” toward this ultimate reality. Once reached, religious practice and belief is no longer “absolutized.”
This video is just one of many examples in which Fr. Keating avoids speaking about the truth of Catholicism or Christianity in general, as compared to other religions. He makes the Catholic Faith into simply one of many possible ways of moving towards the divine (albeit, the way he has chosen).
Watch the video yourself, and then I’ll comment on a few other aspects of what he says.
Note also in the video his Buddhist understanding of the self. What is the cause of all our ills? Fr. Keating says it is our “separate-self sense.” In other words, the sense that I am someone separate from everyone else, that I am a person, and that there are other persons who are distinct from me.
Contrast this idea with what the CDF says about Christian prayer:
[Prayer] expresses therefore the communion of redeemed creatures with the intimate life of the Persons of the Trinity. This communion, based on Baptism and the Eucharist, source and summit of the life of the Church, implies an attitude of conversion, a flight from ‘self’ to the ‘You’ of God.” (On Some Aspects of Christian Meditation, no. 3)
Without a “separate-self sense,” we cannot even practice Christian prayer. Recognizing that God is a personal being, distinct from ourselves (also personal beings, made in His likeness), is absolutely foundational. The CDF also says,
an absorbing of the human self into the divine self is never possible, not even in the highest states of grace.” (No. 14)
Fr. Keating quotes the greatest commandment, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind” (Mt 22:27). But how is it possible to love God at all, if he is not someone separate from ourselves? Without separate selves, love is just a nice word. One ends up seeking fulfillment, release, etc., rather than intimacy and the Divine Will. This is ultimately selfishness, not love. The CDF says:
From the dogmatic point of view, it is impossible to arrive at a perfect love of God if one ignores his giving of himself to us through his Incarnate Son, who was crucified and rose from the dead. (No. 20)
I did not notice a single mention of redemption or even of Jesus in this interview on (supposedly Christian) “spirituality.”
In much of the video, Ken Wilber (the interviewer) and Fr. Keating deal with psychology, as though science could confirm or deny spiritual truth. In fact, the CDF identifies the substitution of psychology for spirituality as one of the problems with modern methods of prayer. And this erroneous substitution is intimately bound up with the rejection of the truth of our separateness from God:
[Erroneous modern prayer methods] incite [man] to try and overcome the distance separating creature from Creator, as though there ought not to be such a distance; to consider the way of Christ on earth, by which he wishes to lead us to the Father, as something now surpassed; to bring down to the level of natural psychology what has been regarded as pure grace, considering it instead as ‘superior knowledge or as ‘experience.’ (On Some Aspects of Christian Meditation, no. 10)
We see once again that the CDF has addressed numerous ideas taught by Fr. Keating and other Centering Prayer advocates and found them problematic. The fact that the CDF never mentions Centering Prayer or Fr. Keating by name is completely irrelevant.
Earlier posts in this series: