The Heart of the Matter
A Dialogue
between Father Thomas Keating and Andrew Cohen
In every
issue of What Is Enlightenment? we aspire to introduce our readers to
sincere and passionate individuals who care profoundly about their fellow human
beings and who dare to accept, as their own burden, the deepest spiritual
aspirations of the race. Such encounters are always a privilege, but it
sometimes happens, as it did with Father Thomas Keating, that the warmth, love,
decency and sheer humanity that we experience in their presence exceed our
expectations, and we can only wonder at the good fortune of being able to
include their insights, ideas—and their spirit—in our ongoing inquiry into the
nature and significance of enlightenment.
Father Keating, who spent
twenty years as the abbot of St. Joseph's Abbey, a Trappist monastery in
Spencer, Massachusetts, is now, at seventy-four, the leading figure in an
interdenominational movement to revitalize the Christian contemplative practice
known as "centering prayer." He is the cofounder of Contemplative Outreach, an
organization devoted to introducing Christian contemplative practices to
laypeople of all faiths, and the author of several books, including Open
Mind, Open Heart and Intimacy with God, both of which describe the
process of spiritual development that such practices are intended to
catalyze.
Since the beginning of his Outreach activities, Father Keating
has shared responsibility for the development of contemplative workshops and
retreats with several of his colleagues. Yet for many of the growing number of
people who have benefited from their work, it is Keating himself, because of his
extraordinary warmth and humility, who exemplifies and embodies the
transformative potential of centering prayer. As a result, he is in constant
demand as a lecturer and workshop leader and maintains, despite frail health, a
taxing schedule that takes him to several cities each year. Keating is also
known for his avid and unusually open-minded interest in the contemplative and
meditative practices of other religious traditions. He has met and studied with
spiritual teachers from a variety of Hindu and Buddhist lineages and helped to
create, fifteen years ago, the Snowmass Interreligious Conference, at which
teachers from different traditions meet regularly to compare views and ideas,
and to evaluate objectively the benefits and drawbacks of their respective
practices.
In the midst of all this activity, one might well suppose that
Father Keating's celibacy is, as he says it was in his years as a novice, a
given, something to be considered only in the context of so many other pressing
concerns. But in the course of his fifty-three years as a celibate monk—several
of them spent guiding others in the practice—Father Keating has clearly given
much thought to the significant role celibacy can play in the lives of sincere
spiritual aspirants, and it is a testament to his open-mindedness that, among
the highly respected advocates of celibacy we interviewed for this issue,
he is uniquely outspoken in his insistence that the celibate state must
never be regarded as inherently superior, nor as essential to the
attainment of any ultimate spiritual goal. The goal of celibacy, Father Keating
asserts passionately, is "ever greater humility and purity of heart . . . a
letting go of pride and the false self so that God can be God in us."
Fundamental to his approach is the recognition that it is only through the
cultivation of these attributes—humility and purity—and only through a process
of "inner purification" rather than "external observance," that the potential of
any spiritual practice to bring about authentic and lasting transformation can
be realized.
Father Keating shared his views with spiritual teacher
Andrew Cohen, the founder of What Is Enlightenment?, by telephone from
his mountain hermitage at St. Benedict's Monastery in Snowmass, Colorado, last
October.
–Craig Hamilton
Andrew
Cohen: I thought that a good way to get started would be to give you a
little background about why we're interested in discussing the subject of
celibacy with you for this issue of our magazine. I'm a spiritual teacher with a
community of students, and I put a lot of emphasis on renunciation and the role
that it plays in helping human beings come closer to truth. There was a period
in my own life when I practiced celibacy consciously for about three years, and
it helped me enormously to realize a degree of objectivity in relationship to
sexuality, which is a most challenging area of human life. So at this point, I
encourage some of my own students to devote a period of time—usually it's
between three and five years—to a very formal practice of celibacy, in order to
help them also to become clearer about this aspect of their own human
experience.
So to begin with, could I ask when you first took your vow of
chastity?
Thomas Keating: Let's see, that must have been in
1946, after my novitiate. I had already taken vows, though, for the two years of
the novitiate, when I first entered the Trappist monastery.
AC:
What kind of vows were those?
TK: Those were temporary vows
like the ones your students take, a temporary commitment intended to give the
candidates a chance to experience the challenges and benefits of the practice of
perfect chastity. I might add that I had already been practicing outside the
monastery for two or three years while I was going to school; but it's quite
different to practice celibacy—or chastity, if you want to use that word—without
the support of a spiritual community. So I'm glad to hear that the men and women
who come to you for teaching are able to support each other in this endeavor;
that's a great idea. And as I'm sure you know, the commitment to celibacy as a
state of life isn't the only feature of monastic life, but it's one of several
commitments, all of which are considered to be equally supportive and essential
to the transformative process. For example, there's a commitment to poverty, and
its tendency to induce a nonpossessive attitude toward material things—just as
chastity tends to induce a nonpossessive attitude toward the body and sex—and
obedience, which is meant to instill a nonpossessive attitude toward our own
will and judgment through submission to a teacher or to the community as a whole
if the community has a Rule of Life.
AC: Did you have any
expectations about what the practice of celibacy would be like? Would you say,
for example, that it represented, in your own mind and heart, a kind of
sweetness—sweetness as in simplicity?
TK: Well, to tell you
the truth, monastic life is extremely austere and hard—at least it was in the
monastery that I entered. And so one kind of took celibacy more or less for
granted, and one's concrete attention was often devoted to the various other
practices—like getting up at one or two in the morning and praying in the early
hours of the dawn, fasting and abstinence, and along with all that, working
very, very hard. So you really felt less involved with the concerns associated
with the practice of celibacy than with, you know, having sufficient health and
determination just to get through the daily schedule. That's my best
recollection. You know, you're asking me about my life over fifty years ago, and
my best recollection is how hard the physical life was and how searching was the
exterior silence. We spoke only to the Superior and the Novice Master most of
the time, and it was silence, the experience of silence, that was most
pervasive. So it would be hard for me to say that I experienced celibacy in any
other way than as part of the context in which these other very concrete issues
were turning up every single day. When you get up at one in the morning, for
example, all you're really thinking about is getting down to the church on
time.
AC: How has your experience of celibacy changed or
deepened over the years?
TK: It has only become clearer that
it's a gift of God and that the practice of it is entirely dependent on God's
power and mercy. In other words, you learn about your weaknesses in a way that
only strong temptation and perhaps a few other things can teach you. So all I
can say is, "So far, so good"—but I never claim that I'll make it to the end. In
fact, I remember a dear old brother who, at eighty-five, used to come to speak
to the Superior, and when he left he'd always say, "Pray for my perseverance!"
Because he was worried, you know, that he might hit the road to town before he
managed to get himself back to his room!
But another thing that comes to
mind is that as one matures in a lifelong commitment to celibacy, there's a
whole set of attitudes toward God that begin to emerge as a result of this
movement from formal commitment to direct experience, from friendship with God
to union with God—attitudes that open one to ever deeper possibilities of union
with ultimate reality, ever greater humility and purity of heart, which are what
were identified by the Desert Fathers and Mothers as the goal of
celibacy. And I think that that would be what characterizes my own experience
more than anything else—the ever increasing desire for humility and purity of
heart. Of course, physical success in observing celibacy can also lead, in some
cases, to a certain sense of achievement or pride, and in fact there's a
recorded instance of that; it's the famous case of some Jansenist nuns in
sixteenth or seventeenth century France who were described as "pure as angels
but proud as devils"—so evidently something was not working in their celibate
commitment! And that's why I feel so strongly that celibacy needs to be
presented not in isolation but as part of a larger package, and especially with
the interior purpose or intention of getting closer to God. Because the
renunciation is sometimes very, very intense, and one needs the motivation of
knowing that this really is moving somewhere that's more important than physical
attraction, or comfort, or sexual relief or whatever—of knowing that this is the
love of God coming to fulfillment in oneself, all at once in a number of
different ways, all leading to a letting go of pride and the false self so that
God can be God in us.
AC: Especially in light of what
you've just spoken about so beautifully, I'd like to ask you about the common
view that the celibate state represents an inherently higher or purer condition
than the noncelibate. I'm sure you're aware that there's a lot of debate going
on around questions like this these days.
TK: Yes. My reaction
to that discussion—and it's only mine—is that it's not celibacy itself
that is a higher state but the nonpossessive attitude of true humility or purity
of heart that under ideal circumstances is associated with it; that's what true
virginity or celibacy really is when it's understood in its full spiritual
meaning. The goal, as I said, is purity of heart, or what the Desert Fathers and
Mothers describe as that humility that is the acceptance of all reality about
ourselves and God, and acceptance also of our own weakness and helplessness. One
of the things that is most striking about this way of understanding celibacy is
how much it, as a gift of God, has to be supported over time by the grace
of God in order for the practitioner to persevere with, and not to abandon,
his or her commitment.
And if you look at celibacy as a lifestyle, a
long-range commitment, it has the same goal as marriage, actually. What that
means is that it's supposed to be transformational; it's a way to union with
God. Now obviously, there's no reason why someone who's married can't attain
that state, and if you accept the idea of marriage being a sacrament, then I
suppose it could be a higher state than celibacy, which is not as holy a state
as one that has been blessed in such a special way by God and the Church.
Certainly from the Church's point of view, marriage is a particular state of
grace in which the partners are empowered, through their life together, to be
purified. But the important point here is that this happens, whether it is in
marriage or in the celibate commitment, only when we become faithful to love. In
marriage this means the forgiveness and forbearance of the depths of each
other's faults, but in either case, it's only then that we begin to enter into
what St. John of the Cross calls the "period of purification," in which the Holy
Spirit reaches deeper into our hearts than we can go by any asceticism or
discipline of our own making. The Spirit invites us to look at the dark side of
our personality, as Jung would call it, and also to sift through the unconscious
motivations that we're not normally aware of in daily life. It's that conscious
purification that prepares us for unselfish love, for spiritual friendship and
for a union with God in which we're not looking for satisfaction or
enlightenment for our own sake but are simply trying to love God, to please God,
and to do His will by living ordinary life with extraordinary love.
So in
celibacy as in marriage, love is the name of the game—otherwise I
wouldn't recommend it—and the challenge is to see if you can keep it going. And
the heart of the matter, you might say, is that just as a husband and wife,
through the sacrament of marriage, are supposed to make God visible to each
other and minister the unconditional love of God to each other not just in their
conjugal life together but in every detail—the way they pour their coffee in the
morning, the way they handle the problems with their children, the way they go
to work, how they say hello and goodbye—so the celibate commitment is not just
about chastity. It's about being more and more present to others, in service to
others, and trying to bring a quality to the details of daily life that
manifests, in everything we do, the unconditional love of God and even the
tenderness of God. And so it's very important, it seems to me, to
distinguish sexuality from genitality, or genital activity. Sexuality is not
something that's given up in the celibate commitment; on the contrary, because
human sexuality includes genital activity but is not identical with it, we
remain women and men not only physically but also emotionally and sensually down
to the very roots of our being.
AC: Could you say more about
this distinction between sexuality and genitality?
TK: In
celibacy, the sexual energy—which should never be repressed—is directed by the
practice of chastity toward the right use of that energy according to our
state of life, which for celibates is to help build human relationships and
communities through service, friendship, understanding, cooperation and other
similar virtues. The sexual energy is transmuted in this way into an ever
greater energy in service to others and in the search for God. Otherwise,
celibacy can become simply a physical achievement and hence a source of pride.
It's not an end in itself, in other words, but a way of life that has to make
God's love visible in the community or wherever one decides to live the celibate
life.
AC: Judging from your description, the celibate's sphere
of interest seems almost implicitly broader than that of a married individual.
Yet you've also said that neither married life nor celibate monastic life is
inherently superior, and that in either case what's really most important is
one's motivation.
TK: Exactly. And not only one's motivation
but the perseverance in that motivation through the purification of the dark
side so that—
AC: The dark side?
TK:
Purification of one's innermost being rather than just biologically or
physically because, without that inner purification, celibacy is an external
observance rather than an interior practice that supports authentic
transformation.
AC: It sounds as if one who was fully committed
to undergoing this process of transformation would in a sense be married to God.
Wouldn't one's attention therefore be liberated in such a way that one could
have no special friendships or intimate relationships but would rather love all
selflessly?
TK: Yes, chastity enhances and extends the power
to love; it enables us to perceive the sacredness of everything that is,
especially other people. But to reach that one has to go through a process away
from the experience of conventional intimacy with others and toward another kind
of intimacy which, while it respects everyone's uniqueness, loves them not for
any physical purpose of one's own. And as a consequence of that, one respects
the dignity of other persons and couldn't possibly use them for sexual or
emotional fulfillment. Now this doesn't exclude friendship, which is very
important in supporting a celibate commitment, but it does imply a discipline
that filters out of that growing intimacy with another the genital attraction
that may be there, and which is perfectly normal if it is there. But one
ought not to conclude from this that a genuinely spiritual friendship must
exclude all warmth or emotion; it is only those excessive marks of affection
that lead to deep sensuality or acting out that have to be sacrificed, not
friendship itself. In fact one needs friends to support one's commitment
to celibacy; otherwise one may fall into loneliness or some kind of self-seeking
that is almost narcissistic. This is one of the hazards in the celibate
commitment.
AC: What are some of the other
hazards?
TK: Celibacy is not a commitment one should take
lightly, and there are different temptations along the way. Sexual attraction is
one thing in adolescence and another thing altogether in adulthood, where
procreation becomes important. Then, in the midlife crisis, a whole new aspect
of our sexuality emerges that has to do with the temptation to return to the
unfinished relationships of one's youth or regrets about not having experienced
certain things before one became celibate. As a result the temptation to depart
from one's commitment is also very strong at that time. And even in old age, one
finds that that loneliness is still present. So because the sexual energy lasts
all our lives, a lifetime commitment to celibacy is bound to include periods
that are extremely difficult, and the important question is: To what degree has
this energy been transmuted and transformed by discipline, service to others and
devotion to God, so that in those moments when the attraction of sexual
satisfaction is extremely strong, there's enough inner strength to resist
it?
In the Christian tradition, especially in those denominations that
emphasize the love of God or specifically the love of Jesus Christ, "friendship"
is the model for a relationship with God that moves from the superficiality of
mere acquaintance to a degree of friendliness, based on years of hanging out
together, that at a certain point demands a true commitment. This kind of
commitment is characteristic of any friendship whether it's human or divine, and
it's in that moment that one begins to consider whether one's devotion to
celibacy is truly a lifetime commitment to God or only a temporary one. And one
should have plenty of time to think this decision through because of its deep
psychological, social and spiritual consequences. There's a whole mystique, you
might say, to a lifelong commitment. It's very different from a temporary
commitment, even though that's an extremely useful one for someone to pass
through, as you evidently teach in your community. It's a wonderful way of
getting a clear idea of what sexuality is and whether you want to renounce it
for life; and as I said, it would be a great mistake to make that decision
lightly or without a good period of time to practice it first on a temporary
basis.
AC: There have certainly been too many people, I think,
who have taken that decision too lightly and then lived to regret
it.
TK: Yes. And I would think that nobody really has the
power to do this without the grace of God; whether you think of it as grace or
some other kind of force, it's like the twelve steps of AA—the second step,
isn't it?—"We found out that we were absolutely powerless of ourselves." And
that's one of the great benefits of the celibate commitment: You find out fairly
soon that it's not going to be easy. There is a higher power—we call it God in
the Christian tradition—and His grace doesn't come in the abstract but in the
form of a community and a model of commitment to encourage us in difficult
times, a special opportunity for spiritual retreat or study or sometimes even
psychological instruction. But even so, not everybody is humanly equipped for a
celibate commitment. Certainly I would never recommend it for someone who has a
serious personality disorder or a long history of promiscuity or some other kind
of neurotic problem; such things should certainly be treated before one makes a
commitment as serious as this one.
AC: I agree with you that,
through the practice of celibacy, one gets an experience of how extremely
powerful the sexual force is—an experience that's very different than if one
were never to undergo a period of prolonged abstinence.
TK:
Absolutely, and it's for that reason that I think it would be an enormously
valuable experience for both women and men, especially at an earlier learning
period in their young adulthood, because really most young people are no more
ready for a marriage commitment than they are for a monastic
commitment.
AC: You're right about that.
TK:
It really takes some life experience to be able to handle the responsibilities
that that commitment requires. And a celibacy commitment, similarly, has its own
set of responsibilities that need to be practiced and tested
humbly.
AC: What would you say is the greatest joy of the
practice?
TK: Loving God! And hoping always that that love
will increase and enable us to surrender ourselves more and more completely,
body, mind and spirit—totally: conscious, unconscious, every level of our being.
This is my view of what celibacy is all about. Its fulfillment is certainly
going to take some time, and there are going to be some rough spots, and not
everybody's going to make it; there are going to be some failures. Anybody who's
been through those dark nights will not judge anybody's failures because he or
she knows how difficult that commitment is. In the "dark night" of St. John of
the Cross, who is one of the great teachers in Catholic mysticism, there are
described three great trials or temptations, one of which he called the "spirit
of fornication," in which there are enormous and continual temptations to sexual
activity or to leaving the celibate commitment. And it's in that intense
struggle that the virtue of chastity is tested; the renunciate is pounded by
temptation to the depths of his soul until he becomes really stable in the face
of all temptation.
AC: The beautiful way you're speaking
makes me curious to know if you ever come together with your brother monks just
to share your experience of the practice, for the purposes of support and
investigation, as we are doing here.
TK: No, not very often.
Very rarely, in fact. They do that in the first few years of monastic life,
along with studying the various other commitments that are also involved. But
later on, to tell you the truth, you don't see much of that—and I think it would
be a good idea.
AC: I've always found this question very
interesting because over the years that I've been teaching, often my celibate
students—if we've been in India, for example—would want to get together with
other monks and nuns from, say, the Buddhist or Hindu traditions, just to speak
together about the practice of celibacy and its relationship to the pursuit of
liberation or, as you would say, a pure heart. And it's been fascinating to
discover that very few practitioners have had much to say or have even been
particularly interested in talking because quite often, it seems, the practice
of celibacy is not accompanied by any kind of active investigation or inquiry.
TK: You're right. It's kind of taken for granted. And as I
said in the beginning, one of the things that you have rightly observed and, I
gather, integrated into the life of your community is that celibacy is a very
important commitment with enormous possibilities, and that as such it should be
fully studied and understood by neophytes, and that their experiences of its
difficulties should be shared within the group. And I'd bet that the reason this
doesn't happen more often is in large part because almost all the religious
traditions, and society in general, have been most unwilling, until thirty or
forty years ago, to speak about sexual energy or sexual matters at all. Lots of
people even arrived at marriage without having heard anything about—what are
they?—the birds and the—
AC: The bees.
TK:
Shows you how much I know!
AC: I've also noticed, even with my
own students, that someone can practice celibacy for a couple of years and never
really begin. It might take a few years before the individual really
begins to find some energetic, enthusiastic, inspired interest. And then of
course the practice comes alive and its liberating power is experienced and
appreciated.
TK: That's the full experience.
AC:
Yes, and then, of course, it's so fruitful. And it's interesting that in our
community—this might sound strange to you, but the men and women who are
celibate live together in separate houses from those who are not celibate—they
report that their relationships with each other are tangibly different because
of the vow they've taken, and that they experience a much greater freedom and
intimacy in their association with each other than they do with other members of
the community, who one would suppose are equally committed to liberation and
purity and honesty and truth. Yet simply because they've taken this vow—and
because they take it very seriously—they experience a much greater freedom of
being when they're together with each other, principally because they all know
that they don't want anything from each other. They were speaking with me
about this a week or so ago, and it was very moving.
TK:
That's wonderful, that experience of freedom. It makes all the other aspects of
community life more accessible and valuable, this interior freedom that the
celibate commitment makes possible. You told me that you've asked them to make a
temporary vow, is that correct?
AC: Yes.
TK:
So everybody knows that everybody else is committed to this, and immediately
there's a great freedom from all the subtle ways that young people—and
not-so-young people—interact for reasons of sensuality, flirtation, and that
kind of thing. All of that falls away, and this allows people to be themselves:
honest and straightforward and loving, without seeking any kind of return or
reward, especially of a physical nature.
AC: Physical or even
just emotional—wanting to be seen as special, this kind of thing. Because I've
noticed, just in observing my own experience, that inherent in sexual desire is
a kind of psychological and emotional compulsion to want to be seen in a
certain way and also to want to have and to consume. Standing back
from it, one recognizes this to be the very force or power of the ego
itself.
TK: Yes, I think that's extremely right and true. It's
always looking for its own satisfaction. Whereas the true Self is not engaged in
that kind of melodrama.
AC: When I was teaching the other day I
said: It's the ego that experiences the thrill of wanting, but the true Self
experiences that very thrill as suffering.
TK: Yes,
beautiful.
AC: Another thing I wanted to ask you about is the
fact that many—or perhaps even most—of the greatest spiritual figures throughout
history have chosen to lead a celibate life. Why do you think that
is?
TK: Well, I think there's enough evidence from psychology
today for us to be able to recognize that sexual energy is not only in the body,
but it also has something to do with the unconscious. And the scope, extent and
power of this energy are enormous and have to be respected. And when it's
channeled, through devotion to God and service to others, this energy begins to
emerge, especially during meditative practices, in a different form. Instead of
just sort of blowing you away, it's channeled by the solid preparation of faith
in God and love for other people; it's transformed or transmuted into higher
possibilities of energy for use in seeking God's presence, which isn't an easy
path. Cultivation of the ability to face up to that energy directly becomes a
support for our pursuit of the highest and most difficult good, and especially
the ultimate goal of surrendering absolutely to God. The great spiritual figures
you mention no doubt understood that implicitly, but I think it's extremely
important that those of us who are experiencing the growth or emergence of this
energy within ourselves have the tools at hand to make use of it for good,
because if one isn't well prepared for the emergence of the subtle energy of
sexuality, then one can get blown away. As an example of what I'm talking
about, I'm thinking of people a generation or two ago who wanted to experiment
with psychedelic drugs and so on. What they didn't realize was that they were
loosening things up in the psyche that they weren't ready to face—images or
desires or fantasies that were emerging from that energy as it came to
consciousness. There's a relation, it seems to me, between the growth of
celibate consciousness, the fruits of which you've beautifully described as
sweetness, and those dark forces in the psyche that can transform that very same
energy into ego trips and sheer selfishness if it's released too soon, before
the person is spiritually equipped to handle that kind of primal energy. Do you
understand what I'm getting at?
AC: Yes, I
do.
TK: And that's why I feel so strongly that celibacy should
never be practiced in isolation from other practices that strengthen community
relations, such as devotion, such as real friendship, and the kind of intimacy
that seeks no reward but the happiness of the other person. And also I think
that for many people, celibacy needs to be nourished by a more and more intimate
relationship with God, so that the divine presence is experienced more and more
as a vital force of one's own consciousness, and so that one is
consenting to the presence and action of God both in one's meditation and
in daily life.
AC: Everything you're saying is quite moving,
and I deeply appreciate it. But of course in the process of exploring this issue
very actively and in great depth, we've found that even in the spiritual world
many people seem to view the practice of celibacy with fear and suspicion.
Sometimes even just speaking about the practice makes people angry and
upset.
TK: Yes, well, I think I know what you mean. And I
think it's partly to do with their early education. Some religious groups have
been so strict about sexual matters that many of the young people growing up in
those traditions either became frightened to death of sex and developed
repressive or neurotic symptoms of one kind or another, or they just turned
their back on the whole idea of religion and ran headlong into experimentation
and promiscuity. And so I suspect that this fear of celibacy is due to
repression in early childhood and the obvious damage it has done to a lot of
people. I've seen this happening to people in religious life whose motivation
for entertaining celibacy was simply to avoid sexuality because, early in life,
they'd had experiences that were so traumatic that emotionally they hadn't
developed sufficiently to be able to handle them. Child abuse, for instance, is
an enormous obstacle to human growth, and one really needs psychological help
with that, especially before entering into a celibate
commitment.
AC: But do you think part of this fear of celibacy
might also be due to the fact that for many—or perhaps most—people in our
society, the sexual force seems inherently to represent an imaginary promise of
paradise, an illusory promise of completeness or wholeness? My own suspicion is
that because most people have not discovered that the source of their true
happiness really lies in a very different place, they're often too terrified
even to question whether the one place they're convinced they'll find it can
actually deliver.
TK: Yes, I'm sure that you're right. And
it's also true that philosophically our Western culture has been heavily
influenced by the Greek view of the body and the fear of sexuality that come
down to us from some sources in early Christianity as it was influenced by
neoplatonic philosophy. Oddly enough, Christianity emerged out of the Hebrew
tradition, in which the unity of body and soul is very strongly affirmed. But
unfortunately, the early fathers of the Church were more influenced, partly
because they had consciously separated from the Jewish religion, by Greek
philosophy, which is wonderful in some respects but extremely defective in
others, particularly when it's applied to the interpretation of the Old
Testament and its moral code. So it's only recently that in the Catholic Church,
for instance, marriage has come to be regarded as a way to holiness that is
equal with the celibate commitment. This is an enormous step in the direction of
liberation from mind-sets that I think have been harmful both to marriage and to
celibacy.
AC: In the process of looking very deeply into this
subject, what has became apparent to me is that generally speaking, in religious
or spiritual circles and also outside of them, human beings basically tend to
have one of two fundamental views or value judgments with regard to the ultimate
nature of sexuality. One of these views holds that sexuality is good,
healthy and natural—and this is obviously a very popular belief in the
time that we're living in, fueled, as you've said, by a certain rebelliousness
against the repressive ideas and traditions of the recent past. And the other
view, which many traditional religions seem to emphasize, is that sexuality is
bad, dirty and evil—
TK: Yes, that's the idea I was
just describing myself, prominent in some early Christian circles and especially
in the time of St. Augustine, who was very negative about sexuality. It
sometimes happens among converts from promiscuity that they get carried away and
go a little too far.
AC: Yes, precisely. But what began to
occur to me, in the process of looking very deeply into my own experience in
order to try to understand all this, was that obviously the sexual force itself
could be neither good, healthy and natural nor bad, dirty and evil because it
simply was what it was in and of itself. It wasn't inherently good or
bad.
TK: Well, yes, I would definitely hesitate to say that
it's bad. I think sexuality is best understood as the basic force between women
and men, a force of human growth that needs to be cultivated, but in the right
way, with discipline and with choices that are mature, so that it doesn't become
a source of neurosis for some people. But as soon as you say there's something
wrong with sexuality, then you're taking the side of those who don't
believe that everything that God has made is good. What we do with sex
may not be good, but that could never mean that the sexual force itself is not
absolutely essential because it's the growth of our sexuality, as male and
female, that matures and opens us to other people. This is true whether the
sexual energy is expressed through genital activity, marriage or in the celibate
state. That force is to be not repressed but transmuted, transformed and
integrated into the whole of our being; then you have a whole human
being. Take, for instance, those who are in the service of others in ministry:
If they repress any emotion, including sexual feeling, they're going to
come across as "cold fish," as they say, and they're not going to impress
anyone. It's sexuality that gives warmth to the whole personality; but in
service—and also in marriage—sexuality can be expressed as affection and love
without being a form of genitality, because as I said earlier, chastity is not
the rejection of sexuality or even of genitality but the right use of it
according to our state of life. So sexuality is a positive virtue, and it's a
hazard in celibacy only if one denies it and then represses one's feelings
instead of integrating them into the whole evolving development of one's
faculties, including one's intuitive and spiritual faculties, which I think are
especially fostered by a celibate commitment, but which are still just as
available to anyone because they are human faculties. So do you see the
distinction that I'm trying to make?
AC: Yes, I certainly do.
What you're saying makes perfect sense.
TK: It's not that I
expect everybody to agree with me. But I think that if we don't take the view
that sexuality is good, then immediately we've lost sight of it in relation to
the power it has to unify and to mature the whole human psyche and body so that
spirit can express itself through us.
AC: I agree with you two
hundred percent. But I think I was making a slightly different point, and that
is because the power of sexuality is so strong, we as human beings are always
seeking for ways to feel comfortable in the face of its awesome and
overwhelming power. And one strategy that human beings use in order to feel
comfortable in the face of sexuality is to say, "Well, it's good, healthy and
natural." And another, of course, is to reject it by saying that "it's bad,
dirty and evil." And I basically feel that neither of these positions could ever
accurately represent what it truly is.
TK: Yes, now I
understand, and I fully agree with you.
AC: So my point is that
maybe sexuality itself, and the force of it, is ultimately neutral,
because it simply is—it's the creative force or the creative power of
life, of the universe in a state of becoming. But in terms of this materialistic
relationship with it that the individual creates because it's so compelling, so
frightening, so overwhelming and so enticing, taking a position of
neutrality really forces one to scrutinize one's relationship to it in a way
that I would say never "lets one off the hook," never gives one the security of
feeling, "Well, yes, I know what that is"—you know, that it's either a wonderful
thing or a terrible thing.
TK: Yes, well, like most things in
life it's a matter of intention.
AC: Exactly
right.
TK: And it's in this experience of intention that one
moves to higher integration. But it's when we get stuck in whichever one of
those extremes you just mentioned that human growth slows down—or comes to a
screeching halt—until one finds the insight to transcend both of those views,
neither of which is fully human. Negative or positive, they're just responses to
instinct, and a human being is more than just instinct. A human being has
all these other powers that instinct supports, and instinct is fine as
far as it goes, but it's incomplete as a motivating power for the whole of life.
But that's the human predicament, you see. And of course the majority of people
do respond to it by sexually acting out as if sex, as you say, were the only
pleasure to be had in life.
AC:
Precisely.
TK: I mean, there's no doubt about it: Some
people really do seem to live only for that, and we even have an industry
that supports this, along with sexual aberrations of all kinds. And it's waved
in front of young people, I would guess, in most cities and towns nowadays, and
of course in the media.
AC: Yes, it's
everywhere.
TK: So needless to say, there's no real support
for a commitment to celibacy in our culture anymore. Although it was always only
a very small number who were interested anyway, at least in the past there was a
profound respect for it in some communities, but now even among the Roman
Catholics that respect has diminished. It's sad to consider that perhaps both
marriage and celibacy are suffering in our time from what might be called an
incapacity in most people who are growing up today, or who have grown up in the
last generation or so, to commit themselves to something for
life—whatever it might be—or even for a long period of time. Because there
are no models for that anymore. So much divorce, so much moving, so much
changing of jobs or professions, travel, lack of stability in families; there's
no real experience of the larger family, of grandparents, for example, who have
been together all their lives. So to start telling people that you've got to
make a life commitment either to this person or to this God of yours—well, it
sounds like nonsense to them, like somebody's just arrived from another
planet!
There are very few experiences in our culture of the value of
moderation, of balance, of the integration of human growth beyond instinctuality
to a point where instinctual needs are sufficiently integrated and moderated
that their energy can be used for the love of God's service. That to me is what
the spiritual journey is all about—empowering ourselves to use all the
forces of our being, not for our own satisfaction but in the service of God and
other people and the planet. I think that's the fruit of celibacy,
don't you? It's a capacity for sensitivity to the needs of all other creatures
and for a certain happiness in belonging to this universe, and not just for sex!
They say that babies have a sort of polymorphous sexuality in which the
pleasures of the senses are experienced throughout the body and not just fixated
in the genital organs, and I think there's an analogy in that to spiritual life.
In the spiritual journey the sexual urge, at least insofar as it wants to
express itself genitally, is relativized by the experience of the beauty of the
other pleasures of the senses, which obviously are not made ends in themselves
either, but together open us up to the truth and the beauty and the goodness of
all of creation. In this way, the Creator or the God we're seeking becomes
present not only in our meditation or prayer, but comes to be recognized as the
source of everything that exists, including events that are passing through our
own thoughts and feelings, and soon everything begins to be seen as that
unity, that oneness, that immense awareness. And then, it seems to me, human
beings can begin to live in harmony and peace because they've learned to see
each other not as objects but as subjects manifesting an immense subjectivity
that embraces all in the most personal relationship one could ever
imagine—father, mother, brother, sister, lover—all rolled into one as a
sense of the ever-present unconditional love of God. Promiscuity or repression
can only hinder the realization of that miracle, you see? And frankly I've seen
far too much of both in the lives of people who have shared their spiritual
journeys with me—both within the monastery and outside.