The Gift of Knowledge gives us a true idea of the created world in relation to God: it is not a substitute for God, as we tend to make it. The created world is a stepping-stone to God and manifests God. Without that orientation, the created world is sheer vanity or illusion. Since we, too, are created beings, there is a certain humbling character that the Gift of Knowledge imparts--namely that we are basically prone to illusion and that our way of looking at life is not the only way and certainly not the most accurate. Such knowledge opens us, like the opening of mind and heart that we pursue in Centering Prayer, to the reality of God just as God is, without our interpretations--however devout or pious. God is extremely down to earth and has a certain humor and playfulness, qualities that Jesus manifests in the Gospels, especially in the parables.

The Gift of Knowledge is an intuition into the fact that only God can satisfy our deepest longing for happiness. The Gift of Knowledge provides perspective on the energy that we put our emotional programs for happiness that grow up around the instinctual needs of security and survival, power and control, and affection and esteem. While these needs are essential for our survival and growth as infants, they become exaggerated to the degree we feel they have been withheld. Hence, as the compensatory process becomes entrenched, we invest more and more energy in finding in our culture or in our environment the symbols that will satisfy our unbridled needs.

Obviously, given the nature of the false self, we are in competition with everybody else on earth who is trying to do the same unfortunate and childish thing. It can't possibly succeed. When it doesn't work, we are immediately frustrated and so trigger afflictive emotions, such as grief, anger, fear, and discouragement. One's life becomes an endless recycling of desire, frustration, and afflictive emotions. This recycling makes some people so miserable that they opt for some way of ending their pain, such as total withdrawal from life (apathy) or an aggressive program that tries to dominate everybody else. The Spirit of God in response to our Centering Prayer practice provides perspective for the energy that is channeled into this daily frustration of our immoderate desires. The Spirit says to us: "You will never find happiness in any of your instinctual needs. They are only created things, and created things are designed to be stepping-stones to God, and not substitutes for God."

The Spirit presents us with the true source of happiness, which is the experience of God as intimate and always present. Instead of rejoicing with so great a gift, most of us go into a period of mourning. This is natural, because whenever human beings lose something they love greatly, they feel sad. If we think that security, affection, or power are the greatest things on earth and that we are not getting them--or never going to get them--we automatically go into mourning.

In the action of the Gift of Knowledge, the mourning is not like ordinary feelings of grief. It is, rather, constructive and fruitful, because after we get used to the fact that God is the only source of happiness, we have no more energy to invest in these hopeless expectations and so begin to experience peace. The Fruits of the Spirit--Charity, Joy, Peace, and the rest--begin to emerge as habitual dispositions in daily life. The most mature fruits of the Spirit are the Beatitudes, which are even greater dispositions of freedom. Through the exercise of the Fruits, we are not held back anymore by the residue of the emotional programs for happiness that we brought with us from early childhood and that we have been more or less dominated by all our lives.

The Spirit also lays to rest the prejudices and biases that come from the period of age four to eight, when we unquestioningly absorb the values of our culture, parents, education, and ethnic, religious, and peer groups. There is, of course, a certain value in those social entities. It is our over-identification with those values that pulls our energy away from relating to God into various dead ends.

The Gift of Knowledge corresponds to the beatitude of those who mourn. The reason we mourn is that something inside us realizes that our programs for happiness, put together in early childhood, are not going to work anymore. This is one of the intuitive fruits of the Gift of Knowledge. It is the realization of the damage that the emotional programs have done to us throughout our lives up until now Part of the mourning caused by the Gift of Knowledge is the beautiful grace called "tears of contrition." Such contrition is also known as compunction. Compunction is the humble acknowledgement of our failures without any guilt feelings attached to them. If there are guilt feelings attached to them, then they are coming from our own neuroses. When there is a feeling of loving sorrow for having damaged ourselves and others, these tears are cleansing. Hence the promise contained in the beatitude: "Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted."

Comfort consists in the exercise of hope. The theological virtue of hope is purified by the Gift of Knowledge and perfects it. Hope as a theological virtue does not depend on the past. In other words, hope is not based on what we have done in the past, whether good or bad. No matter who we are, even if we are the greatest sinner on earth, we can always hope, because hope is not based on past actions. It is based on the infinite goodness and mercy of God here and now--a mercy that never changes.

Those who mourn are blessed because the feeling of sorrow is mitigated and balanced by the theological virtue of hope, as I have just described it. Compunction is a blend or perfect balance of sorrow for real failures and boundless confidence in the mercy of God. Without that balance, mourning turns into discouragement and or even despair. Whenever we feel discouraged, especially when we feel despair over some misdeed in our life, we should immediately remember hope: that God is always waiting for us with unconditional love. The moment that we turn to him with trust in the divine mercy, the past is completely forgotten. God relates to us in the present moment, not in the past or future.

Continued . . .

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Excerpted from Fruits and Gift of the Spirit by Fr. Thomas Keating

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