For centuries the great model of Spiritual growth in the Christian tradition has been the friendship of Christ. Friendship is a marvelous paradigm because it suggests confidence, love, and self-disclosure, all of which increase as friendliness develops into friendship and ever deepening levels of commitment. The paradigm of friendship, however, does not necessarily include the aspect of emotional illness that is so characteristic of the human condition. The friendship of Christ, of course, does include the reality of human weakness and need. One characteristic of love is that it reduces our defenses. When our defenses go down, the dark side of our personality emerges. One important aspect of a true friendship is the willingness to help each other process that material.

Here is another model that might be appropriate for our time, at least for the Western world, which has been so influenced by contemporary psychology. I call this paradigm for spiritual growth the "Divine Therapy." Therapy suggests a climate of friendship and the trust that a topnotch therapist is able to inspire, while at the same time emphasizing that we come to therapy with a variety of serious emotional or mental problems.

The human race, as a whole, is a sick species. According to the Roman Catholic tradition, only the Blessed Virgin Mary came into existence and remained emotionally undamaged. Most people are not aware of their illness or how very sick they are. They do not have an adequate diagnosis of the human condition in general or their own illness in particular. Hence they do not reach out for the kind of assistance that they need in order to recover.

One of the great strengths of the Twelve Step Program of Alcoholics Anonymous is that it emphasizes how serious one's illness actually is. Participants in AA know that their lives are unmanageable and will never become manageable unless they work the twelve steps. In actual fact, most humans suffer from the serious illness that Ann Wilson Schaef calls "the Addictive Process"--indeed, as high as 98 percent of the population in the Western world, according to some recent statistics. Personally, I have never met anyone from the other 2 percent! The addictive process as a psychological term parallels what theology in the Christian tradition calls the "consequences of original sin," only in much greater detail. The addictive process manifests itself according to circumstances and personality in one or another of the many addictions that can now be treated by various Twelve Step programs. The advantage of being an addict is that you know that you will never get well without help. Unfortunately, the average practicing Christian, because of a certain modicum of respectability, does not seem to know this. It is not until the addiction gradually gets so bad and all semblance of functionality breaks down that one finally recognizes it. The practical question for all of us is "How addicted are we?"

The consequences of original sin according to traditional theology are three: illusion, concupiscence, and weakness of will. Illusion means that although we are irresistibly programmed for boundless happiness in a way that is inherent to human nature, we do not know where true happiness is to be found. Concupiscence means that we seek happiness in the wrong places or too much happiness in the right places. And finally, if we ever reach the point of finding out where true happiness is to be found, our will is too weak to pursue it.

What is different about this teaching from the proclamation of the first step of the Twelve Step Program of AA that "my life is unmanageable"? If one accepts the traditional doctrine of the consequences of original sin, the freedom to manage one's life is severely limited. It is on the basis of complete helplessness apart from the grace of God that the whole idea of redemption rests.

Once we reach the bottom line of the diagnosis, "my life is unmanageable," we do not have to wait until things fall completely apart to recognize the seriousness of our illness. We can start at once by taking preventive therapy designed to heal the roots of developing addictive processes before they become full blown. The gospel addresses the human condition just as it is. "Repent"--that fundamental call in the gospel to begin the healing process--means "change the direction in which you are looking for happiness." The various orientations for happiness that we brought with us from early childhood are not working. They are slowly killing us. If we respond to the invitation to repent addressed to us so lovingly by the divine physician, we can begin at once to take advantage of the Divine Therapy.

Therapy, as we saw, implies both the relationship of friendship and the relationship of healing. Reading the gospel from the perspective of contemporary psychotherapy provides us with a detailed diagnosis of the disease. Contemplative prayer and action--life under the direct influence of the Seven Gifts of the Spirit (counsel, prudence, fortitude, reverence, wisdom, understanding, knowledge)--is the gospel program for human health, wholeness, and transformation.

Many of Jesus' parables and recorded sayings are basically directed at our unconscious emotional programs for happiness, which tear us apart by ever increasing demands that cannot possibly be fulfilled. A person dominated by an emotional investment in the instinctual needs for control, esteem, or security will absorb into these magnetic energy centers every new experience and interpret it from their perspective. If it satisfies, there is temporary delight; if it frustrates, lingering distress.

How did we get hooked into these programs in the first place? This question is still under investigation in our time. The world religions have projected various creation theories to account for the human condition universally experienced as seriously flawed. Now psychology and science are making their contributions. Developmental psychologists such as Piaget, and more recently John Bradshaw, have attributed the cause to failures of parental nurturance and emotional wounding experienced in early childhood. In his book The Ego and the Dynamic Ground (SUNY Press, 1988) transpersonal psychologist Michael Washburn hypothesizes a repression of the sense of oneness with the source of our being--what he calls the "dynamic ground"--as the first step in the process of developing a separate self-identity--a repression that starts us off on a desperate search for happiness that cannot possibly succeed. Whatever the cause, the source of true happiness is missing from our growing-up experience. The awareness of the divine presence is true security, true affirmation, and true independence, but that reassuring presence and pervading sense of bliss is missing from everyone's developing consciousness.

Without the reassuring experience of God the world is perceived to be potentially hostile. Since the need for happiness is so fundamental and so strong, we invest at a very early age in various substitutes. Our programs for happiness seek in vain to compensate for the absence of the sense of God's presence as the developmental process proceeds. The net result of our efforts to repress emotional pain or to compensate for it is the formation of the false self. The gospel invites us to recognize that the false self is a disease that can be healed and to accept Christ as the divine physician or, in the context of this paradigm, the Divine Therapist. The healing process is primarily the work of contemplative prayer, which, along with the homework of daily life, constitutes the Divine Therapy.

Let's look at what I am calling the Divine Therapy to see if it truly responds to the illness of the human condition and its diagnosis both theological and psychological. Let's envision a period of Centering Prayer as a take-off point and enlarge it to include several years of regular practice. Centering Prayer as it becomes habitual is dominated more and more by the contemplative gifts of the Holy Spirit: knowledge, understanding, and wisdom. When we sit down in prayer, our psychological experience is something like that depicted in Diagram 5 (remember that we are telescoping the cumulative effect of several years of practice into a single prayer period.) When we introduce the sacred word, we institute a circular motion with four major moments. The first moment is when we introduce the sacred word (or the sacred gaze or breath) as the symbol of our consent to God's presence and action within us and gently establish an attitude of waiting upon the Lord with loving attentiveness. At first there may be an experience of endless thoughts filling our awareness. When we have been practicing for several years, this normally passes fairly quickly into a deep sense of quiet, refreshment, or rest. This is the second moment in the circular movement of Centering Prayer. "Rest" is the term for a wide variety of psychological impressions such as peace, interior silence, contentment, a sense of coming home, of well-being, and most of all, of God's presence.

Diagram 5

Suppose this rest is so deep that at some point during prayer there are few or no thoughts passing by. Or one has a strong sense of the presence of God. The experience of deep rest, cumulative now since we are talking about a year or two of practice, automatically causes the body to rest, and indeed to rest in a greater degree than in sleep.

The feeling of deep rest, especially when it involves a deep sense of the divine presence, leads to a kind of psychological transference with God. That is to say, God becomes the therapist in the psychoanalytic sense in which we look to a therapist for the trust and love that we did not feel we received as a child from an important other, such as a parent. The pain of rejection, which the emotions have stored in the unconscious and which is reactivated by every new rejection in life, is projected onto the therapist, who reflects back the acceptance that we did not adequately experience in childhood. This heals the emotional wounds in a way that no amount of theological reflection can do. The emotions do not obey reason. They need reassurance in the area and in the measure in which they felt deprived. Almost everyone has a residue of emotional pain for the affection and security that as infants we needed and felt deprived of.

Continued next week . . .

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Excerpted from Intimacy with God by Fr. Thomas Keating

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