Finding Our Keys

From Inward/Outward yesterday. A call to finding our way through the spiritual.

We have all lost the key to our house. We don’t live there any more. We don’t experience the divine indwelling. We don’t live with the kind of intimacy with God that Adam and Eve reportedly enjoyed in the Garden of Eden. The house in the parable represents happiness, and happiness is intimacy with God, the experience of God’s loving presence. Without that experience, nothing else quite works; with it, almost anything works.

This is the human condition—to be without the true source of happiness, which is the experience of the presence of God, and to have lost the key to happiness, which is the contemplative dimension of life, the path to the increasing assimilation and enjoyment of God’s presence. What we experience is our desperate search for happiness where it cannot possibly be found. The key is not in the grass; it was not lost outside ourselves. It was lost inside ourselves. That is where we need to look for it.

Father Thomas Keating is a Trappist monk and considered to be the founder of the Centering Prayer movement. This passage is an excerpt from his book called The Human Condition.