Thomas Keating’s The Secret Embrace

In advance of Cynthia Bourgeault’s anticipated new book, Thomas Keating: The Making of a Modern Christian Mystic, Spirituality & Practice is featuring her classic teaching “Thomas Keating’s The Secret Embrace.” This one month e-course will include an opportunity to connect with Cynthia via Zoom for a one-hour session in October. Learn more below and register here.

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Father Thomas Keating is widely known as the co-founder of the Centering Prayer movement and a master teacher of contemplative prayer and devotion. In a final burst of creative energy during early winter 2017 — the last winter of his life — he and his nephew, filmmaker Peter Jones, worked intensely for three months, pooling their respective artistic gifts to create an extraordinary, visually stunning collection of eight small poems, haiku-like in their leanness and breathtaking in their wisdom. They are essentially Thomas’s final will and testament, his spiritual legacy to the world.

These poems electrified the audience when Cynthia Bourgeault first presented them in a three-day live webinar. We are thrilled to now have her written, interactively taught course that explores these poems in even greater depth. Even if you, like Fr. Keating, do not consider yourself particularly a poetry lover, we trust that you will still find plenty here to fire your imagination and fuel your journey.

The course will allow you to glimpse, through their shimmering facets, key aspects of his final journey of transfiguration. The whole course will be set on the foundation of the question “How do we live in this world of pain and uncertainty with the courage and unity that come from turning toward the stillness, the transfiguration?”

Cynthia will cover several key themes:

• the dark night passage
• divinization
• unitive life
• the transfiguration (rather than dismantling) of the false self.

When you sign up for this e-course, you will receive 12 emails, sent to you on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Each will include:

• a short commentary on the poem of the day (some lasting two days)
• some questions for reflection
• a daily practice

Then, on Wednesday, October 9th from 12 – 1 pm PT / 3 – 4 pm ET (find the time in your area here), we will gather with Cynthia on Zoom to discuss your experiences in the course and ask questions. Throughout the month, you will also be encouraged to share in the online Practice Circle, a forum open 24/7.

Cynthia believes, as do we, that Father Thomas’s poems deserve repeated contemplation. So even if you took this e-course when it was first offered in 2019, you may want to work with it again. As before, Cynthia will be present in the Practice Circle to comment on your reflections and encourage you. Also, when you take this course now, you will have access to the one-hour Zoom talk that Cynthia did in 2019, increasing the value of your subscription this time.

Register for “Thomas Keating’s The Secret Embrace here.