A brand new course focusing on the eight poems in Thomas Keating’s ‘The Secret Embrace’, his final spiritual legacy to the world composed the last winter of his life.
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 of creative energy during early winter 2018 — 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 have her with us for a 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 a schedule you choose. . Each will include:
- a short commentary on the poem of the day (some lasting two days)
- some questions for reflection
- a daily practice
You will also receive a link so you can watch the one-hour talk Cynthia gave on Zoom toward the end of the first run of the e-course.