CTD3 – Waiting in the Desert – Crossing the Desert: Lent and Conversion with Deacon James Keating – Discerning Hearts Podcasts

DescerningHearts.com presents Crossing the Desert, Lent and Conversion, with Deacon James Keating.

Deacon Keating has a PhD and is a professor of spiritual theology and serves as a spiritual director at Kendrick Lennon Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri.

He has led more than 400 workshops in areas of morality and spirituality and has authored numerous books including The Way of Mystery, Listening for Truth, and Spiritual Fatherhood.

Crossing the Desert, Lent and Conversion, with Deacon James Keating. I'm your host, Chris McGregor.

Welcome back, Deacon Keating. Thank you.

Over the last several segments we've been taking a look at your book Crossing the Desert, Lent and Conversion.

And it is so important during the period of Lent that we don't get too absorbed in the to-do lists that we set for ourselves during that time, isn't it?

Right. It becomes another series of failures that we've attempted. Lent can be sort of like a religious New Year's Day where we make all these resolutions.

And then because our list is so formidable, we fail at them and then once we fail, human nature takes over and we say, well, since I failed, I guess I wouldn't even try anymore.

And then we give up the whole journey. So no, it's not a list of to-do items.

Again, it's more of this stance of making yourself available to be affected by God. I mean, that's what Lent is. That's why God drove the prophets and took Moses and Jesus himself went to the desert because it renders us more available to be affected by God.

The desert is the symbol of complete dependency and neediness and all the props that we have are stripped from us.

And we get to the core. We get to what is most basic in us. And that is what holds us in existence. And what holds us in existence is our deep being in God without this connection to God's love.

We would not exist at all. Obviously, Genesis tells us. So Lent is not adding up what we are to do and events that we are to attend.

These can be helpful, but their helpfulness is measured only upon the standard of whether these events and these lists that we have are actually making us more available to God's mercy.

When we're more available to God's mercy, are we able to see more clearly the temptations that are in front of us?

Yes. I mean, the more we allow ourselves to be vulnerable before God, then the more our consciousness is freed from the games and the tricks that we play, the defense mechanisms that we use to hide what we are either shamed of or guilty of.

Or unable to confront this particular time in our life because we don't want to enter the change or the conversion that is necessary for us.

So a lot of us during the course of our days, we keep what is most crucial for us to think about. We keep that pushed into the subconscious.

And as we noted before, I believe that this is the most dangerous of all activities, not only on the psychological level, but on the spiritual level because that which is hidden can easily be manipulated by Satan.

Satan doesn't know what to do when everything is thrown into the light. Satan can only really attack us when we are hiding things about ourselves from ourselves.

Certainly, we're not talking about public confession. We're talking about hiding the truth of our lives, hiding that from ourselves.

And then Satan can use that to pummel our self-esteem and beat us up spiritually and negate any sense of self-love, legitimate self-love and consolation because we have not brought to the light that which is necessary.

And what's necessary to bring to the light is that which is a stumbling block to our intimacy with Christ, namely sin.

Or in the case of psychology, some levels of pathology, although certainly grace can get through our pathologies and our neuroses.

And sometimes people who are neurotic or in some other ways affectively suffering, emotionally suffering.

Sometimes God's grace gets through quite powerfully indeed and it's not a stumbling block at all.

The main stumbling block is sin. And so all of that must come to the light during light. And that's where we get our liberation from at Easter.

Everything that we have hidden is now coming to the light. Everything that is sin in us is now being forgiven.

And then on Easter we rise with Christ and the glory of Christ's victory over death because sin is just dead and dying things. That's all sin is.

We keep running from God and trying to sustain ourselves by way of our ego. And that's a recipe for death.

We will die to our true being and to our true glory. And we only come to the true glory of the human being when we give those sins over to God.

And then in Christ we rise to the beauty of being in communion with God.

Really struck when you use the term light, bringing them essentially to the light of Christ, those sins that we have because during the lent it's a time of purification and enlightenment particularly as outlined in the rights of a Christian initiation for adults.

Those people who are going through the conversion process, going through this period where they're turning their lives over to Christ.

So for them the church deems this period of lent a time of purification and enlightenment but it's really true for all of us isn't it?

The reason we have the scrutiny is as public during the RCA process is so that we can all join with these men and women who are entering our church.

We can join with them in naming the truth about ourselves, that whole sense of the scrutiny where the truth arises and in the power of Christ we accept we embrace the truth.

Not unto some condemnation but unto conversion. We always embrace the truth unto conversion.

If we just embrace the truth unto condemnation then that's a form of spiritual pathology. It's impotent, it's lifeless, there's nothing there for us.

Okay, so we name our sins and we sort of treasure them and the naming of them and we feel bad about ourselves and we feel guilty and we get a warps sort of consolation from that.

That's not the point, the point is to name them, bring them to the light and forget them and begin the fullness of new life in Christ.

And the fullness of new life in Christ is just ordering the ego toward the needs of the other.

That's the great turnaround, ordering our mind and our affections, no longer toward the self but toward the other.

And of course we're doing this in the power of Christ. We can't do it without Him, that's why we call it salvation because through His grace, through the mystery of His life, His death and His resurrection, through that great mystery He moves us with our free yes, He moves us out of the self toward the interests of others.

Others become more fascinating to us than ourselves after we meet Jesus and particularly the poverty of others, the sickness of others, the neediness of others.

In other words, we have grown a heart of compassion by way of Jesus Christ.

And so we might have been callous at one point because we were so fearful and we lived only for ourselves but now in Christ because He conquers death, the death of our bodies and the death of sin.

We are no longer fearful, fear no longer binds us. We are living in the light and when you live in the light you see the other.

That's what the light does, the light shows you the poor and the sick and those who are still in sin who need to be evangelized.

And so it's this great movement out of the self and then deeply led into the interest of others.

What's in your interest, the converted person asks, previously we just kept saying what's in my own interest but now we ask what's in your interest, what's best for you?

That's how we know we have begun to experience the resurrection and the ascension because that question is in our heart.

What's in your best interest and we're sort of fed up with the punyness of ourselves and Christ has shown us the great expansiveness of life which is taking care of others and being fascinated with God and having a vision that looks out toward creation and He expands our soul that way. That's where ecstasy comes from.

Often when we speak of the light of truth, we don't always connect it with the term that I think is developed unfortunately more negative connotations than a connotations of the good and I'm thinking of morality.

What is morally evil, I think a lot of times when people think of morality they think of it as a negative or a shame as opposed to there is something really quite glorious and true morality isn't there?

Yes, of course the whole sense of morality is just that you're coming into this freedom of being a human being who has been found by Christ to be moral is to be free and to be immoral is to be chained.

And the reason that people like to cast negative aspersions on morality is because they love their sins since they love their sins they threatened by the light.

The light is not the beginning of liberation. The light is the end of their fun. The light is the diminishment of their egocentric pleasures and so they don't welcome the church they don't welcome the evangelical message.

They hate priests they hate the church they hate the mass because all of these are signs of liberation for them and they don't want to be liberated.

They keep living in that small puny world where when stress gets too great they run into their favorite sins they hide in their favorite sins instead of hiding in the wounds of Christ in the mystery of the passion and the mystery of salvation upon the cross

where the great mystics talked about hiding in the wounds of Christ we hide in our sins because the stress level is so great that we go back to our habitual behaviors of consolation and our habitual behaviors of consolation whether they're sinful or virtuous are serving a particular need for those who have yet to come to the light.

It's serving the need of a swaging a stress maybe fear maybe some difficulty maybe some suffering and they keep running into the sin like a I don't like vermin runs into their whole like a rat runs into a rat hole they go back into it to sort of save themselves so that the light can't see them or find them.

And so they live in this dark world where they keep returning to their sin over and over again whereas the person who has allowed the light to come in they go toward the wounds of Christ they never take their eyes off the mystery of self giving they never take their eyes off the mystery of loving the other and slowly but surely Jesus pulls them out of this whole habit of hiding in sin and he begins to say come and hide in this better place

hide in the mystery of giving yourself over to others hide in the mystery of love of neighbor and this is where Christian humility is born

humility is thinking about the other and not thinking about yourself so you don't thrust yourself into the center this is why it's another form of hiding but it's a healthy form of hiding

where a sin is a very pathological form of hiding where the self is everything Christ pulls you out of that sin but you are still to hide so to speak in metaphorical language you're hiding in the service that you give to others

you're hiding in the humility that is now the fruit of your relationship with Jesus it's not about you don't care about you remember again in the saints they're always asking how can I help you

what interest can I serve of yours so obviously the focus is not on the self so you have these people who are not yet ready to experience resurrection because it means the leaving of the selfishness behind

and the selfishness is all that they have known and so the pastoral ministry the church is supposed to be that grace filled coaxing relationship

that tries to coax people out of their hiding holes coax them out of the capital sins coax them out of the seven deadly sins and into the light

and that's why people give their lives to the priest to order some other specific form of ministry

we'll return in just a moment to crossing the desert but in conversion with deacon James Keating

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we now return to crossing the desert night and conversion with deacon James Katie

in crossing the desert land and conversion you have a section called waiting in the desert and from what you just talked about particularly concerning temptations and recognizing our sins

it really does help us to recall doesn't it that time when Jesus was waiting in the desert

and the forty days and forty nights and and all that again the illusions back to Old Testament understandings of the desert

and this sense of the desert this sense of absolute and total dependency on God moving us away from that which is habitually disappointing

which is some kind of absolute dependency on myself we may not recognize it but it's absolutely disappointing

and they say in the understanding of alcoholism it's like when you hit bottom you realize how little and how tiny your world was

and you almost want to pray in intercessory prayer oh lord either give me a breakdown or give me a breakthrough

because I'm I'm just stuck in this world where I think I'm dependent upon myself that I mean control

and so we want to move people into the desert of length so that there is this vulnerability, this openness, this simplicity

stop resisting the truth of God's desire to care for you to stop it

it's not helpful it's not healthy it has nothing to do with christian anthropology the meaning of human life

your thwarting who God is again it would be like a child who doesn't let their parents buy food and feed them or

clone them or house them this is somehow hideously unnatural why would a child one live outside in the front lawn of their house

or in the streets when their parents are eager and ready to sacrifice give them a place for shelter and clothing and food and education

and they keep refusing it well analytically and spiritually that this is what we go through in sin

we have to stop getting in the way of God being God God really does want to give us the best he's preparing the best

the best is intimacy with himself this lent receive that that's the gift he wants to give in the desert

he doesn't want us to suffer he doesn't want us to do any type of masochistic penances

he wants us to receive this gift he wants to give us in the desert he has ruled us to the desert

just like the bride and the bridegroom knew this honeymoon time

now receive the gift of the one who has called you

there will be accompanying suffering and the suffering is all because our interest in our sin is dissipating

it's a pain but he's not making you suffer all he's doing is bestowing his love on you

the reason you're suffering is because you have loved wrongly for the last 20 or 30 years

it's not God making you suffer during life

you're suffering because you have chosen unwisely to love that which is beneath your dignity

and now he wants to restore you

so let him come and let him give what he wants to give himself be receptive to that gift

even if it takes 40 days or 40 years but be receptive

is it too simplistic to say for us when we are in this desert unlike Jesus who was alone facing temptations

we are not alone if we allow him to accompany us

well no he's right there with us

and again it's part of the struggle though to recognize that

if you recognize that Jesus is with you during this length

then all of those attachments that need to go

all of those attachments are going to be disentangled much easier

in the desert of course the Father was with Jesus

and Jesus is always accompanying us aiming us toward the Father

he wants us to go to the source of life

he wants to always point us into that generating source of the love between himself and the Father

as carried in the Spirit

he's always trying

if we can use that word to wake us up or awaken us

into this great reality that we keep resisting

we were destined to share in Jesus Christ

a life of participation in the Trinity

in the love between the Father and the Son

the Son and the Father and the Spirit that is that love

we were destined to participate in that

Jesus is always trying to get us the Father through Jesus and in the Spirit

always trying to call these people home

so yes we're in the desert but rightly said

we're never alone

and it's a very very short turn of the will

and the mind and the affections

within our soul

that allows Christ to assist us in length

we just have to make a little turn of the heart

to cry out to Jesus

to cry out to the Spirit to come

and help us in whatever struggle we have during these 40 days

so that he can purify us

especially through the sacrament of reconciliation

that's all the time we have for today

thank you so much

Deacon Keating any final thoughts on this particular segment

now we just have to continue in hope

there is nobody who is beyond the reach of the grace of God

and whatever sin

you hate the most that you have committed

and Jesus loves you

an infinite time

and infinite time

beyond that which you think is blocking you from his love

so give him over that which you are most ashamed of

most embarrassed of

that's sin which is most grave

and he will take it and he will replace it

not with condemnation

but only mercy and love

thank you Deacon Keating

thank you

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lent and conversion with Deacon James Keating

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Crossing the Desert

Lant and Conversion

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