A dialogue between Father Thomas Keating and Andrew Cohen

In every issue of What Is Enlightenment? we aspire
to introduce our readers to sincere and passionate individuals who care profoundly
about their fellow human beings and who dare to accept, as their own burden,
the deepest spiritual aspirations of the race. Such encounters are always a
privilege, but it sometimes happens, as it did with Father Thomas Keating, that
the warmth, love, decency and sheer humanity that we experience in their presence
exceed our expectations, and we can only wonder at the good fortune of being
able to include their insights, ideas—and their spirit—in our ongoing inquiry
into the nature and significance of enlightenment.


Father
Keating, who spent twenty years as the abbot of St. Joseph’s Abbey, a Trappist
monastery in Spencer, Massachusetts, is now, at seventy-four, the leading figure
in an interdenominational movement to revitalize the Christian contemplative
practice known as “centering prayer.” He is the cofounder of Contemplative
Outreach, an organization devoted to introducing Christian contemplative practices
to laypeople of all faiths, and the author of several books, including Open
Mind, Open Heart and Intimacy with God, both of which describe the
process of spiritual development that such practices are intended to catalyze.


Since
the beginning of his Outreach activities, Father Keating has shared responsibility
for the development of contemplative workshops and retreats with several of
his colleagues. Yet for many of the growing number of people who have benefited
from their work, it is Keating himself, because of his extraordinary warmth
and humility, who exemplifies and embodies the transformative potential of centering
prayer. As a result, he is in constant demand as a lecturer and workshop leader
and maintains, despite frail health, a taxing schedule that takes him to several
cities each year. Keating is also known for his avid and unusually open-minded
interest in the contemplative and meditative practices of other religious traditions.
He has met and studied with spiritual teachers from a variety of Hindu and Buddhist
lineages and helped to create, fifteen years ago, the Snowmass Interreligious
Conference, at which teachers from different traditions meet regularly to compare
views and ideas, and to evaluate objectively the benefits and drawbacks of their
respective practices.


In the
midst of all this activity, one might well suppose that Father Keating’s celibacy
is, as he says it was in his years as a novice, a given, something to be considered
only in the context of so many other pressing concerns. But in the course of
his fifty-three years as a celibate monk—several of them spent guiding others
in the practice—Father Keating has clearly given much thought to the significant
role celibacy can play in the lives of sincere spiritual aspirants, and it is
a testament to his open-mindedness that, among the highly respected advocates
of celibacy we interviewed for this issue, he is uniquely outspoken in
his insistence that the celibate state must never be regarded as inherently
superior, nor as essential to the attainment of any ultimate spiritual goal.
The goal of celibacy, Father Keating asserts passionately, is “ever greater
humility and purity of heart . . . a letting go of pride and the false self
so that God can be God in us.” Fundamental to his approach is the
recognition that it is only through the cultivation of these attributes—humility
and purity—and only through a process of “inner purification” rather
than “external observance,” that the potential of any spiritual practice
to bring about authentic and lasting transformation can be realized.


Father
Keating shared his views with spiritual teacher Andrew Cohen, the founder of
What Is Enlightenment?, by telephone from his mountain hermitage at St.
Benedict’s Monastery in Snowmass, Colorado, last October.

interview

Andrew Cohen: I thought that a good way
to get started would be to give you a little background about why we’re interested
in discussing the subject of celibacy with you for this issue of our magazine.
I’m a spiritual teacher with a community of students, and I put a lot of emphasis
on renunciation and the role that it plays in helping human beings come closer
to truth. There was a period in my own life when I practiced celibacy consciously
for about three years, and it helped me enormously to realize a degree of objectivity
in relationship to sexuality, which is a most challenging area of human life.
So at this point, I encourage some of my own students to devote a period of
time—usually it’s between three and five years—to a very formal practice of
celibacy, in order to help them also to become clearer about this aspect of
their own human experience.


So to
begin with, could I ask when you first took your vow of chastity?



Thomas Keating: Let’s see, that must have been in 1946, after my
novitiate. I had already taken vows, though, for the two years of the novitiate,
when I first entered the Trappist monastery.



AC: What kind of vows were those?



TK: Those were temporary vows like the ones
your students take, a temporary commitment intended to give the candidates a
chance to experience the challenges and benefits of the practice of perfect
chastity. I might add that I had already been practicing outside the monastery
for two or three years while I was going to school; but it’s quite different
to practice celibacy—or chastity, if you want to use that word—without the support
of a spiritual community. So I’m glad to hear that the men and women who come
to you for teaching are able to support each other in this endeavor; that’s
a great idea. And as I’m sure you know, the commitment to celibacy as a state
of life isn’t the only feature of monastic life, but it’s one of several commitments,
all of which are considered to be equally supportive and essential to the transformative
process. For example, there’s a commitment to poverty, and its tendency to induce
a nonpossessive attitude toward material things—just as chastity tends to induce
a nonpossessive attitude toward the body and sex—and obedience, which is meant
to instill a nonpossessive attitude toward our own will and judgment through
submission to a teacher or to the community as a whole if the community has
a Rule of Life.

AC: Did you have any expectations about
what the practice of celibacy would be like? Would you say, for example, that
it represented, in your own mind and heart, a kind of sweetness—sweetness as
in simplicity?



TK: Well, to tell you the truth, monastic life
is extremely austere and hard—at least it was in the monastery that I entered.
And so one kind of took celibacy more or less for granted, and one’s concrete
attention was often devoted to the various other practices—like getting up at
one or two in the morning and praying in the early hours of the dawn, fasting
and abstinence, and along with all that, working very, very hard. So you really
felt less involved with the concerns associated with the practice of celibacy
than with, you know, having sufficient health and determination just to get
through the daily schedule. That’s my best recollection. You know, you’re asking
me about my life over fifty years ago, and my best recollection is how hard
the physical life was and how searching was the exterior silence. We spoke only
to the Superior and the Novice Master most of the time, and it was silence,
the experience of silence, that was most pervasive. So it would be hard
for me to say that I experienced celibacy in any other way than as part of the
context in which these other very concrete issues were turning up every single
day. When you get up at one in the morning, for example, all you’re really thinking
about is getting down to the church on time.



AC: How has your experience of celibacy
changed or deepened over the years?



TK: It has only become clearer that it’s a
gift of God and that the practice of it is entirely dependent on God’s power
and mercy. In other words, you learn about your weaknesses in a way that only
strong temptation and perhaps a few other things can teach you. So all I can
say is, “So far, so good”—but I never claim that I’ll make it to the end. In
fact, I remember a dear old brother who, at eighty-five, used to come to speak
to the Superior, and when he left he’d always say, “Pray for my perseverance!”
Because he was worried, you know, that he might hit the road to town before
he managed to get himself back to his room!


But another
thing that comes to mind is that as one matures in a lifelong commitment to
celibacy, there’s a whole set of attitudes toward God that begin to emerge as
a result of this movement from formal commitment to direct experience, from
friendship with God to union with God—attitudes that open one to ever deeper
possibilities of union with ultimate reality, ever greater humility and purity
of heart, which are what were identified by the Desert Fathers and Mothers as
the goal of celibacy. And I think that that would be what characterizes
my own experience more than anything else—the ever increasing desire for humility
and purity of heart. Of course, physical success in observing celibacy can also
lead, in some cases, to a certain sense of achievement or pride, and in fact
there’s a recorded instance of that; it’s the famous case of some Jansenist
nuns in sixteenth or seventeenth century France who were described as “pure
as angels but proud as devils”—so evidently something was not working in their
celibate commitment! And that’s why I feel so strongly that celibacy needs to
be presented not in isolation but as part of a larger package, and especially
with the interior purpose or intention of getting closer to God. Because the
renunciation is sometimes very, very intense, and one needs the motivation of
knowing that this really is moving somewhere that’s more important than physical
attraction, or comfort, or sexual relief or whatever—of knowing that this is
the love of God coming to fulfillment in oneself, all at once in a number of
different ways, all leading to a letting go of pride and the false self so that
God can be God in us.

AC: Especially in light of what you’ve
just spoken about so beautifully, I’d like to ask you about the common view
that the celibate state represents an inherently higher or purer condition than
the noncelibate. I’m sure you’re aware that there’s a lot of debate going on
around questions like this these days.



TK: Yes. My reaction to that discussion—and
it’s only mine—is that it’s not celibacy itself that is a higher state
but the nonpossessive attitude of true humility or purity of heart that under
ideal circumstances is associated with it; that’s what true virginity or celibacy
really is when it’s understood in its full spiritual meaning. The goal, as I
said, is purity of heart, or what the Desert Fathers and Mothers describe as
that humility that is the acceptance of all reality about ourselves and God,
and acceptance also of our own weakness and helplessness. One of the things
that is most striking about this way of understanding celibacy is how much it,
as a gift of God, has to be supported over time by the grace of God in
order for the practitioner to persevere with, and not to abandon, his or her
commitment.


And if
you look at celibacy as a lifestyle, a long-range commitment, it has the same
goal as marriage, actually. What that means is that it’s supposed to be transformational;
it’s a way to union with God. Now obviously, there’s no reason why someone who’s
married can’t attain that state, and if you accept the idea of marriage being
a sacrament, then I suppose it could be a higher state than celibacy, which
is not as holy a state as one that has been blessed in such a special way by
God and the Church. Certainly from the Church’s point of view, marriage is a
particular state of grace in which the partners are empowered, through their
life together, to be purified. But the important point here is that this happens,
whether it is in marriage or in the celibate commitment, only when we become
faithful to love. In marriage this means the forgiveness and forbearance of
the depths of each other’s faults, but in either case, it’s only then that we
begin to enter into what St. John of the Cross calls the “period of purification,”
in which the Holy Spirit reaches deeper into our hearts than we can go by any
asceticism or discipline of our own making. The Spirit invites us to look at
the dark side of our personality, as Jung would call it, and also to sift through
the unconscious motivations that we’re not normally aware of in daily life.
It’s that conscious purification that prepares us for unselfish love, for spiritual
friendship and for a union with God in which we’re not looking for satisfaction
or enlightenment for our own sake but are simply trying to love God, to please
God, and to do His will by living ordinary life with extraordinary love.


So in
celibacy as in marriage, love is the name of the game—otherwise I wouldn’t
recommend it—and the challenge is to see if you can keep it going. And the heart
of the matter, you might say, is that just as a husband and wife, through the
sacrament of marriage, are supposed to make God visible to each other and minister
the unconditional love of God to each other not just in their conjugal life
together but in every detail—the way they pour their coffee in the morning,
the way they handle the problems with their children, the way they go to work,
how they say hello and goodbye—so the celibate commitment is not just about
chastity. It’s about being more and more present to others, in service to others,
and trying to bring a quality to the details of daily life that manifests, in
everything we do, the unconditional love of God and even the tenderness of
God. And so it’s very important, it seems to me, to distinguish sexuality from
genitality, or genital activity. Sexuality is not something that’s given up
in the celibate commitment; on the contrary, because human sexuality includes
genital activity but is not identical with it, we remain women and men not only
physically but also emotionally and sensually down to the very roots of our
being.

AC: Could you say more about this distinction
between sexuality and genitality?



TK: In celibacy, the sexual energy—which should
never be repressed—is directed by the practice of chastity toward the right
use of that energy according to our state of life, which for celibates
is to help build human relationships and communities through service, friendship,
understanding, cooperation and other similar virtues. The sexual energy is transmuted
in this way into an ever greater energy in service to others and in the search
for God. Otherwise, celibacy can become simply a physical achievement and hence
a source of pride. It’s not an end in itself, in other words, but a way of life
that has to make God’s love visible in the community or wherever one decides
to live the celibate life.



AC: Judging from your description, the celibate’s
sphere of interest seems almost implicitly broader than that of a married individual.
Yet you’ve also said that neither married life nor celibate monastic life is
inherently superior, and that in either case what’s really most important is
one’s motivation.



TK: Exactly. And not only one’s motivation
but the perseverance in that motivation through the purification of the dark
side so that—



AC: The dark side?



TK: Purification of one’s innermost being rather
than just biologically or physically because, without that inner purification,
celibacy is an external observance rather than an interior practice that supports
authentic transformation.



AC: It sounds as if one who was fully committed
to undergoing this process of transformation would in a sense be married to
God. Wouldn’t one’s attention therefore be liberated in such a way that one
could have no special friendships or intimate relationships but would rather
love all selflessly?



TK: Yes, chastity enhances and extends the
power to love; it enables us to perceive the sacredness of everything that is,
especially other people. But to reach that one has to go through a process away
from the experience of conventional intimacy with others and toward another
kind of intimacy which, while it respects everyone’s uniqueness, loves them
not for any physical purpose of one’s own. And as a consequence of that, one
respects the dignity of other persons and couldn’t possibly use them for sexual
or emotional fulfillment. Now this doesn’t exclude friendship, which is very
important in supporting a celibate commitment, but it does imply a discipline
that filters out of that growing intimacy with another the genital attraction
that may be there, and which is perfectly normal if it is there. But
one ought not to conclude from this that a genuinely spiritual friendship must
exclude all warmth or emotion; it is only those excessive marks of affection
that lead to deep sensuality or acting out that have to be sacrificed, not friendship
itself. In fact one needs friends to support one’s commitment to celibacy;
otherwise one may fall into loneliness or some kind of self-seeking that is
almost narcissistic. This is one of the hazards in the celibate commitment.



AC: What are some of the other hazards?



TK: Celibacy is not a commitment one should take lightly, and there
are different temptations along the way. Sexual attraction is one thing in adolescence
and another thing altogether in adulthood, where procreation becomes important.
Then, in the midlife crisis, a whole new aspect of our sexuality emerges that
has to do with the temptation to return to the unfinished relationships of one’s
youth or regrets about not having experienced certain things before one became
celibate. As a result the temptation to depart from one’s commitment is also
very strong at that time. And even in old age, one finds that that loneliness
is still present. So because the sexual energy lasts all our lives, a lifetime
commitment to celibacy is bound to include periods that are extremely difficult,
and the important question is: To what degree has this energy been transmuted
and transformed by discipline, service to others and devotion to God, so that
in those moments when the attraction of sexual satisfaction is extremely strong,
there’s enough inner strength to resist it?


In the
Christian tradition, especially in those denominations that emphasize the love
of God or specifically the love of Jesus Christ, “friendship” is the model for
a relationship with God that moves from the superficiality of mere acquaintance
to a degree of friendliness, based on years of hanging out together, that at
a certain point demands a true commitment. This kind of commitment is characteristic
of any friendship whether it’s human or divine, and it’s in that moment that
one begins to consider whether one’s devotion to celibacy is truly a lifetime
commitment to God or only a temporary one. And one should have plenty of time
to think this decision through because of its deep psychological, social and
spiritual consequences. There’s a whole mystique, you might say, to a lifelong
commitment. It’s very different from a temporary commitment, even though that’s
an extremely useful one for someone to pass through, as you evidently teach
in your community. It’s a wonderful way of getting a clear idea of what sexuality
is and whether you want to renounce it for life; and as I said, it would be
a great mistake to make that decision lightly or without a good period of time
to practice it first on a temporary basis.



AC: There have certainly been too many people,
I think, who have taken that decision too lightly and then lived to regret
it.



TK: Yes. And I would think that nobody really
has the power to do this without the grace of God; whether you think of it as
grace or some other kind of force, it’s like the twelve steps of AA—the second
step, isn’t it?—”We found out that we were absolutely powerless of ourselves.”
And that’s one of the great benefits of the celibate commitment: You find out
fairly soon that it’s not going to be easy. There is a higher power—we call
it God in the Christian tradition—and His grace doesn’t come in the abstract
but in the form of a community and a model of commitment to encourage us in
difficult times, a special opportunity for spiritual retreat or study or sometimes
even psychological instruction. But even so, not everybody is humanly equipped
for a celibate commitment. Certainly I would never recommend it for someone
who has a serious personality disorder or a long history of promiscuity or some
other kind of neurotic problem; such things should certainly be treated before
one makes a commitment as serious as this one.



AC: I agree with you that, through the practice
of celibacy, one gets an experience of how extremely powerful the sexual force
is—an experience that’s very different than if one were never to undergo a period
of prolonged abstinence.



TK: Absolutely, and it’s for that reason that
I think it would be an enormously valuable experience for both women and men,
especially at an earlier learning period in their young adulthood, because really
most young people are no more ready for a marriage commitment than they are
for a monastic commitment.



AC: You’re right about that.



TK: It really takes some life experience to
be able to handle the responsibilities that that commitment requires. And a
celibacy commitment, similarly, has its own set of responsibilities that need
to be practiced and tested humbly.



AC: What would you say is the greatest joy
of the practice?



TK: Loving God! And hoping always that that
love will increase and enable us to surrender ourselves more and more completely,
body, mind and spirit—totally: conscious, unconscious, every level of our being.
This is my view of what celibacy is all about. Its fulfillment is certainly
going to take some time, and there are going to be some rough spots, and not
everybody’s going to make it; there are going to be some failures. Anybody who’s
been through those dark nights will not judge anybody’s failures because he
or she knows how difficult that commitment is. In the “dark night” of St. John
of the Cross, who is one of the great teachers in Catholic mysticism, there
are described three great trials or temptations, one of which he called the
“spirit of fornication,” in which there are enormous and continual temptations
to sexual activity or to leaving the celibate commitment. And it’s in that intense
struggle that the virtue of chastity is tested; the renunciate is pounded by
temptation to the depths of his soul until he becomes really stable in the face
of all temptation.



AC: The beautiful way you’re speaking makes
me curious to know if you ever come together with your brother monks just to
share your experience of the practice, for the purposes of support and investigation,
as we are doing here.



TK: No, not very often. Very rarely, in fact.
They do that in the first few years of monastic life, along with studying the
various other commitments that are also involved. But later on, to tell you
the truth, you don’t see much of that—and I think it would be a good idea.



AC: I’ve always found this question very
interesting because over the years that I’ve been teaching, often my celibate
students—if we’ve been in India, for example—would want to get together with
other monks and nuns from, say, the Buddhist or Hindu traditions, just to speak
together about the practice of celibacy and its relationship to the pursuit
of liberation or, as you would say, a pure heart. And it’s been fascinating
to discover that very few practitioners have had much to say or have even been
particularly interested in talking because quite often, it seems, the practice
of celibacy is not accompanied by any kind of active investigation or inquiry.

TK: You’re right. It’s kind of taken for granted.
And as I said in the beginning, one of the things that you have rightly observed
and, I gather, integrated into the life of your community is that celibacy is
a very important commitment with enormous possibilities, and that as such it
should be fully studied and understood by neophytes, and that their experiences
of its difficulties should be shared within the group. And I’d bet that the
reason this doesn’t happen more often is in large part because almost all the
religious traditions, and society in general, have been most unwilling, until
thirty or forty years ago, to speak about sexual energy or sexual matters at
all. Lots of people even arrived at marriage without having heard anything about—what
are they?—the birds and the—



AC: The bees.



TK: Shows you how much I know!



AC: I’ve also noticed, even with my own
students, that someone can practice celibacy for a couple of years and never
really begin. It might take a few years before the individual really
begins to find some energetic, enthusiastic, inspired interest. And then of
course the practice comes alive and its liberating power is experienced and
appreciated.



TK: That’s the full experience.



AC: Yes, and then, of course, it’s so fruitful.
And it’s interesting that in our community—this might sound strange to you,
but the men and women who are celibate live together in separate houses from
those who are not celibate—they report that their relationships with each other
are tangibly different because of the vow they’ve taken, and that they experience
a much greater freedom and intimacy in their association with each other than
they do with other members of the community, who one would suppose are equally
committed to liberation and purity and honesty and truth. Yet simply because
they’ve taken this vow—and because they take it very seriously—they experience
a much greater freedom of being when they’re together with each other, principally
because they all know that they don’t want anything from each other.
They were speaking with me about this a week or so ago, and it was very moving.



TK: That’s wonderful, that experience of freedom.
It makes all the other aspects of community life more accessible and valuable,
this interior freedom that the celibate commitment makes possible. You told
me that you’ve asked them to make a temporary vow, is that correct?



AC: Yes.



TK: So everybody knows that everybody else
is committed to this, and immediately there’s a great freedom from all the subtle
ways that young people—and not-so-young people—interact for reasons of sensuality,
flirtation, and that kind of thing. All of that falls away, and this allows
people to be themselves: honest and straightforward and loving, without seeking
any kind of return or reward, especially of a physical nature.



AC: Physical or even just emotional—wanting
to be seen as special, this kind of thing. Because I’ve noticed, just in observing
my own experience, that inherent in sexual desire is a kind of psychological
and emotional compulsion to want to be seen in a certain way and also
to want to have and to consume. Standing back from it, one recognizes
this to be the very force or power of the ego itself.



TK: Yes, I think that’s extremely right and
true. It’s always looking for its own satisfaction. Whereas the true Self is
not engaged in that kind of melodrama.



AC: When I was teaching the other day I
said: It’s the ego that experiences the thrill of wanting, but the true Self
experiences that very thrill as suffering.



TK: Yes, beautiful.



AC: Another thing I wanted to ask you about
is the fact that many—or perhaps even most—of the greatest spiritual figures
throughout history have chosen to lead a celibate life. Why do you think that
is?



TK: Well, I think there’s enough evidence from
psychology today for us to be able to recognize that sexual energy is not only
in the body, but it also has something to do with the unconscious. And the scope,
extent and power of this energy are enormous and have to be respected. And when
it’s channeled, through devotion to God and service to others, this energy begins
to emerge, especially during meditative practices, in a different form. Instead
of just sort of blowing you away, it’s channeled by the solid preparation of
faith in God and love for other people; it’s transformed or transmuted into
higher possibilities of energy for use in seeking God’s presence, which isn’t
an easy path. Cultivation of the ability to face up to that energy directly
becomes a support for our pursuit of the highest and most difficult good, and
especially the ultimate goal of surrendering absolutely to God. The great spiritual
figures you mention no doubt understood that implicitly, but I think it’s extremely
important that those of us who are experiencing the growth or emergence of this
energy within ourselves have the tools at hand to make use of it for good, because
if one isn’t well prepared for the emergence of the subtle energy of sexuality,
then one can get blown away. As an example of what I’m talking about,
I’m thinking of people a generation or two ago who wanted to experiment with
psychedelic drugs and so on. What they didn’t realize was that they were loosening
things up in the psyche that they weren’t ready to face—images or desires or
fantasies that were emerging from that energy as it came to consciousness. There’s
a relation, it seems to me, between the growth of celibate consciousness, the
fruits of which you’ve beautifully described as sweetness, and those dark forces
in the psyche that can transform that very same energy into ego trips and sheer
selfishness if it’s released too soon, before the person is spiritually equipped
to handle that kind of primal energy. Do you understand what I’m getting at?



AC: Yes, I do.



TK: And that’s why I feel so strongly that
celibacy should never be practiced in isolation from other practices that strengthen
community relations, such as devotion, such as real friendship, and the kind
of intimacy that seeks no reward but the happiness of the other person. And
also I think that for many people, celibacy needs to be nourished by a more
and more intimate relationship with God, so that the divine presence is experienced
more and more as a vital force of one’s own consciousness, and so that one is
consenting to the presence and action of God both in one’s meditation
and in daily life.



AC: Everything you’re saying is quite moving,
and I deeply appreciate it. But of course in the process of exploring this issue
very actively and in great depth, we’ve found that even in the spiritual world
many people seem to view the practice of celibacy with fear and suspicion. Sometimes
even just speaking about the practice makes people angry and upset.



TK: Yes, well, I think I know what you mean.
And I think it’s partly to do with their early education. Some religious groups
have been so strict about sexual matters that many of the young people growing
up in those traditions either became frightened to death of sex and developed
repressive or neurotic symptoms of one kind or another, or they just turned
their back on the whole idea of religion and ran headlong into experimentation
and promiscuity. And so I suspect that this fear of celibacy is due to repression
in early childhood and the obvious damage it has done to a lot of people. I’ve
seen this happening to people in religious life whose motivation for entertaining
celibacy was simply to avoid sexuality because, early in life, they’d had experiences
that were so traumatic that emotionally they hadn’t developed sufficiently to
be able to handle them. Child abuse, for instance, is an enormous obstacle to
human growth, and one really needs psychological help with that, especially
before entering into a celibate commitment.



AC: But do you think part of this fear of
celibacy might also be due to the fact that for many—or perhaps most—people
in our society, the sexual force seems inherently to represent an imaginary
promise of paradise, an illusory promise of completeness or wholeness? My own
suspicion is that because most people have not discovered that the source of
their true happiness really lies in a very different place, they’re often too
terrified even to question whether the one place they’re convinced they’ll find
it can actually deliver.



TK: Yes, I’m sure that you’re right. And it’s
also true that philosophically our Western culture has been heavily influenced
by the Greek view of the body and the fear of sexuality that come down to us
from some sources in early Christianity as it was influenced by neoplatonic
philosophy. Oddly enough, Christianity emerged out of the Hebrew tradition,
in which the unity of body and soul is very strongly affirmed. But unfortunately,
the early fathers of the Church were more influenced, partly because they had
consciously separated from the Jewish religion, by Greek philosophy, which is
wonderful in some respects but extremely defective in others, particularly when
it’s applied to the interpretation of the Old Testament and its moral code.
So it’s only recently that in the Catholic Church, for instance, marriage has
come to be regarded as a way to holiness that is equal with the celibate commitment.
This is an enormous step in the direction of liberation from mind-sets that
I think have been harmful both to marriage and to celibacy.

AC: In the process of looking very deeply
into this subject, what has became apparent to me is that generally speaking,
in religious or spiritual circles and also outside of them, human beings basically
tend to have one of two fundamental views or value judgments with regard to
the ultimate nature of sexuality. One of these views holds that sexuality is
good, healthy and natural—and this is obviously a very popular belief
in the time that we’re living in, fueled, as you’ve said, by a certain rebelliousness
against the repressive ideas and traditions of the recent past. And the other
view, which many traditional religions seem to emphasize, is that sexuality
is bad, dirty and evil—



TK: Yes, that’s the idea I was just describing
myself, prominent in some early Christian circles and especially in the time
of St. Augustine, who was very negative about sexuality. It sometimes happens
among converts from promiscuity that they get carried away and go a little too
far.



AC: Yes, precisely. But what began to occur
to me, in the process of looking very deeply into my own experience in order
to try to understand all this, was that obviously the sexual force itself could
be neither good, healthy and natural nor bad, dirty and evil because it simply
was what it was in and of itself. It wasn’t inherently good or bad.



TK: Well, yes, I would definitely hesitate
to say that it’s bad. I think sexuality is best understood as the basic force
between women and men, a force of human growth that needs to be cultivated,
but in the right way, with discipline and with choices that are mature, so that
it doesn’t become a source of neurosis for some people. But as soon as you say
there’s something wrong with sexuality, then you’re taking the side of
those who don’t believe that everything that God has made is good. What we do
with sex may not be good, but that could never mean that the sexual force
itself is not absolutely essential because it’s the growth of our sexuality,
as male and female, that matures and opens us to other people. This is true
whether the sexual energy is expressed through genital activity, marriage or
in the celibate state. That force is to be not repressed but transmuted, transformed
and integrated into the whole of our being; then you have a whole human
being. Take, for instance, those who are in the service of others in ministry:
If they repress any emotion, including sexual feeling, they’re going
to come across as “cold fish,” as they say, and they’re not going to impress
anyone. It’s sexuality that gives warmth to the whole personality; but in service—and
also in marriage—sexuality can be expressed as affection and love without being
a form of genitality, because as I said earlier, chastity is not the rejection
of sexuality or even of genitality but the right use of it according
to our state of life. So sexuality is a positive virtue, and it’s a hazard in
celibacy only if one denies it and then represses one’s feelings instead of
integrating them into the whole evolving development of one’s faculties, including
one’s intuitive and spiritual faculties, which I think are especially fostered
by a celibate commitment, but which are still just as available to anyone because
they are human faculties. So do you see the distinction that I’m trying
to make?



AC: Yes, I certainly do. What you’re saying
makes perfect sense.



TK: It’s not that I expect everybody to agree
with me. But I think that if we don’t take the view that sexuality is good,
then immediately we’ve lost sight of it in relation to the power it has to unify
and to mature the whole human psyche and body so that spirit can express itself
through us.



AC: I agree with you two hundred percent.
But I think I was making a slightly different point, and that is because the
power of sexuality is so strong, we as human beings are always seeking for ways
to feel comfortable in the face of its awesome and overwhelming power.
And one strategy that human beings use in order to feel comfortable in the face
of sexuality is to say, “Well, it’s good, healthy and natural.” And another,
of course, is to reject it by saying that “it’s bad, dirty and evil.” And I
basically feel that neither of these positions could ever accurately represent
what it truly is.



TK: Yes, now I understand, and I fully agree
with you.



AC: So my point is that maybe sexuality itself, and the force
of it, is ultimately neutral, because it simply is—it’s the creative
force or the creative power of life, of the universe in a state of becoming.
But in terms of this materialistic relationship with it that the individual
creates because it’s so compelling, so frightening, so overwhelming and so enticing,
taking a position of neutrality really forces one to scrutinize one’s
relationship to it in a way that I would say never “lets one off the hook,”
never gives one the security of feeling, “Well, yes, I know what that is”—you
know, that it’s either a wonderful thing or a terrible thing.



TK: Yes, well, like most things in life it’s a matter of intention.



AC: Exactly right.



TK: And it’s in this experience of intention
that one moves to higher integration. But it’s when we get stuck in whichever
one of those extremes you just mentioned that human growth slows down—or comes
to a screeching halt—until one finds the insight to transcend both of those
views, neither of which is fully human. Negative or positive, they’re just responses
to instinct, and a human being is more than just instinct. A human being
has all these other powers that instinct supports, and instinct is fine
as far as it goes, but it’s incomplete as a motivating power for the whole of
life. But that’s the human predicament, you see. And of course the majority
of people do respond to it by sexually acting out as if sex, as you say, were
the only pleasure to be had in life.



AC: Precisely.



TK: I mean, there’s no doubt about it: Some
people really do seem to live only for that, and we even have an industry
that supports this, along with sexual aberrations of all kinds. And it’s waved
in front of young people, I would guess, in most cities and towns nowadays,
and of course in the media.



AC: Yes, it’s everywhere.



TK: So needless to say, there’s no real support
for a commitment to celibacy in our culture anymore. Although it was always
only a very small number who were interested anyway, at least in the past there
was a profound respect for it in some communities, but now even among the Roman
Catholics that respect has diminished. It’s sad to consider that perhaps both
marriage and celibacy are suffering in our time from what might be called an
incapacity in most people who are growing up today, or who have grown up in
the last generation or so, to commit themselves to something for life—whatever
it might be—or even for a long period of time. Because there are no models for
that anymore. So much divorce, so much moving, so much changing of jobs or professions,
travel, lack of stability in families; there’s no real experience of the larger
family, of grandparents, for example, who have been together all their lives.
So to start telling people that you’ve got to make a life commitment either
to this person or to this God of yours—well, it sounds like nonsense to them,
like somebody’s just arrived from another planet!


There
are very few experiences in our culture of the value of moderation, of balance,
of the integration of human growth beyond instinctuality to a point where instinctual
needs are sufficiently integrated and moderated that their energy can be used
for the love of God’s service. That to me is what the spiritual journey is all
about—empowering ourselves to use all the forces of our being, not for
our own satisfaction but in the service of God and other people and the planet.
I think that’s the fruit of celibacy, don’t you? It’s a capacity
for sensitivity to the needs of all other creatures and for a certain happiness
in belonging to this universe, and not just for sex! They say that babies have
a sort of polymorphous sexuality in which the pleasures of the senses are experienced
throughout the body and not just fixated in the genital organs, and I think
there’s an analogy in that to spiritual life. In the spiritual journey the sexual
urge, at least insofar as it wants to express itself genitally, is relativized
by the experience of the beauty of the other pleasures of the senses, which
obviously are not made ends in themselves either, but together open us up to
the truth and the beauty and the goodness of all of creation. In this way, the
Creator or the God we’re seeking becomes present not only in our meditation
or prayer, but comes to be recognized as the source of everything that exists,
including events that are passing through our own thoughts and feelings, and
soon everything begins to be seen as that unity, that oneness, that immense
awareness. And then, it seems to me, human beings can begin to live in harmony
and peace because they’ve learned to see each other not as objects but as subjects
manifesting an immense subjectivity that embraces all in the most personal relationship
one could ever imagine—father, mother, brother, sister, lover—all rolled
into one as a sense of the ever-present unconditional love of God. Promiscuity
or repression can only hinder the realization of that miracle, you see? And
frankly I’ve seen far too much of both in the lives of people who have shared
their spiritual journeys with me—both within the monastery and outside.