Invitation to Love Quotes

“Silence is God's first language; everything else is a poor translation.”
― Thomas Keating, Invitation to Love: The Way of Christian Contemplation

“Service without seeking any return characterizes the Ultimate Reality.”
― Thomas Keating, Invitation to Love: The Way of Christian Contemplation

“he experience of the transforming union is a way of being in the world that enables us to live daily life with the invincible conviction of continuous union with God. It is a new way of being in the world, a way”
― Thomas Keating, Invitation to Love: The Way of Christian Contemplation

“The spiritual journey can be a lonely road in the beginning. Later God will give us new friends. God does not take anything away except to give us something better.”
― Thomas Keating, Invitation to Love: The Way of Christian Contemplation

“We have seen already in the first chapter how one such model—the developmental, pioneered by child psychologist Jean Piaget—helps explain the roots of our unconscious emotional programs for happiness. Each of us needs to be reassured and affirmed in his or her own personhood and self-identity. If this assurance is withheld because of lack of concern or commitment on the part of parents, these painful privations will require defensive or compensatory measures. As a consequence, our emotional life ceases to grow in relation to the unfolding values of human development and becomes fixated at the level of the perceived deprivation. The emotional fixation fossilizes into a program for happiness. When fully formed it develops into a center of gravity, which attracts to itself more and more of our psychological resources: thoughts, feelings, images, reactions, and behavior. Later experiences and events in life are all sucked into its gravitational field and interpreted as helpful or harmful in terms of our basic drive for happiness. These centers, as we shall see, are reinforced by the culture in which we live and the particular group with which we identify, or rather, overidentify.”
― Thomas Keating, Invitation to Love: The Way of Christian Contemplation

“Dryness and the Dark Night”:2 A certain scientist devoted his life to developing a strain of butterfly that would be the most beautiful combination of colors ever seen on this planet. After years of experimentation, he was certain that he had a cocoon that would produce his genetic masterpiece. On the day that the butterfly was expected to emerge, he gathered together his entire staff. All waited breathlessly as the creature began to work its way out of the cocoon. It disengaged its right wing, its body, and most of its left wing. Just as the staff were ready to cheer and pass the champagne and cigars, they saw with horror that the extremity of the left wing of the butterfly was stuck in the mouth of the cocoon. The creature was desperately flapping its other wing to free itself. As it labored, it grew more and more exhausted. Each new effort seemed more difficult, and the intervals between efforts grew longer. At last the scientist, unable to bear the tension, took a scalpel and cut a tiny section from the mouth of the cocoon. With one final burst of strength, the butterfly fell free onto the laboratory table. Everybody cheered and reached for the cigars and the champagne. Then silence again descended on the room. Although the butterfly was free, it could not fly. . . The struggle to escape from the cocoon is nature’s way of forcing blood to the extremities of a butterfly’s wings so that when it emerges from the cocoon it can enjoy its new life and fly to its heart’s content. In seeking to save the creature’s life, the scientist had truncated its capacity to function. A butterfly that cannot fly is a contradiction in terms. This is a mistake that God is not going to make. The image of God watching Anthony has to be understood. God holds back his infinite mercy from rushing to the rescue when we are in temptation and difficulties. He will not actively intervene because the struggle is opening and preparing every recess of our being for the divine energy of grace. God is transforming us so that we can enjoy the divine life to the full once it has been established. If the divine help comes too soon, before the work of purification and healing has been accomplished, it may frustrate our ultimate ability to live the divine life.”
― Thomas Keating, Invitation to Love: The Way of Christian Contemplation

“What kind of God is this who permits or sends such tragedy into the lives of his friends? Job complained bitterly about his pitiful condition. But would he have learned who God is unless he had gone through the shattering experiences that brought to an end his naive conception of how God functions? The greatest fruit of the night of spirit is the disposition that is willing to accept God on his own terms. As a result, one allows God to be God without knowing who or what that is.”
― Thomas Keating, Invitation to Love: The Way of Christian Contemplation

“Divine love is infused in the seedbed of total submission and self-surrender and brings us through the night of spirit into the transforming union.”
― Thomas Keating, Invitation to Love: The Way of Christian Contemplation

“The pathology is simply this: we have come to full reflective self-consciousness without the experience of intimacy with God. Because that crucial reassurance is missing, our fragile egos desperately seek other means of shoring up our weaknesses and defending ourselves from the pain of alienation from God and other people.”
― Thomas Keating, Invitation to Love: The Way of Christian Contemplation

“Similarly, Jesus invites us to change the direction in which we are looking for happiness and to join the new humanity that is opening to interior freedom and self-transcendence. The primary issue for the human family at its present level of evolutionary development is to become fully human. But that, as we have seen, means rediscovering our connectedness to God, which was repressed somewhere in early childhood.”
― Thomas Keating, Invitation to Love: The Way of Christian Contemplation

“the radical healing is the acceptance of the situation, because in some way God is present there.”
― Thomas Keating, Invitation to Love: The Way of Christian Contemplation

“A total surrender of ourselves to the spiritual journey is required, not just a patchwork of exercises that are part of daily life but do not affect the whole of it or penetrate the various aspects of our lives.”
― Thomas Keating, Invitation to Love: The Way of Christian Contemplation

“The dispositions proper to the mental egoic level reflect the growing sense of equality with other humans, accountability for the care and preservation of the earth and its living and inorganic resources, and a more mature relationship to God. Respect for others diminishes the drive to dominate and control. Cooperation replaces unbridled competition. Harmony replaces rigid value systems. Negotiating replaces exclusive self-interest or national interests. Living in peace with others becomes a more important value, though not at any price. Accessing full mental egoic consciousness is the door leading to the great adventure of recovering and developing union with God.”
― Thomas Keating, Invitation to Love: The Way of Christian Contemplation

“The failure of our efforts to serve teaches us how to serve: that is, with complete dependence on divine inspiration. This is what changes the world.”
― Thomas Keating, Invitation to Love: The Way of Christian Contemplation

“True asceticism is not the rejection of the world, but the acceptance of everything that is good, beautiful, and true. It is learning how to use our faculties and the good things of this world as God’s gifts rather than expressions of selfishness.”
― Thomas Keating, Invitation to Love: The Way of Christian Contemplation

“At each level of human development, God offers himself to us just as we are. Thus, he is the typhonic God of primitive peoples and children, the monotheistic God of mythic membership consciousness, and the God of infinite concern for the whole human family revealed in the gospel.”
― Thomas Keating, Invitation to Love: The Way of Christian Contemplation

“When we taste the goodness of God and experience the humility that arises spontaneously from that relationship, the programs glorified by the false self and our cultural conditioning diminish in size and no longer exercise the fascination that used to hold them in place.”
― Thomas Keating, Invitation to Love: The Way of Christian Contemplation

“By consenting to God’s creation, to our basic goodness as human beings, and to the letting go of what we love in this world, we are brought to the final surrender, which is to allow the false self to die and the true self to emerge. The true self might be described as our participation in the divine life manifesting in our uniqueness.”
― Thomas Keating, Invitation to Love: The Way of Christian Contemplation