American Trappist monk and author, Thomas Keating, Died at 95

  Religion, Writer

Thomas Keating was born on March 7, 1923, in New York City and died on October 25, 2018.

He was an American monk and priest of the Cistercian order (also known as Trappists).

Keating was known as one of the principal developers of Centering Prayer, a contemporary method of contemplative prayer that emerged from St. Joseph’s Abbey, Spencer, Massachusetts.

Keating entered the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance in Valley Falls, Rhode Island, in January, 1944.

He was selected Superior of St. Benedict’s Monastery, Snowmass, Colorado, in 1958, and was chosen abbot of St. Joseph’s Abbey, Spencer, Massachusetts, in 1961.

He came back to Snowmass in the wake of resigning as abbot of Spencer in 1981, where he set up a program of ten-day concentrated withdraws in the act of Centering Prayer, a contemporary type of the Christian pensive custom.

He was one of three chief designers Centering Prayer, a contemporary strategy for pondering petition, that rose up out of St. Joseph’s Abbey in 1975.

William Meninger and Basil Pennington, additionally Cistercian priests, were alternate engineers.

At the point when the idea was first proposed by Father Keating, Fr. William Meninger began encouraging a technique dependent on the fourteenth century otherworldly exemplary, The Cloud of Unknowing.

Fr. Meninger alluded to this as the Prayer of the Cloud and encouraged it to clerics at the withdraw house.

Fr. Basil Pennington gave the main withdraw to a lay gathering of people in Connecticut where the members proposed the term Centering Prayer. Since Thomas Merton had been known to utilize the term preceding this, it has been recommended the expression may have started from him.

In 1984, Keating alongside Gustave Reininger and Edward Bednar, helped to establish Contemplative Outreach, Ltd., a worldwide, ecumenical profound system that shows the act of Centering Prayer and Lectio Divina, a technique for petition drawn from the Christian scrutinizing convention.

Thoughtful Outreach gives an emotionally supportive network to those on the pondering way through a wide assortment of assets, workshops, and retreats.

Keating additionally helped found the Snowmass Interreligious Conference in 1982 and was a past leader of the Temple of Understanding and of the Monastic Interreligious Dialog among different interreligious exercises.

Thomas Keating passed away at 95 years old.

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