Thomas Keating

The first portrait of Thomas Keating’s remarkable evolution, in the last decades of his life, into a fully realized modern-day Christian mystic.

In the first four decades of his life as a Trappist monk, Thomas Keating created a comprehensive, unified psychospiritual pathway leading from healing to holiness and from contemporary psychological wellness to classic mystical sanctity and beatitude. In short, he fashioned a powerful new on-ramp to the Christian contemplative tradition. Yet, as beloved author and Keating disciple Cynthia Bourgeault shows, that was not the end of Keating’s story. In this unique blend of biography, personal experience, and close reading of his late works, Bourgeault illuminates Keating’s remarkable spiritual development from the late 1980s until his death in 2018. She explores:

• Keating’s increasing commitment to the nondual practice of "objectless awareness"
• His contributions to interspiritual dialogue
• The evolution of his early teaching on the movement from "false self" to "true self," to that from "true self" to "no self"
• His final "dark night of the spirit" and passage through death
• New evidence that he never left Christianity but carried it with him to new places