Transforming

Christ’s Descent into Hell, and Resurrection

When the Israelites celebrated the feast of the Passover, they were forbidden to use leavened bread....Leaven was made by placing a piece of bread in a dark damp place until it began to decay and stink. Leavened bread was thus a lively symbol of the unholy and the profane...

[This parable of Jesus] challenges our ideas of what is good and what is evil. It is as if Jesus says to us, “What makes you so sure?” Job experienced God as acting unjustly in his overwhelming trials. He did not know what to make of such treatment because for him God was the infinitely Just One who faithfully rewards good and punishes evil...

The parable of the leaven also implies that what we think is the worst thing that could happen to us may actually be the coming of the Kingdom of God into our lives. Or, to put it differently, the Kingdom is most powerful where we least expect to find it and where we may not even want to find it.

Thomas Keating

Unless a grain of wheat falls on the ground and dies, it remains only a single grain; but if it dies, it yields a great harvest.

John 12: 24

A Path of Transforming

Difficulties, suffering, physical death, spiritual death, evil...these are the great challenges of human existence. When confronted with these experiences we understandably ask, where is God? Yet, could these events actually already be in the mystery of God itself?

Transformation on the contemplative journey comes not when difficulties are eliminated, but when we learn to relate to them in a new way, in God. Jesus demonstrated transformation at the beginning of his public ministry when, at the wedding in Cana, he changed water into wine. The liquid remained the same substance, but was taken to a new level. The culmination of Jesus’ work took this process to its fullest potential with his death and resurrection when he transformed the end of life into a new kind of life. So too on the spiritual journey, our challenges are not eliminated but can be transformed to a new level.

Thomas Keating illumines Jesus’ teaching on how our own difficulties can be “leaven,” the very substance that stimulates our spiritual growth. The Way of Transformation opens this teaching further. It demonstrates the attitudes you can take in order to enfold your human challenges in divine grace.

These perspectives are discovered within the divine world that Christ’s life, death, resurrection and ascension opened to his followers. Each stage of Jesus’ life unfolds a deepening embrace of the mystery of transformation -- so that we can receive the mystery of Christ’s presence and action in all of our life, our difficulties, and our death.

Opening to the mystery of transformation in contemplative practice helps us negotiate times of spiritual darkness in our journey, and respond to the challenge and wonder of living a fully human life.