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.