GOD IS LARGER THAN RELIGION: Thomas Keating’s Interfaith Vision
Many are familiar with the Trappist monk and great popularizer of the meditation method of Centering Prayer, Fr. Thomas Keating. Keating — who died in October 2018 — gathered religious leaders from across the great religious traditions.
Fr. Thomas Keating wrote:
The great treasure that interreligious dialogue could unlock is to get people to know and love other religions and the people who practice them. The attitude of exclusivity must be laid to rest. God is too big to be contained in one religion.
Based on this, a few important notes come to mind.
One: The point of interreligious dialogue is love:
In practicing interspirituality we learn to love the religions themselves because we come to know them as paths of true transformation and spiritual maturity.
And we learn to love the people in the religions themselves. By knowing their practice, we can better understand and love one another.
Two: God is very large. Too large, in fact, to be contained in any single religion.
Religions are like buckets with which we hold Infinite Ocean of God. There are many different buckets and so much more water!
Our own theological and philosophical worldview is finite. The Divine is always larger than any container we can stuff It into. It's like trying to stuff the entire ocean into a jar. . . impossible! God is just too big!
For this reason, if we are to pursue capital-T-Truth, we are helped when working with an interfaith perspective because the fullness of God is sometimes better recognized from a religion or worldview other than the one you were born into.
“The God of your understanding is just that: the God of your understanding. What you need is the God just beyond your understanding.”
— Rabbi Rami Shapiro
In 1984 Trappist Monk and popularizer of the meditation method of Centering Prayer, Thomas Keating invited contemplatives from the various world traditions together to engage in interfaith conversation and interspiritual practice.
He invited meditators of the the following faiths:
• Jewish
• Buddhist
• Hindu
• Native America
• Protestant
• Catholic
• Russian Orthodox
• Islamic
What would come of bringing together these committed contemplatives with wildly different vocabularies of what is most Ultimate and Absolute?
How would their experience and the interpretation of their meditation and prayer bring them together or further divide them?
As the group continued to meet over the years, the conferences evolved to be named “The Snowmass Conference,” and Thomas Keating brought forth what would later be called “The 8 Points of Agreements,” eight affirmations shared by each of the participants
You can read more about these conferences in Nethanel Miles-Yepez’s book, The Common Heart: An Experience of Interreligious Dialogue. I have copied the 8 Points of Agreement below and have added a few personal notes as bullet points.
The Snowmass Conference
Eight Points of Agreements:
1. The world religions bear witness to the experience of Ultimate Reality, to which they give various names.
• All world religions are attempts by humanity to explain and live out their experience with Ultimate Reality, God, or the divine.
• Religious teachings are cultural expressions of how they understand “what is.”
• Each culture and religion “clothes” the naked, Ultimate Reality with various names: God, Christ, Allah, Brahman, Buddhahood, etc.
• All are finite attempts at expressing the Infinite.
2. Ultimate Reality cannot be limited by any name or concept.
• “God” is infinite and inexhaustible in understanding.
• God is mystery beyond any finite idea or conception.
• No finite mind can hold the infinity of the Divine.
• No religion can hold “all of God.”
• God is bigger than any one idea and religion.
• God, like the ocean, can never be fully contained in a religion, like a cup holding the ocean.
3. Ultimate Reality is the ground of infinite potentiality and actualization.
• God is the very source of all that is.
• God is the Source of all that is possible, all that is able to come into being in the world.
• God is the “Ground of Being,” or, ultimate Source all being.
• All humans share the same Source of potential.
• Only because God IS is all else possible.
4. Faith is opening, accepting, and responding to Ultimate Reality. Faith in this sense precedes every belief system.
• True faith is “prior to” belief in religion.
• Faith is open trust in God before we even put definition to what God is.
• Religions are developed in response to a sense of faith and give shape and form to the formless trust in God.
• Religions are cultural expressions of open trust in what is most Ultimate.
• Where belief is faith in a concrete idea or “knowing”, faith is a more fundamental trust in the “unknowing” mystery of being.
• Faith then “precedes belief systems” and is the ground from which concrete belief emerges.
5. The potential for human wholeness—or, in other frames of reference, enlightenment, salvation, transcendence, transformation, blessedness—is present in every human being.
• All humans have the capacity for wholeness: genuine spiritual transformation.
• Regardless of one’s religious upbringing, expression or lack thereof.
• The human capacity to genuinely change for the better is present and accessible to all human beings.
• No one is outside the grace of God.
• Transformation inside time, and ‘salvation’ in eternity is present and possible within all humans, regardless of one’s particular faith.
6. Ultimate Reality may be experienced not only through religious practices but also through nature, art, human relationships, and service to others.
• Religion is just one way to experience God.
• We also relate to the immediacy of the Divine through the outdoors, art, music, service, food, people, etc.
• Religious practice is a traditional way of experiencing the Ultimate, but the experience of the Ultimate is never limited to religious practice.
• Holistic religious practice even includes things like “nature, art, human relationship and service to others.”
7. As long as the human condition is experienced as separate from Ultimate Reality, it is subject to ignorance and illusion, weakness and suffering.
• The human condition is the sense of separation from God or Source.
• Many hold a “perceived sense” that we are separate from one another and God.
• The result of this perceived separation is hardship, suffering and sense of separation from others.
• This perceived separation itself is an illusion we can unlearn.
8. Disciplined practice is essential to the spiritual life; yet spiritual attainment is not the result of one’s own efforts, but the result of the experience of oneness with Ultimate Reality.
• Committed spiritual practices like prayer and meditation are essential in nurturing the spiritual life.
• However, true spiritual transformation is a result of God’s grace and not our effort or practice.
• From the ego’s perspective, it can feel like spiritual growth is the result of our own effort: daily we should do our spiritual reading or meditation.
• From the perspective of our higher, truer self, spiritual growth is the result of God’s grace.
*Read more in Nethanel Miles-Yepez book, The Common Heart: An Experience of Interreligious Dialogue.
Source: Keith Kristich, Closer Than Breath, March 10, 2025, events@closerthanbreath.com
