Cost: $60

In-Person Event 

Center for Contemplative Living

3650 Yates St., Denver, CO

Four Wednesday Afternoons

October 4 - 25, 2023

1:00 -3:00 pm

Thomas Keating offers us another view of the spiritual journey through what we might call a developmental theology of the four consents. His teaching is based on the work of the theologian John S. Dunne. The four consents are invitations to welcome all of life:

1.  Our basic goodness before we do anything,

2.  The full development of our being with all our talents and creative energies, 

3.  The diminution of self as we age and experience the sufferings of life,

4.  Transformation, whether of the false self or through dying and death.

"The spiritual journey is a training in consent to God's presence and to all reality… The divine action invites us to make the consents that we were unable to make in childhood and growing up because of the circumstances that surrounded our early lives. [The four consents are] a paradigm for the spiritual journey that shed a great deal of light on the positive aspects of grace, which not only heals the emotional damage of a lifetime, but also empowers us to enter on the path of unconditional love…”  - Thomas Keating, Invitation to Love

But consent is a gradual process, not a one-time event, as we have learned in our Centering Prayer practice. We will explore each of the four consents and discover where in our lives we have yet to consent or where we have hesitated and may still be hesitating. This will be an opportunity to go deeper in contemplative life by discovering the precious gift that you are.

About Julie

Julie Saad has been a student of Father Thomas Keating, and active with Contemplative Outreach, since 1994. She served on the Governing Board for Contemplative Outreach for 6 years (ending Dec ‘22) and is currently the coordinator of the Contemplative Living Experience Program in Denver, CO.

For years, Julie has worked on integrating Fr. Thomas Keating's work on Centering Prayer and the spiritual journey into her own life so that she can transmit it to others. Her book: "Contemplative Life: Discovering Our Path into the Heart of God" was published in November of 2021. “This book started out as a guidebook on the Contemplative Living Experience program, a spiritual formation program in contemplative life offered by Contemplative Outreach. It grew into a story about how a life dedicated to contemplative prayer can be transformed when one consents to the presence and action of God within, the divine indwelling. Because Julie’s teaching style comes out of her lived experience, the book also became part memoir and part practical application of Thomas Keating’s teaching.”