The Five Consents

Most of us imagine faith as a system or set of beliefs. Beliefs are important, but faith is so much more than just holding belief. Faith is letting go. Or as the contemplative tradition teaches us: faith consists of a series of consents.

We don't make loud declarations. They aren't dramatic moments. But small interior yeses that slowly shape who we become over the course of our lives. Ongoing consents we make as we return to the sacred presence of the Divine at work in and around us. The more we habituate consent in our daily lives, the more these yeses become automatic.  

The contemplative teacher Thomas Keating described spiritual growth through what we called four consents, or four ways we say yes to God as our lives unfold. Through my work with young adults and personal study of the contemplative tradition, I add a fifth consent, building on the work of Fr. Keating.

Before anything else, there is the simple consent to be alive. This might sound obvious, but many people spend years quietly resisting their own lives. For example:

• We wish we were someone else.
• We resent our past.
• We feel embarrassed or shame for our personalities, our families, or our struggles. 
• We work hard crafting a personality that's not true to who we are, but allows us to fit in with a specific group of people. 

Our unique life is a gift, and it is utterly lovable before we do anything. Genesis shares a story (well, two) of how creation was formed by God. In each thing created God claimed as good. However, when God created humans, God claimed them as very good. We are very good. God takes delight in us. Before we accomplish anything, before we prove anything, our existence already carries dignity.

I know many of us struggle with this first consent. College years are full of comparisons, anxiety, and pressure to perform. It can feel like you must justify your existence through success. And it only gets harder when we graduate and enter into the "real world" where now our very existence depends on money.

Contemplative spirituality invites a quieter truth: You don't have to earn he right to be here. In fact, Journey House strongly believes everyone has a seat at the table. It doesn't matter what kind of stories make up the fabric of your past. It doesn't matter if you fit in with a specific group of people. You belong here, as long as you are open to sharing the table with others.

The first consent is accepting the gift of you with humility and gratitude.

Once we accept the goodness of our very being, the next invitation is to accept that we are creative and invited to grow.

This consent often begins to awaken during our teenage years. Children mostly receive life. They experience the world as something given to them. But adolescence introduces something new: agency. Energy rises. Questions multiply. Teenagers start discovering something powerful: My life can affect the world around me. 

Our existence is a gift. Our participation is the response to that gift.

We have the courage to step into life with curiosity. To try things. To make things. To explore who we are becoming. 

However, we can also go through life half-asleep. We survive our schedules, manage responsibilities, scroll through our phones, and get through the week. Before we know it, life becomes something that happens to us rather than something we embody.

This second consent shifts that posture. And it sounds something like this: "Yes, I will fully participate in my life. Yes, I will show up fully."

Ideas turn into action.
Curiosity turns into exploration.
Energy turns into creativity.

We awaken our creativity and our quirky energy we bring to our social groups. Beneath our experiementation that often marks this age group is a deeper spiritual movement: the discover that life invites our participation.

Contemplative living is sometimes misunderstood as this passive or withdrawn posture from the world. But true contemplative living doesn't remove us from the world. It takes this energy we experience and helps ground it in healthy ways. We create space where we begin to notice where life feels most alive. We recognize what draws us, what inspires us, what stirs compassion or imagination within us.

The second consent is not about having everything figured out. It is about staying open to the creative moment of life. In time, this openness matures, and what starts as exploration eventually leads to deeper questions about purpose and responsibility. And those questions lead us toward the third consent when we become young adults. 

The first two consents are personal consents we make as God created us and then fashions our lives to be creative, energetic beings. In this third consent, there is a fundamental shift that happens as we mature through the second consent. We are confronted with the reality that we are an individual that's deeply connected to other individuals, that we are part of a larger group.

In this consent we say yes to find and create spaces where we and others can belong.

Part of this consent is asking questions, like:

• Where do I belong?
• What kind of world am I helping to create?
• What should I do with my life?
• How am I going to make a difference?

This consent doesn't necessarily answer these questions directly, but they reshape the way we ask them. It reminds us that spiritual life is not about perfect certainty or constant emotional heights, but realizing that we both receive and build belonging in this world. We realize that we are called to a communal responsibility.

Contemplative living teaches us that we belong to God. When that truth begins to sink into our bones, something changes in how we see others. The boundaries that once separated people begin to soften. We start noticing who feels left out. We become more aware of relationships we surround ourselves with as we search for a partner to share intimacy and life with. 

If we fully make this consent, we start to notice who is invisible. We notice who has been pushed to the margins. We notice who walks into a room wondering if they are allowed to stay. And slowly a new desire emerges:

What if we helped build spaces where people could be?

The thing about belonging: it's not just an emotional warmth, a mantra we say to make ourselves feel better. It is the intentional shaping of communities where dignity, safety, and voice are protected.

And so with this consent we see our friend groups becoming chosen family. Communities are formed around shared values. We become architects of belonging where we craft tables that welcomes people, we build communities where honesty is safe, and we advocate for systems that reflect our deeply held values.

As we continue to grow and mature we come to the fourth consent of releasing our grip on life. We start to really confront with the fact of life: everything around us is temporary (except God of course).

The energy of youth pushes us outward. We build careers, friendships, communities, and dreams. We invest ourselves in people, places, and projects that give our lives meaning. But eventually something happens that no amount of ambition or planning can prevent. Life begins to take things away.

Illness interrupts our plans.
Relationships change or end.
Communities shift.
Bodies age.
People we love die.

The invitation of this stage in our lives is not to fight that reality endlessly, but to slowly learn a deeper kind of surrender. This is not indifference. It's not a lack of love. In fact, it often grows out of loving deeply. The more we love people, places, and experiences, the more we eventually encounter the pain of letting them go.

Contemplative living teaches us that this process is not simply loss. It is also learning. Over time, life dismantles the illusion that we control everything, that we will somehow be that one person that will live forever. the identities we once relied on begin to soften. The roles we played shift (as does our responsibilities and even our values). The things that once defined us lose their grip.

This diminishment can feel frighting at first. That's why we have this thing called a mid-life crisis. But contemplatives have long noticed that something surprising happens in the midst of it. As the self we constructed begins to loosen, a deeper self begins to appear.

We become less concerned with proving ourselves.
Less anxious about status or success (assuming we make this consent).
More attentive to what truly matters.

In this sense, the third consent is a quiet spiritual session on holding our lives with open hands.

Open hands toward our possessions. Toward our achievements. Toward the people we love most. This doesn't make love weaker, it actually makes love truer. Because love that clings tries to keep things from change. Love that releases trusts that nothing real can ultimately be lost in God. Illness, aging, and death are not failures of our journey. They are part of the path itself. They slowly teach us what every contemplative learns: we cannot carry everything with us. 

And so we practice letting go. 

Are we willing to let go of who we thought we were?

Consent five is the consent to transformation. Not the kind of change we manage ourselves, but the kind that only unfolds when God slowly dismantles the structures we have built throughout life to protect our identity. It's often called the process of death of the false self.

The false self is not evil. We need to be clear about this. It is the identity we construct over time in order to survive the world. Life is trauma (if you ever witnessed birth you know that it starts off traumatic, and it doesn't end). Over time we construct masks we wear in order to survive the world. It is built from our need for approval, security, control, and belonging.

And so we learn how to perform certain roles. We learn how to succeed. We learn how to protect ourselves from rejection or pain. Eventually this constructed identity becomes the person we believe we are.

However, deep within us there is another self, the self that exists in God. And the spiritual journey inevitably moves us toward a difficult question:

"Am I willing to release the version of myself I have spent my life building?"

This consent rarely happens all at once. it unfolds slowly through the same forces that shape the fourth consent: loss, suffering, failure, aging, and all of our humbling experiences that strip away our illusions of control and security.

But here something new occurs. Instead of simply letting go of all these external things, we begin releasing the inner narratives that have grown to define us. This need to prove ourselves. This need to always be right. This need for validation that we are enough. These identities cannot (and should not) survive the deeper work of God.

And that can feel like death. Actually for many of us, it feels much worse than death.

We want transformation. We often talk about transformation, even if we don't use the word. But transformation is hard because it requires a kind of surrender that feels like losing ourselves. But the purpose of this surrender is not destruction. It's liberation.

The more our false self loosens its grip, something more spacious begins to emerge. We are less reactive, less defensive, less driven by fear. Compassion grows more naturally. Humility depends. We discover a quiet freedom we might never know was possible. And this is the beginning of the true self appearing. The self that exists in communion with God. 

When we talk about these five consents, it can sound as if they unfold in a neat sequence. Granted each growth stage we experience as we grow older offers these consent naturally as a process of becoming mature humans. However, we all know that real life rarely works that way. Nothing is messier than reality.

The spiritual journey is far more circular than linear. At different moments in life we find ourselves returning to the same consents again and again. We can spend years participating creatively in life and then suddenly discover the need to accept ourselves after a season of grief or failure. We can spend so much time preparing for the loss of a loved one or a change in our work, but struggle to process grief when it does happen.

The consents are less like steps on a staircase and more like movements in a lifelong rhythm. Sometimes we learn to receive our lives again. Sometimes we rediscover the courage to participate. Sometimes we are called outward again to build spaces of belonging. Sometimes we practice the difficult work of letting go. And sometimes we are being quietly transformed.

These movements overlap, repeat, and deepen over time. And the other part of this: if we don't make a consent as the naturally happen, it becomes harder to consent to the others as they come.

The further we travel on the spiritual path, the more childlike the journey becomes again. We return to simple trust. We return to receiving life as gift.

This is why the language of consent is helpful. Again and again we are invited to say yes.