James Finley > Quotes

“How strange God's ways are! He calls us to a union we do not understand. He calls us to a place of encounter which we cannot find. We search and search. Our silence reveals to us not a garden of delights but an awful nothingness. God leaves us in an awful emptiness. All our initial enthusiastic notions of prayer deteriorate into an acknowledgement of our utter superficiality and lack of authenticity before God. We can only throw ourselves completely on his mercy. We can only wait in the darkness and cry out for our salvation. We can but trust that God's love is such that our sinfulness does not even matter. We can only have faith.”
― James Finley, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

“We give God a name. We then equate God with the name we have given him, and in doing so we make ourselves, in effect, God’s God. Instead of acknowledging God as the source of our identity and existence, we make ourselves the self-proclaimed source of God’s identity. God then becomes the one made in our image and likeness.

Those engaged in the undertaking of naming God see themselves as participating in a holy work. They are the God-definers, the definition makers.”
― James Finley, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

“This disappearance, this annihilation is all a matter of appearances as seen through the eyes of the false self. The annihilation is only apparent, for the self being annihilated is itself only apparent. It is a self without God, that is, a self that can never exist. What is annihilated is our false self, our external self made absolute, the imposter, the mask (persona), the liar we think we are but are not. The annihilation therefore is not annihilation at all, for nothing real or genuine is annihilated. Rather, what is genuine is affirmed as our psychological, historical, social self and placed in its true relationship to God. All that is annihilated is the illusion of the self that cannot bear God's presence, save as an idol fabricated for the ego's own glorification. It is this "self" that is "annihilated" through God's merciful love. The annihilation is merciful for it, in fact, is the antithesis of annihilation. It is rather an obscure, inexplicable foretaste in faith of our final consummation as created persons. It is the mystery of the cross creatively at work in the foundations of consciousness, recreating our awareness that we might know God as he knows himself.”
― James Finley, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

“Spiritual reading, discursive meditation, and prayer prepare our hearts for contemplation. Contemplation is a state of realized oneness with God. When engaged in contemplation, we rest in God resting in us. We are at home in God at home in us. Our role in contemplation is essentially receptive, in that when we are engaged in contemplation we receive a gift of divine awareness. Contemplation, in its essentially receptive aspect, is sometimes referred to as mystical experience or mystical prayer. The word mystical, as used in the classical Christian texts, does not refer to having visions, hearing God’s voice, or experiencing any other similar, extraordinary events. Although these kinds of experiences can and do occur, they do not necessarily arise from God, and even when they do, they can become hindrances if we cling to them. The Christian mystics use the terms contemplation and mystical union with God to refer not to visions and other similar experiences, but rather to a life-transforming realization of oneness with God. In this mystical realization of oneness with God we are liberated from our tendencies to derive our security and identity from anything less than God. In specifically Christian terms, we enter the mind of Christ, who realized oneness with God to be the reality of himself and of everyone and everything around him.”
― James Finley, Christian Meditation: Experiencing the Presence of God

“Compassion is the love that recognizes and goes forth to identify with the preciousness of all that is lost and broken within ourselves and others.”
― James Finley, Christian Meditation: Experiencing the Presence of God

“In our zeal to become the landlords of our own being, we cling to each achievement as a kind of verification of our self-proclaimed reality. We become the center and God somehow recedes to an invisible fringe. Others become real to the extent they become significant others to the designs of our own ego. And in this process the ALL of God dies in us and the sterile nothingness of our desires becomes our God.”
― James Finley, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

“Compassion forms the essential bond between seeking God in meditation and all forms of social justice. For the more we are transformed in compassion, the more we are impelled to act with compassion toward others.”
― James Finley, Christian Meditation: Experiencing the Presence of God

“The truth is that we can venture into meditation only in our willingness to be, at times, perplexed. What is more, we must be willing to befriend our perplexity as a way of dying to our futile efforts to grasp the ungraspable depths that meditation invites us to discover. It”
― James Finley, Christian Meditation: Experiencing the Presence of God

“It is little wonder then that the term "religious" is often a pejorative one indicating an escapist, self-righteous, other-worldly or perhaps superstitious stance toward life. Nor should this come as any surprise, in light of all we have been saying of the pervasiveness of the false self. Since religion deals with the ultimate realities of life, it is understandable that religion would draw out the ultimate in the false self's basic disorientation and blindness. The false self can have but false gods, all of which in the end turn out to be but reflections of the false self as it worships itself and sets itself up as the reason for its own existence.”
― James Finley, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

“All that we can do with any spiritual discipline is produce within ourselves something of the silence, the humility, the detachment, the purity of heart and the indifference which are required if the inner self is to make some shy, unpredictable manifestation of his presence.11”
― James Finley, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

“We meditate that we might learn to see through Christ’s eyes the divine mystery of all that surrounds us.”
― James Finley, Christian Meditation: Experiencing the Presence of God

“Jesus saw God in all that he saw. Jesus tells us, “You have eyes to see but you do not see” (Mark 8:18). You have not learned to awaken to your God-given capacity to see the God-given, godly nature of yourselves, others, and all things. This is the source of all your sorrow and confusion. Our prayer then becomes, “Lord, that I might see your presence presencing itself and giving itself away as the intimate immediacy of the grace and miracle of our very presence and of all things in our communal nothingness without you. Help us to understand that the generosity of the Infinite is infinite and that we are the generosity of God. We are the song you sing.”
― James Finley

“The core of our being is drawn like a stone to the quiet depths of each moment where God waits for us with eternal longing. But to those depths the false self will not let us travel. Like stones skipped across the surface of the water we are kept skimming along the peripheral, one-dimensional fringes of life. To sink is to vanish. To sink into the unknown depths of God’s call to union with himself is to lose all that the false self knows and cherishes.”
― James Finley, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

“In prayer, like the stars before the rising sun, all the burdens of our autonomous self disperse before the “piercing presence” of God. God unclothes, undoes us, “prunes away every branch that does not bear fruit.” He even takes God away from us”
― James Finley, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

“We can say that, for Merton, religion refers to our deepest reality which lies hidden in our innate propensity for union with God. Our life, in other words, simply makes no sense whatsoever except to the extent it is directed toward union with God, that is, to the extent that it is authentically religious.”
― James Finley, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

“ways of prayer often call forth a kind of knowing that passes beyond clear ideas and the ordinary way of thinking.”
― James Finley, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

“As Saint Paul expresses it, “There are in the end three things that last: faith, hope and love, and the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor 13:13). This love, which is the ultimate consummation of the true self, is first of all God himself, who is love. When God gives us the Spirit, we receive the power to love God with God’s own love. We are given a new identity, because this love given to us by God is in the end our very self-created in the image of love.”
― James Finley, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

“We pray not to recharge our batteries for the business of getting back to the concerns of daily life, but rather to be transformed by God so that the myths and fictions of our life might fall like broken shackles from our wrists. We withdraw within not to retreat from life but to retreat from the constant evasion, the constant fearsome retreat from all that is real in the eyes of God.”
― James Finley, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

“do not have to live in a monastery to find our way into the deep healing and liberation that monastic life nurtures and protects.”
― James Finley, The Healing Path: A Memoir and an Invitation

“But indeed we exist solely for this, to be the place He has chosen for His presence, His manifestation in the world, His epiphany. . . . The love of our fellow man is given us as the way of realizing this. . . . It is the love of my lover, my brother, or my child that sees God in me, makes God credible to myself in me. And it is my love for my lover, my child, my brother that enables me to show God to him or her in himself or herself. Love is the epiphany of God in our poverty.”
― James Finley, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

“Fame and success are the myth of the ego”
― James Finley, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

“... to ponder those moments in which we experience something of God's presence in such a simple thing as giving over to the smell of a blood-red rose or lying awake at night listening to the rain ... those moments when we are intimately awakened to a sweet communion with God that we cannot prove to anybody, including ourselves.”
― James Finley

“The spiritual life is to be earnestly pursued as though no spiritual life existed. This is the only safe and sane way to travel in the deep waters of the Spirit. Indeed, such childlike simplicity in the face of God expresses a realization that there is, in fact, no spiritual life as such separate from life itself. There is only one life, and that is God’s life which he gives to us from moment to moment, drawing us to himself with every holy breath we take. The purpose of our prayer is to help us find God, that we might consciously and gratefully live this life, and through our presence invite others to live it as well.”
― James Finley, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

“But the most I can do for the world is to transcend it so as to serve it as a person instead of a slave. The only genuine way to serve it is to follow God’s will, in which alone the world finds its validity. And, an important expression of God’s will is fidelity to some degree of prayer in which I discover and actualize a transcendent self grounded in love.”
― James Finley, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

“This occurs whenever society makes a cult of some relative interpretation of life or sets some relative good up as the end of life itself. Success, progress, and all similar goals are examples of the world’s expression of the false self. These social imperatives hold themselves up as absolutes to the extent that we are led to believe that life is nothing but these things. And in this exclusiveness is the falsity. We are led to believe that only the world can save us. We are told that irrelevance according to the criterion of the world is tantamount to nonexistence. We are what we are to the world and all else is nonbeing.”
― James Finley, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

“Let no one hope to find in contemplation an escape from conflict, from anguish, or from doubt. On the contrary, the deep inexpressible certitude of the contemplative experience awakens a tragic anguish and opens many questions in the depth of the heart like wounds that cannot stop bleeding.”
― James Finley, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

“In silence we are learning how to listen. If we’re not silent, we can’t listen, and it’s in listening that we can learn to hear. This ties into a mystical understanding of creation. In God’s “Let it be,” God is speaking all things into being: “Let there be light, let there be stones, and trees, and stars.” It isn’t as if God speaks everything into being and then goes off to leave the universe to run on its own. Rather, creation is absolute and perpetual. Right now, we’re being created by God in this self-donating act by which God is giving God’s very presence to us in our nothingness without God. Our body embodies the presence of God in our nothingness without God. God is speaking all things into being right now, and if God would cease this speaking, we’d all disappear. So we’re trying to become so silent that we can hear God speaking us into being. How can I become so silent that I can hear God speaking the sun into being as it moves across the sky, over the trees and fields rendered sacred in being created by God in their nothingness without God? And so the silence of our prayer embodies the deep, vast silence in which we learn from God how to listen to the living word of God, embodying itself as the reality of all things in their nothingness without God.”
― James Finley

“in whose presence others are better able to experience the gift and miracle of who they really are deep down and who they are called to be, so that they in turn can pass on the contagious energy of healing to others. Amen. So be it.”
― James Finley, The Healing Path: A Memoir and an Invitation

“The mother of all lies is the lie we persist in telling ourselves about ourselves. And since we are not brazen enough liars to make ourselves believe our own lie individually, we pool all our lies together and believe them because they have become the big lie uttered by the vox populi, and this kind of lie we accept as ultimate truth.”
― James Finley, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

“For Merton, the matter of who we are always precedes what we do. Thus, sin is not essentially an action but rather an identity. Sin is a fundamental stance of wanting to be what we are not. Sin is thus an orientation to falsity, a basic lie concerning our own deepest reality. Likewise, inversely, to turn away from sin is, above all, to turn away from a tragic case of mistaken identity concerning our own selves.”
― James Finley, Merton's Palace of Nowhere