James Finley

“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: 40th Anniversary Edition

“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: 40th Anniversary Edition