Quotes from James Finley

Meditation is a way of slowing down so as to descend into the depths of yourself in the present moment, where God lies waiting to grant you a deep experience of your eternal oneness with God.

The depths of the self are the heights of God.

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.

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

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.

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

We meditate that we might learn to see through Christ's eyes the divine mystery of all that surrounds us.

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.

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.

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

ways of prayer often call forth a kind of knowing that passes beyond clear ideas and the ordinary way of thinking.

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.

desire to practice meditation means you are being blessed in a most extraordinary way. You are being led into the waters of meditative awareness, in which hermits, monks and nuns living in monasteries, and countless devout women and men living in the world have found a deep and abiding

We are called upon to live Christ's life. We are called into the desert to meet the demon within. We are called to face God alone in the night of our own solitude. We are called to die with Jesus, in order to live with him. We are asked to lose all, to be emptied out, in order to be filled with the very fullness of God.

the wisdom dimensions of the healing path of our unfolding lives through time can be best understood as the ways we are quickened from within, in often unexpected ways, by deepening intimations of what we have perhaps always known, hidden with Christ in God from before the origins of universe.

The lesson here for me was that one sure way to be numbered among the dead would be to set out on a ruthless campaign never to make anything out of anything. The tragic irony of such an endeavor is that, should one succeed, one becomes someone who makes something out of the fact that he never makes anything out of anything! This maze suspiciously resembles the dilemma of the humble person who becomes proud about being humble.

The solution Merton suggests is that we should quit keeping score altogether and surrender ourselves with all our sinfulness to God who sees neither the score nor the scorekeeper but only his child redeemed by Christ.

Fame and success are the myth of the ego

To practice meditation as an act of religious faith is to open ourselves to the endlessly reassuring realization that our very being and the very being of everyone and everything around us is the generosity of God. For God is creating us in the present moment, loving us into being, such that our very presence in the present moment is the manifested presence of God. We meditate that we might awaken to this unitive mystery, not just in meditation, but in every moment of our lives.

I experienced the Church to be this refuge within and beyond myself.

Prayer begins to take on its full dimensions only when we begin to intuit that the subtle nothingness of prayer is everything.