Tami Simon: You’re listening to “Insights at the Edge.” Today I speak with Jim Finley. A master of the Christian contemplative way and a renowned retreat leader, Jim left home at the age of 18 and studied at the Abbey of Gethsemani with Thomas Merton for six years. He’s a clinical psychologist in Santa Monica, California, and the author of Christian Meditation: Experiencing the Presence of God,and the book, The Contemplative Heart,as well as the Sounds True audio learning programs, Christian Meditation: Entering the Mind of Christ, Thomas Merton’s Path to the Palace of Nowhere: The Essential Guide to the Contemplative Teachings of Thomas Merton, and along with medical intuitive Caroline Myss, the audio program Transforming Trauma: A Seven-Step Process for Spiritual Healing.
In this episode of “Insights at the Edge,” I spoke with Jim about embracing our brokenness and the attitude of nonjudgmental compassion as a critical part of meditation. We also spoke about the value of spontaneous moments of meditative awareness, as well as false perceptions about the practice of meditation. Here’s my conversation with someone I consider a very experienced meditator and teacher of meditation: Jim Finley.
Jim, I’m so interested in meditation, as someone who’s been a meditator now for close to three decades. What I’m really curious about is: What does it mean to meditate in the Christian tradition? How might that be different from meditating in other traditions? What’s Christian meditation?
James Finley: I would say, first, that I think if we speak of meditation in terms of consciousness, then meditation is universal. That is, meditation is the process of entering into more interior, meditative states of consciousness that lead toward realized oneness, reunitive consciousness. But each religious tradition has its own vocabulary for that. That is, each religion has its own specific way or set of transparent metaphors that express, in the specific language of that tradition, this universal path. I think Christian meditation is the specifically Christian way of speaking of this path of more interior, meditative states of consciousness leading to oneness, which is the mystical heritage of the Christian tradition.
TS: Now, one of the phrases that you use in talking about Christian meditation in the series on Christian meditation is this idea of “entering the mind of Christ.” What might that mean?
JF: When the Christian mystics read the Gospels, they saw in Christ the exemplar of this unitive consciousness, this spiritual awakening, say analogous to the way the Buddhist tradition understands the Buddha’s enlightenment. They saw Jesus as bodying forth this enlightened, awakened state. What that would mean, specifically, in the Christian tradition would be- One way to say it succinctly would be that toward the end of his life, at the Last Supper actually, one of the disciples asked Jesus, “Show us the Father, and that will be enough.” That is, “Let us see God, and we won’t complain.” You see, he had this divine kind of seeing.
Jesus said, “He who sees me sees the Father.” So Jesus bears witness that he realized himself to be the manifestation of the infinite mystery of God. Then Jesus also said, “What you do to the least of my brethren, you do unto me.” That is, identifying himself in realized oneness with God, he simultaneously identified himself with the divinity of all that is lost and broken within ourselves and others. This simultaneous identification of the infinite with brokenness, and expressing that identification through love, is Christ consciousness, is the mind of Christ.
And so the Christian mystics were people on this meditative path, asking, “How can I habitually ground myself in this Christ consciousness? How can I habitually experience myself to be the generosity of God? And how can I see that generosity of God in all that is lost and broken in myself and others, and respond in love to that?” I think that’s the sense of it.
TS: I’d love for you to talk more about what you mean by our brokenness, and how that is a part of the Christian meditative journey. That’s not normally something that’s referred to when people talk about the purpose of meditation.
JF: Traditionally, in the Christian tradition-and I’ll use two terms that Thomas Merton uses for this kind of very classic sense of things-is that a Christian understanding of ourselves is that our deepest form of powerlessness is our powerlessness to exist by our own efforts. Namely, we do not have the power to bring ourselves into existence, nor do we have the power to sustain ourselves in existence. Breath by breath, heartbeat by heartbeat, our reality is given to us by God, whose reality is himself. This powerlessness to be without God, who is being itself, giving us our being, this is the amazing quality of ourselves as a gift of God. Then, being the gift of God, we’re to awaken to that, which is spiritual awakening, and we’re to be faithful to that through a life of gratitude and love.
Now, for all of us, the thing is that we tend not to be aware of that. And in our unawareness of that-what Jesus called blindness, and the Buddha called ignorance-we act out all of these sad and terrible things on ourselves and on one another. Not only that, but much to our dismay, we find that we’re invested in these patterns that compromise and violate the God-given gift of ourselves.
Meditation, then, brings us to this kind of self-knowledge, where we come to the realization of these patterns where we compromise or violate the God-given, godly nature of ourselves, and how, in silence and prayer, we can allow the love of God to infuse itself into our heart and heal us from these patterns. That’s what Merton called “this sense of compunction.” It’s this pathos of prayer, this tender, heartfelt liberation from the tyranny of our brokenness, learning to live by this love.
TS: You know, Jim, I think the reason I’m so interested in this idea of our brokenness-and you’re talking now about our powerlessness without God-is that often I interview various nondual teachers, people who talk about spiritual awakening, and they don’t emphasize this component, this element that you’re emphasizing. The emphasis more is just this breakthrough into the power of unitive consciousness, without this emphasis on the part of us that feels broken and powerless. I think this is one of the unique qualities of the Christian contemplative path. I wonder if you could even speak more about it, and what it feels like in you to touch that part of yourself, that feeling of powerlessness.
JF: I’ll say it first as it comes to me, let’s say psychologically, and use that to segue into how meditation is the ultimate experience of this. I say this, probably, just out of my own life, and out of the work I do as a contemplative therapist, or working with people who want to bring this meditative dimension of their healing. I’ll start there, and then segue into this more classic sense of this question.
I think one way to get right at it is that, in the process of healing, in a moment where a person risks sharing what hurts the most, in the presence of someone who will not invade them or abandon them, they unexpectedly come upon, within themselves, the Pearl of Great Price. That is, they experience the preciousness of themselves in their fragility. This experience is a very profound experience, that the very brokenness one tends to be ashamed of, the very brokenness that one is trying to get past- And well one should! One should try to move beyond the ways that brokenness limits us, and so on. But the paradox of it is, in the presence of someone who will not invade us or abandon us, we unexpectedly come upon the already precious nature of ourselves in our brokenness.
This paradoxical experience has an infinite quality to it, and I would like to segue over to that, into Christian terms. There was a great Christian mystic who died in the concentration camps, Edith Stein. She wrote a book, The Science of the Cross, and she was converted to Catholicism, and became a cloistered Carmelite nun, was a scholar, and so on. So this is really the science of the cross: The science of the cross is that, when we really risk opening ourselves to the depths of our brokenness, we discover that we’re not annihilated, but we’re liberated from the tyranny of brokenness over our heart, that it’s in the very willingness to face the brokenness that we discover the divinity of ourselves shining through our brokenness.
I know what you’ re saying about spiritual teachers, and I respect those teachings. It’s really true. There really is this unitive state, and the purity of that state, in reaching it. But when we start talking about how it’s concretely lived day by day in ordinariness, I think it creates a kind of sublimated or rarified notion of a wholeness we can never quite get to. But what if I can taste an unexplainable wholeness in the midst of my lack of wholeness? What if I can experience freedom from the tyranny of suffering in the midst of suffering, or freedom from the tyranny of death in the midst of death?
It’s like with Elisabeth Kbler-Ross and the stages of dying, where she talks about acceptance. She says not everyone comes to acceptance, but someone who comes to acceptance, she says, they have a peace. The words she uses are, “It’s uncanny.” It’s not that they’re not dying, because they are. It’s not that their death is not immensely sad in terms of the people left behind, because it is. But in the very midst of dying, they’re liberated from the tyranny of dying. To me, at least, this is a very rich and intimate and fertile way to understand this whole thing.
TS: Now, you talked about what this might look like as a spiritual counselor, where somebody’s coming to you and they’re talking about this experience, and they’re being held in the loving space of a counselor who is neither invading nor abandoning them, to use your language. But what’s that like in the process of meditating by myself? How does this field of acceptance get generated when I’m just alone in contemplation?
JF: Let me put it this way, in my own words: Let’s say that I’m sitting in a state of a sustained, childlike attentiveness. Let’s say I’m sitting very still, I’m simply aware of my breathing, and in the awareness of my breathing, I’m resting in a kind of inner quietness. In that quietness, I directly experience my inability to be sustained in quietness. That is, I catch myself in the act of slipping off to sleep, I catch myself getting off into strings of thoughts, I catch myself when a memory comes up and I get off into some kind of reactive scenario in my head, and I keep returning again and again to this kind of simple intention to rest in this quietness.
Now, on one level, what I’m looking for is: How can I so mature in quietness that I no longer have to be compromised like this, by these thoughts and these distractions? But what tends to happen in my experience of this is that, in the very inability to get past the frailty of myself, I begin to taste the unexplainable preciousness of myself in my inability to get past the brokenness of myself. This notion that I’m constantly trying to overcome something-“Am I lovable yet? Is this good enough yet?”-this is a subtle form of violence on ourselves. If I can learn to taste how unexplainably lovable and loved I am in my very inability to get past the brokenness of myself, then there’s a kind of surprising freedom in that. That’s my experience of it.
TS: That’s wonderful. I’m reminded that, in your book on Christian meditation, you talk about how the attitude in meditation, the attitudinal posture, is one of nonjudgmental compassion.
JF: Right. You see, it’s because my sense of this is that, say I’m sitting in this quietness, in this sincere intention of realizing this oneness-in Christian terms, this is called Christ consciousness-and sitting in this silent vulnerability, these distractions keep coming up, and half-heartedness and all the rest of it. The thing is, I think what happens is we catch ourselves in the act of perpetuating violence on the part of us that needs to be loved the most. That is, we catch ourselves being punitive toward ourselves in our inability to meditate, as well as we think we should be able to meditate. Catching ourselves in the act of being punitive toward ourselves and our powerlessness is really the heart of violence in the world.
Or if we don’t do that, the flip side of the whole thing is we abandon ourselves; that is, we say, “I can’t do this! I’m not good at this! I can’t tolerate having to face this inadequacy in myself! I’ll quit! I’ll go watch television or something I can deal with!” If instead we can learn, say in our breathing-a practice I suggest to people is, when you exhale, silently say, “I love you,” as an act of exhaling yourself, as an act of love to the infinite love that’s inhaling itself into you with each inhalation. So on the exhalation, it’s a silent “I love you,” and on the inhalation, you’re listening to the silent “I love you” of God breathing into you the gift of life itself.
So the practice is “I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you,” and in that “I love you, I love you,” distractions arise within me. As distractions arise within me, so does my reactivity to myself arise for being so distracted. I catch myself in the act of being punitive toward myself for being so distracted, and what I do is, as I inhale, I inhale this unconditional, infinite love loving me as unexplainably precious in my powerlessness not to be distracted. Then when I exhale, I give myself, distractions and all, to the love that gives itself to me as precious, distractions and all. As I do that, I’m liberated from the tyranny of distraction as having the power to name who I am, and I discover that love alone has the power to name who I am, as unexplainably lovable in my powerlessness.
I think that’s, to me, the intimacy of the meditative experience, this kind of liberation through love this way.
TS: That’s extraordinarily beautiful! Thank you so much. That’s such a beautiful practice.
JF: And I’ll share something, too, where I think human love kind of incarnates this. I think there are moments between two people in an intimate relationship, in which there’s the kind of discussion which is not easy to have, in which one is admitting to the other something about themselves that they find very hard to accept. It might be some infidelity to the partner . . . whatever it is. If they disclose it in a vulnerable way, they can experience themselves being unconditionally loved by the beloved as precious in the intimacy of their infidelities, and it liberates them from shame.
I’m not saying that as human beings, we always live up to this. Sometimes we fall short and the partner gets punitive, and this is what makes relationships so challenging. But when human love really comes into its own, I think it somehow embodies this meditative quality that I’m talking about with each other.
TS: Well, what I think is so profound about what you’re getting at here is that this part of us that doesn’t find ourselves lovable is usually so difficult to heal, and here you are pointing out how we can heal this part of ourselves at the core of our meditative practice and at the core of our intimate relationships.
JF: Exactly! That’s what I’m saying, really. To put this in specifically Christian terms for a minute: When you really look at the healing stories in the Gospels-you know, where someone is blind or someone can’t walk or whatever-when you really look at the story, at the heart of the story is that Jesus approaches the person, and Jesus sees the difficulty and responds to it. But even more deeply, what he does is that he, in a sense, sees the brokenness, but looks past it into the invincible preciousness of the person in their brokenness. They are able to see, reflected in Jesus’ eyes, the invincible preciousness of themselves in their brokenness.
Joining Jesus in seeing this invincible preciousness is the true healing. The bodily healing, theologically, in the scriptures, is seen as a sign of faith, but the healing is not really whether or not, in the realm of circumstances, we’re able to be free from this shortcoming or free from that shortcoming. It’s really: To what extent can we be freed from the idolatry of shame, and how can we embrace the powerlessness that comes from the fact that love alone has the authority to name who we are?
There’s a lovely passage, I don’t know where it’s from, but someone at Saint Benedict in the fifth century once said, “What do you monks do in the monastery all day?”
And he said, “Fall down and get up. Fall down and get up. Fall down and get up.”
The silent life leaves nothing to hide behind, and you’re just exposed, being the way you are. If you’re driven by shame, it will drive you crazy, but if you surrender yourself to this love that loves you in your brokenness, there is a sense of liberation.
TS: Now, you talked some earlier, when we were talking about what it might mean to enter the mind of Christ, about Christ and the father, and that relationship in terms of meditation. I’m curious how you see the Holy Trinity in terms of the practice of meditation.
JF: Well, my sense, really, is that when we read the classical texts of the Christian mystics, you see these constant innuendos and references to the Trinity. That is, I really don’t think it’s possible to get inside the language of the Christian mystics without this sense of Trinitarian intuitive awareness of what they’re talking about. And realize we’re now entering into deep water here. Not to take on the Trinity in a few minutes, but just to poetically give a sense of it-
TS: Jim, talking to you is always deep water! That’s one of the things I like.
JF: Yes, why go into the water if it’s not deep, know what I mean?
TS: Yes!
JF: Life is deep!
So here, I’ll say it poetically: How I say it to people is that, in the Christian tradition, this love poetry of the ineffable is that God is ineffable, hidden, ungraspable, like nothing we can say about God is true. By the very fact that we’re saying it, God is beyond that. God is beyond that, so God is endlessly abyssive hiddenness, a presence. This birthless, deathless, boundaryless hiddenness is eternally expressing itself, or revealing itself, as divine relations of knowledge and love.
So intimacy is the first manifestation of the unmanifested. That Father, Son, and Spirit are divine relations of unity in distinction and distinction in unity. In other words, the mystery of being a person is much deeper than being an individual, because the tradition doesn’t at all say that there are three individuals, Father, Son, and Spirit. Rather, they are divine relations of knowledge and love as manifesting the mystery of the infinite.
Is it OK to go on? I’ll go on?
TS: Please.
JF: OK. God the father-if it was matriarchal society, it would be God the mother, but here let’s say that God is origin-is eternally speaking himself or expressing himself, and God, as spoken, is the Word, which is the second person in the Trinity. Or God the father eternally knows himself, and the second person in the Trinity, the Word, is then the wisdom of the father. It’s God as knowing and God as known, that distinction between knowing and being known. Now the father and the son, in their infinite knowledge of each other, give rise to an infinite love, and the infinite love arising from the infinite knowledge is the Holy Spirit.
Now the thing is, if we were to try to find God the father in any way whatsoever other than the son, we’d never find God the father, because there is no God the father, because God in the Knossos is infinitely empty in the infinity of himself, and gives all that he is as the son. Likewise, if we would try to find Christ, the second person in the Trinity, in any way whatsoever other than the father, we would search and search and search. We’d never find Christ. There is no Christ, because Christ is in no way whatsoever other than the father. And so with the Holy Spirit. This is the triune, the unitive mystery of the ineffable.
Now, where we come in is the tradition teaches that, from all eternity, God the father speaks himself as the Word, and from all eternity, contemplates himself in the Word, so the life of God is a contemplative life. And God, in contemplating himself in the Word, eternally contemplates the eternal possibility of all things. So when God created fire, God did not have to think up what fire might be. From all eternity, God eternally knows what fire eternally is in contemplating the eternal possibility of fire in the Word. This is fire in God before God said, “Let it be.” This is fire before the origins of the universe. This is the eternal fire. So in Creation, in Genesis, when God says, “Let it be,” God brings into existence in time and space this fire, and this is why we can contemplate fire. We gaze into the flames, and in the flames we catch intimations of something without boundaries.
And so with water and trees and stones and so on. This is Saint Francis calling the sun his brother, “Brother sun and sister moon,” that the creatures of the universe are siblings, that we’re all manifestations of this unmanifested mystery that contemplated us before the origins of the universe, uttering us into existence on this earth.
Now, the thing about us as people in the tradition is that we have the capacity to awaken to this. That is, everything is this. The leaves on the trees are infinity manifested, the sun is eternally manifested, the waves are eternally manifested, everything. This is the God-given, godly nature of all things. What’s unique about us is our capacity to realize it, and this is spiritual awakening. There are fleeting moments where it is given to us to taste this oneness, which is a fleeting moment of contemplation. And in tasting it, we can say “Yes!” to it, because love is never imposed. It’s always offered. In the reciprocity of love, we can choose to give ourselves to the infinite love that infinitely gives itself to us.
So here, then, is our Trinitarian mysticism on the Trinitarian kind of a poetic metaphor of understanding the mystical contemplative experience.
TS: Now, it’s interesting that you talked about the spontaneous moments that we have of awakening. It seems that, in your approach to teaching Christian meditation, you do place a great deal of emphasis on these spontaneous moments of recognition of-using your words-unitive consciousness. Why are those spontaneous moments so important to you?
JF: Well, you know, I think my sense is that when people talk about this, what we’re trying to do is to help people through unnecessary obstacles. That is, there’s some obstacle that we unwittingly impose on ourselves. It’s hard enough as it is when we’re doing it right, so we’re trying to clear the brush away and free ourselves up from unnecessary hindrances.
One unnecessary hindrance is this sense of imagining that we’re talking about something that is in some way fundamentally above and beyond us. Now, in some fundamental sense, it is, but the paradox is that which is infinitely beyond us is infinitely giving itself away as the very reality of us. That’s the unitive mystery, that that which is infinitely beyond us is infinitely emptying itself as the very reality of us, that we ourselves are manifesting that which is infinitely beyond us.
So what I try to do is help people slow it down and recalibrate consciousness to a more subtle scale, where they can begin to realize little, fleeting moments of intimately realized oneness. Because they’re fleeting, and because they’re subtle, we tend not to pay attention to them, but a lot of the meditative life is learning how to pause and pay attention to, in reverence, these simple little flashes and tastes of something. So a moment of smelling a rose, or hearing the rain at night, or looking at a child playing . . . sometimes it grazes our heart in the recognition of something beautiful that we can’t explain. I’m saying these are flashes of spiritual awakening.
The more we can begin to realize that we’re talking about something that’s already begun, that we’re already participating in it, then we can say with more confidence, “Well, how can I learn to stabilize my heart in receptive openness to these flashes?” What can we do to have a more abiding awareness of the depths so fleetingly glimpsed? To me, that sounds more inviting, or more reassuring, than notions that we’re talking about something beyond us, where there’s probably no way we can jump up high enough to reach it. That’s why I emphasize it.
It’s like this discussion we’re having right now. Insofar as we’re mutually genuine in the encounter, we can viscerally and intuitively glimpse there’s something in this encounter that in some way embodies forth the mystery that we’re talking about. It’s always much closer than we expect.
TS: Now, in your own life, correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems that awakening insights occurred in spontaneous ways, and that this has been extremely important to you. Is that true?
JF: That’s really true, yes. That’s true.
TS: Can you share a little bit with us about what maybe some of the early experiences were, and how that shifted your view of what Christian meditation might really be like, the formal practice, how these spontaneous visions affected you in terms of the formal practice of meditation?
JF: Well, I would say- I’ll just mention this in passing, but I think in childhood and so on, there were [these experiences], because I was struggling with a lot of trauma that was going on. I think my prayer and my faith was actually the first beginnings of getting this kind of intimate sense of prayer and God and so on.
Then I think, when I went to the monastery, when we were in this Trappist monastery in just complete silence- We used sign language! We didn’t talk to each other. You used sign language, and you weren’t supposed to make useless sign language, so I just lived in this habitual state of silence. In the silence, and chanting the Psalms, and so on, I think that kind of silence is conducive to the subtle little intimations of God and life and so on.
There was that, and then the big life-changing event for me, which was a little thing- It’s one of these things: I was at the monastery, and Thomas Merton gave me permission to spend some time alone in an abandoned sheep barn, and I would go up into the loft of this abandoned sheep barn, and the doors of the barn were always open and looked out over this meadow. It was in Kentucky, it was very hot, and I was walking back and forth, saying the Psalms. The experience, to me, was that what we tend to think of as the air is literally God, that I was walking back and forth through God, breathing God. There were no emotions connected with it. There were no images. It was like a matter-of-factness to the divinity of air.
I don’t know how else to say that. It was just that I was walking back and forth through God, breathing God. And it was clear to me that, no matter where I would try to run from God, I’d be running away from God, in the God that I was breathing and was sustaining me. And this air, this oceanic God that I was breathing, knew me through and through and through and through as compassion, just endless compassion without boundaries. It was just-I know no words to describe it.
I spent all afternoon like that, then I went over to the monastery for vespers, I chanted, I ate dinner that way, I walked around that way for about three days. On a Sunday-on Sundays, we were allowed to walk outside the monastic enclosure, in the woods outside the monastery-I was walking along this little road like this, breathing God, and there was a little tree hanging down over the path. I reached out and I touched one leaf of the tree, and I looked up in the sky, there was one cloud in the sky, and I said out loud, “It’s one!” That the cloud in the sky, the leaf I was touching, the ground I was standing on, the God I was breathing, it was all just absolutely, completely, unexplainably one. Then I spent all afternoon on a hillside, looking like that. It just changed my whole life. I don’t know how to say it. It was just absolute for me, like a taste of it.
It was still immature, I think, because the brokenness of me kind of came in over it again. I’ve been on a long journey, trying to be safe with that and share it with people. But that moment I touched the leaf, to me it’s so enigmatically how the littlest of things is the totality of reality giving itself away in that little thing. That was, to me, the great insight.
TS: And then how does that insight, that experience you had as a young man, inform, if you will, how you practice meditation now, in a formal sense?
JF: Well, I think what it is for me is, when I sit in meditation, either alone or in a meditation group, whether we’re at Saint Monica’s Church sitting in practice together, or I’m sitting alone, what it is for me is- Well I think, first of all, there’s a kind of a confident clarity that the way I simply am already is perfectly manifesting what I’m looking for. That is, when I’m sitting in my chair like this, and I settle in and I’m looking around the room, the configuration of things in the room is kind of like a divine mandala. And my tiredness or any pain in my body, whatever it is, there’s already a kind of an awareness, like a visceral conviction that it is already completely manifesting what I’m searching for.
Then my practice is one of quieting myself, and kind of surrendering to or relaxing to or breathing into this kind of a sweet surrender to that, a kind of being undone by it, or being softly identified with it somehow. I don’t know how to say it, other than that. That’s what it is for me.
TS: That’s beautiful! In your program on Christian meditation, you talk about what you call the five mistakes, the word “mistakes” meaning false ideas you’ve had about meditation, and what entering deeply into contemplation would first be like when you entered the monastery. You talk about how these mistakes have to do with the nature of thoughts, memories, intentions, feelings, and the body. I wonder if, just briefly, you can share your five mistakes and save us the trouble of making those mistakes ourselves!
JF: Well, first of all, I think sometimes we can hear things like this, and there is a kind of immediate recognition of the intuitive truth of it, that it’s a lifelong journey of learning to stabilize ourselves in the experiential realization of that truth. To intuitively recognize it is a good start. So what were they? I don’t remember exactly.
TS: There were thoughts. Let’s start there. I’ll cue you up, Jim, but you can say what they are.
JF: Thoughts. OK. I’ll start with thoughts.
TS: Yes.
JF: OK. I’ll start with thoughts as I actually experience it, and as my sense, too, of this path as it’s actually experienced.
My sense of meditation, my guidelines that I suggest to people, are to sit still, to sit straight, with our eyes closed or lowered toward the ground, our hands in a comfortable or meaningful position in our lap, slow, deep, natural breathing. And with respect to our minds-or what we usually think of as our minds-to be present, open, and awake, neither clinging to nor rejecting anything. That’s the guideline, to be present, open, and awake, neither clinging to nor rejecting anything. And with the attitude of nonjudgmental compassion toward ourselves as we find ourselves clinging to and rejecting everything that we were talking about earlier.
I want to come back now to being present, open, and awake, to neither clinging to nor rejecting anything, as it applies to thoughts. So I’m sitting, and my intention is clear: I want to sit, say for 30 minutes, present, open, and awake, neither clinging to nor rejecting anything. Very soon, what actually starts to happen, almost always, is that I become aware of a thought arising. And as the thought arises within me, I find that if the thought is pleasant or profound or insightful, whatever it is, I’m subtly drawn-or not so subtly-to wanting to cling to it. If the thought that comes up within me is unpleasant or intensely painful, I’m inclined to want to push it away.
But if I sit in a kind of equal-mindedness of the thought arising, and I’m present, open, and awake, neither clinging to the thought no matter how pleasant it is, nor rejecting it no matter how unpleasant it is, I can watch and observe the thought arising. Now here’s the subtle thing: it’s observing the thought without thinking the thought. Often when thought arises, we’re so used to thinking our thoughts that we start thinking our thoughts, but with a little practice, we can learn to quietly observe thought without thinking the thought.
Sometimes, if we’re talking with somebody-I see this in therapy with people, too-we can say to a person, “You know what I’m thinking right now.” That is, we’re aware of the thought arising prior to sharing it or thinking about it. The thought arises, you’re aware the thought is arising, and as you practice not clinging to it nor rejecting it, not getting caught up in it by thinking about it as pleasant or unpleasant, you can be aware of the thought arising. And as you watch it, you can watch it enduring, and then you watch it pass away.
It always happens; it always happens: The thought arises, the thought endures, then it passes away. Sometimes it’s intercepted midcourse by another thought, and then if you watch that thought, if you just watch it, then that thought endures, and then it passes away. Thoughts arise, endure, and pass away. So in meditation, we’re not trying to stop thinking, which is again the ego imposing itself upon itself. We’re trying to observe thought arising, enduring, and passing away with quiet, graced, reverential awareness.
And here’s the extraordinary thing about this modality of realizing contemplative union: As the thought arises, I can become intimately aware of the divinity of thought arising. That is, from whence does it arise? Anyone who has had a relative with dementia or Alzheimer’s, or anyone who has struggled with cognitive impairments, knows what a gift it is to think, and what a gift thought is. We can begin to experience the divinity of thought arising. That is, we can begin to experience God infinitely giving herself away as this thought arising, and we can see God giving herself away as thought enduring, and as thought passing away, just like this day is arising, enduring, and passing away, just like you and I are arising, we’re enduring, and passing away. In the observance of thought arising, enduring, and passing away, it opens out upon all reality as God being manifested as all that arises, all that endures, and all that passes away.
That’s been a rich and simple experience for me. It’s an easy thought, but in the beginning I was confused. I thought I was trying to stop thinking, or I thought I was trying to have profound thoughts, or I thought of all of those variables of critiquing our thoughts. Instead, what I learned was that I was to reverentially behold thought, to experience the God-given, godly nature of thought. That was a breakthrough for me.
TS: That’s very clear and very helpful. OK, I don’t know if we’ll get through all five, but let’s move on to memories. What was your mistaken idea about memories and contemplative practice?
JF: Yes. It’s that I thought, again, that my goal when I was sitting in meditation-and by the way, memories are forms of thought, and in a way, all thoughts are memories, not to go into all of that right now . . .
TS: No, but it’s a good point, Jim! It’s a very good point!
JF: It is a good point! I think it is. I think that again I thought that I was trying to stop memory so that I could have a pure field of consciousness, but instead I realized that what I was to do was to be aware of memory arising. If it was sad, I could watch myself being inclined to push it away, or if it was pleasant, to cling to it and distract me, but I could learn the kind of art form of watching the memory arise, endure, and pass away. And then I could begin to experience the God-given, godly nature of the gift of memory arising, enduring, and passing away.
This brings about a liberation from my remembering self and all that it remembers. Nothing that happened to me in the past, nothing I did in the past, has the power to name who I am. In my remembrance of the past, viewed with these lucid eyes, I can see the divinity of memory.
TS: You know, I think I’m going to let our listeners listen to the audio series, Christian Meditation: Entering the Mind of Christ, to learn more about your view on intentions, feelings, and the body, what you discovered through the deep practice of meditation.
At this point, though, I just want to make the comment, Jim, that sometimes I think I’ve had this-I don’t know if you want to call it a bias or prejudice, but that, oh, you know, the Buddhists are the ones who really mastered the art of meditation, and Christians, they’re better at heartful actions and service, and their specialty is a different part of spiritual practice. But talking to you, you’ve blown that idea to bits, because you’re such a deep meditator, and you know so much about the practice, and you come from the Christian tradition. I’m just curious what you might have to say about that.
JF: That’s certainly a good point. Thomas Merton once said, “You know, there’s a lot of people losing their faith, and they’re losing it in church.” And he said, “There’s a lot of people leaving Christianity, looking for this unitive experience in other traditions. The tragedy of it all is that this unitive state of realization we’re talking about is the pull of all world religions, including Christianity. The scandal of the church is that it does not teach its own traditions.”
So you get into this ideology of God, these belief systems and morals-which is fine! I think it helps people live good lives, and it’s God’s present and all of that. But there are so many people who are not aware of this ancient path of contemplative Christianity. Since I was blessed by this when I went to the monastery, and I saw Merton as a living embodiment of this, and when I started to read these mystics, I just thought it was so profound.
Then when Thich Nhat Hanh came to Gethsemani and met Merton, and Bede Griffiths came from India to meet Merton, and Abraham Heschel came to meet Merton in the Kabbalah, in Judaism, and when Merton went to Asia to talk with the Dalai Lama, there is this sense of a deep mutual respect for the historical differences of the traditions, in which each of them came to this unity that transcends and wholly permeates the traditions. So I have been deeply influenced by Buddhism, and the whole sense of the dharma is a very-well, we could have had this same talk, I guess, in dharma language.
But for me, the mystical heritage of Christian faith, contemplative Christianity, is really-I don’t know! It’s just eloquent, it’s simple, and I feel like whatever I can do to help people see that and be open to that, I feel fortunate to do that.
TS: And just one final question, Jim. You know our program is called “Insights at the Edge.” I’m curious, for you, in terms of the practice of Christian meditation, what’s your edge? What’s your edge in the practice?
JF: How I put it is this-this will all make sense, let me just say it. When I seek to draw toward what is deepest in my own tradition, I find myself in fidelity to that hiddenness. Merton called it “the hidden center” or “where everything connects.” The more radical I am in drawing close to the hidden center, the more I find myself at the prophetic circumference of what most people expect and understand the tradition to be. That is, I think there’s a lot of people who would listen to this, and it would resonate with them, because they’re already on this path. You know, it will ring true. You can tell when you’re in the presence of it, because it resonates inside of us. The more radically faithful we are to this, the more we find ourselves at the edge of what we can even begin to explain. We cannot explain this. We can bear witness to it, but we become unexplainable to ourselves.
That’s why I think the mystic is not the person who says, “Listen to what I’ve obtained, listen to what I’ve realized.” Instead, the mystic is the one who says, “Look what love has done to me.”
You see, Merton says, “I’m blown down the street like leaves scattered in all directions. Do I even have a life?” Being dispossessed by love, and scattered in all directions-I feel, for me, that’s for me to live at the edge. I just live my life like anyone else, I guess, and try to be safe with it. I sit with people in therapy, I read these texts, and I’m going to go out and have dinner with my wife here in a minute. I always feel that I’m right at the edge of the tender intimacy of this utterly unexplainable thing that’s manifesting itself in what I’m doing. That’s my sense of things, I guess.
TS: Jim, I have to say I’ve found it an absolutely gorgeous experience to speak with you. Thank you so much!
JF: You’re very welcome!
TS: I’ve been speaking with Jim Finley. He’s created a six-part series with Sounds True on Christian Meditation: Entering the Mind of Christ, as well as an audio learning series on Thomas Merton’s Path to the Palace of Nowhere: The Essential Guide to the Contemplative Teachings of Thomas Merton, and in a collaboration with Caroline Myss, a program called Transforming Trauma: A Seven-Step Process for Spiritual Healing.
It’s been wonderful to speak with Jim Finley on Christian meditation-a gentleman who, I think, really understands Christian meditation through and through.
SoundsTrue.com. Many voices, one journey. Thanks for listening.
