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 the book Christian Meditation: Experiencing the Presence of God.
With Sounds True, Jim has recorded several audio learning series, including Christian Meditation: Entering the Mind of Christ, Thomas Merton’s Path to the Palace of Nowhere, and—along with intuitive Caroline Myss—the audio program Transforming Trauma: A Seven-Step Process for Spiritual Healing. He also has a new program with Sounds True, Meister Eckhart’s Living Wisdom: Indestructible Joy and the Path of Letting Go.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Jim and I spoke about what it means to be illumined by faith and to live in vulnerability. We talked about Meister Eckhart’s life as a fourteenth-century mystic and what Jim has found to be most compelling about both his life and his teachings. Finally, Jim led us through a Christian meditation practice in the tradition of Meister Eckhart. Here’s my conversation with Jim Finley:
Jim, in order to create [the] program Meister Eckhart’s Living Wisdom, I’m imagining that at some point in your life you fell in love with the teachings of Meister Eckhart. To begin with, I’d like to know a little bit about that—what was happening in your life when you fell in love with the teachings of Meister Eckhart?
Jim Finley: When I graduated from high school in 1961, I entered the Trappist monastery at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, where I lived there as a member of the community for nearly six years. At that time, Thomas Merton was Master of Novices. He was the senior monk assigned to the spiritual formation of those newly entering the monastery.
I felt very privileged to be with him. I saw him as a living master—a kind of awakened person in the contemplative lineage of the Christian tradition. In his conferences and his talks one-on-one with me in spiritual direction, he would mention these different classical texts of the different mystics—one of which was Meister Eckhart.
In the novitiate library, there [ were] some collected sermons of Eckhart. That’s when I started reading Meister Eckhart. When I started reading him, I was just very taken by—I guess what struck me was a sense of the depth and beauty of what he was saying. That’s kind of how it started for me.
TS: Now, if you were to say that there were just a couple of the most important guiding principles in Meister Eckhart’s work that have really meant the most to you, what would those principles be?
JF: I think one would [need] to be [the] kind of refrains that run through all of his sermons. One would be his understanding of God as generosity. He uses this word, gelassenheit—that if we think of God as generosity, then the generosity of the infinite is infinite. In this infinite generosity of God, God is in a sense like lassen—we see the root word “lazy.” God’s very laid back about being God. God’s not uptight about it at all.
And God’s so released—God’s so freed in being God that God gives. God infinitely gives the infinity of God away as the ground of our own soul . . . whereas the reality of all things is nothingness without God.
So if the generosity of the infinite is infinite, then we are the generosity of God. That’s one of the most stunning things for me. To realize that—to experience that—Eckhart says, is to experience the joy that death does not have the power to destroy. That I, in the very depths of my self, in the very generosity of God, in my very nothingness without God—that’s one of the central things that has captivated me.
The second one would be that he is kind of a mystic teacher. He offers guidelines for a way of life in which each of us can personally open ourselves to be transformed in that realization—which are the teachings found in these sermons of Meister Eckhart.
I would put it that way, as kind of the foundational place to start.
TS: Let’s talk more about this generosity. What does that mean in practical terms, as a person? What does that mean?
JF: Meister Eckhart—he talks about moments. I think this is a helpful place to begin. He talks about moments, in which he says—and he says we need to be very careful of these moments because we can get attached to them. But from time to time, there are moments where we serendipitously find our way into an unexplainable richness welling up out of the depths of life itself.
For example, sometimes in the midst of nature or intimacy with another person, in solitude, in birth, in death, the pause between two lines of a poem, or in prayer, we’re fleetingly graced with a deep awareness that’s nothing’s missing anywhere. It’s [without boundaries] in all directions—like we don’t know what to make of it.
When it’s actually happening, it’s too self-evident to doubt. It’s too deep to comprehend.
There are these moments of awakening utterly beyond what can be defined—utterly beyond what can be grasped. We’re momentarily resting in that kind of sunlit clarity.
Then when the moment passes, and we return back to our customary way of going about our lives, then it’s like how to not break faith with our awakened heart—[as if] in our most childlike hour. “I know that I fleetingly glimpsed that, without which, my life is forever incomplete.” Put it another way, in terms of love, when we deeply love somebody: When we don’t know someone very well, it’s easy to say a lot about them. But when we’ve loved them very, very deeply for a long, long time, we don’t know what to say, and our heart breaks when we try. We know no matter what we would say, it wouldn’t be what we know, because we can’t say it.
I think that’s the generosity of God. It’s that intimacy—that experience.
TS: Now, you said something very interesting: “Not breaking faith with those moments of awakening.” I think probably many listeners can relate to those moments of—I think you referred to “sunlit clarity.” Those types of experiences. But then, when they’re gone, we miss them or wish they would return or wonder why they’re so far away.
Is that breaking faith? What would it mean to stay faithful to those moments that seem now out of my reach?
JF: Yes. Now, I think Meister Eckhart would say that—let’s say that there are these moments. In the remembrance of these moments, there’s a kind of longing for a more abiding way to rest in them. He would say that listening to that kind of delicate longing is actually the beginnings of the path.
Say, “How could I possibly learn to live in a more daily, abiding awareness of this depth so fleetingly glimpsed?” The practical question then would be: How does one go about learning to habituate that sensitivity to that—to let it become ever more habitual?
We would break faith with it, I think, when we play the cynic. It’s like the awakened heart knows that it’s true, but the ego—remembering the moment that it was transcended—is skeptical. We buy into the density and intensity of our day-by-day preoccupations and we shrug it off. I think that’s what he’s talking about—the seduction of the perceived importance of the day-by-day. We kind of move on. We lose touch with it.
TS: One of the images that you offer in this series of teachings from Meister Eckhart is this idea of “border crossings”: that we’re called cross certain borders. Can you talk about that?
JF: Yes. Here’s a fundamental spiritual anthropology or spiritual sense of the way Eckhart invites us to reflect on ourselves. Here’s the way I put it visually:
Imagine we draw a circle. A pretty big circle, like the size of a coffee saucer, on a blank piece of paper. That circle represents our soul, and our soul is the interiority of ourselves. Like our self-reflected, bodily self in time and space—like you and I having this conversation right now.
And he says that our soul looks outward at the surrounding world so that everything that comes into our soul comes into us through our senses. Coming into our senses, we form ideas about ourselves and the world around us. We have our memory of ourselves and the world around us. We have our desires that are formed within ourselves and the world around us. We have our senses—our spiritual senses, our emotions. There’s all of that.
Eckhart would encourage us to respect the gift of that. Really, what he says is just that it’s grounded in love—to ground that day-by-day life as a human being in love, illumined by faith. We live our daily life illumined by faith this way.
But if in the very middle of the circle we put a small circle in the very middle, the small circle in the middle is the mystery where the ground of God—by the generosity of God—makes the ground of God to be the ground of our own soul. God’s ground and our ground are one ground in the innermost center of ourselves—like the deepest depths of the depths of ourselves, within ourselves.
Typically, we go through life looking outward, like the outer face of the soul. We’re going along. We’re just human beings living our daily [lives]. But what happens to us in these moments of awakening—these kinds of “quickenings”—is a kind of boundary crossing from within. That is, we’re intimately accessed by what’s inherently [unspeakable]—what silences us. That boundary crossing of the intimately realized [unspeakable]—is this flash or this taste of this realized oneness.
Then, when it passes and we return back to the preoccupation of looking outward, then there is the remembrance of the border-crossing within ourselves in our most childlike hour. So, the question then is, “How do I learn not to be so taken up by the reality of my outward awareness, of my outward surrounding thoughts, images, impressions, and all of that?” Now that I’ve tasted directly, for a moment, my Self—that which is so utterly beyond all of that and which I intuit will alone consummate the longings of my heart—those are border crossings.
TS: Now, Jim, I’m curious about something in your own life. You offered this phrase: “Being illumined by faith.” You talked about staying faithful to our moments of awakening. I’m curious—right now, in this moment, as we’re having this conversation, when you reflect on what is your faith—what is faith to you? I’d be curious to know what that is.
JF: I’ll say it in keeping here a kind of affinity with Eckhart, but putting it into my own experience with this and just talking to a lot of people about this. [It is] that how I experience is I live my daily life like a human being among human beings. I think my faith, at one level, is kind of an awareness that I have that this day-by-day life that I’m living is proceeding moment by moment by moment by moment by the infinite mystery of reality itself—which we call God in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Different traditions call it different names—Brahman, the Tao, [or] Spirit.
Moment by moment by moment, reality itself is giving me my reality. It’s giving me the reality of this talk right now. Then I can be aware of that and I can read that in the Scriptures. I can have a personal relationship with that through prayer, express it through love in my daily life, and trust that when I die—when the veil parts—it won’t be as in a mirror, darkly, but I’ll know even as I am known. God will be all and all is this kind of eternal destiny beyond thought, beyond feeling, beyond so-and-so.
So there’s that. And there’s just the efficacy of that—like the authenticity of the sincerely lived life.
Also, for me—and this is what drew me to the monastery, and being in the monastery, and drew me to Eckhart. There are these moments of awakening we’re talking about here where there’s a kind of, moments where we’re intimately silenced by the intimacy of the unsayable. Eckhart of these moments, “These moments steal the soul from herself.” I love that phrase. That is, in these moments, there’s this intimate tasting of something utterly, utterly, utterly beyond anything I can even begin to say. And it’s accessing me, and calling me to itself.
So, my faith, then, is: how can I live in a childlike vulnerability in surrendering myself over to receptive openness to that—that it might have its way with me? In the reciprocity of love, how can I then give myself to this unspeakable generosity that so unspeakably gives itself to me?
I think, for me, it’s both. It’s this day-by-day sincerity of a life of faith that calls us to love. And then there’s this kind of mystical tasting of this oneness and an inner call to how to habituate myself in that oneness.
TS: I’m curious. We’re talking some about the teachings of Meister Eckhart and what they’ve meant to you in your life. I’m curious to know [whether there was] anything about his life itself—the choices that he made; the way that he lived and acted in society—that has particularly inspired you?
JF: Yes, I’d say several things, really. One of the commentators that I refer to in the series and so on, Reiner Schürmann—he’s referring to Eckhart’s sermons. Schürmann says, “The fact that Eckhart’s clothing was full of holes suggests to us the fire that consumed him.”
I get this feeling that when Eckhart gave his sermons—and when we slowly read them out loud to ourselves or we just sit with it in a very open way, you get the feeling that he was so radically trying to let the truth of what he was saying flow not from him, but through him. So, there was this fidelity to find language in the service of the unsayable.
He was speaking from the depths of his awakened heart, so the deep unto deep—the place in which his words came in him allows that same depth to resonate in me. In deep unto deep, there’s a sense of resonance or a kind of recognition in the reverberations of the language.
That’s one thing. I think he had the—I don’t know what word to use for that. There’s a kind of purity that he had in how he used language.
The second thing that strikes me is that, for complicated reasons, he was accused of heresy. He was accused of pantheism—which is a complex issue in the Christian tradition in terms of the mystic and saying that everything is God. He was pointing out that those who accused him of that failed to understand the paradoxical subtlety of his language. He clearly was not saying that everything is God. To the contrary, he was bearing witness to our absolute nothingness without God. But it’s our absolute nothingness without God that makes our very presence to be the presence of God.
So, he held true to that subtle, paradoxical language. For political reasons and different reasons, there was a series of trials in which he was called to a series of defenses about his teachings. What strikes me about it is that you never get the feeling in him, one, that he backed down at all—he just held true to the subtle purity of what he felt impelled to say. But you never get any sense of bitterness in him. You never get any sense that, “I’m going to take my marbles and go home.” You never get a sense of reactive resentment. There was a kind of—I don’t know what—a kind of a freedom from it all and in the very midst of it. That really strikes me.
The third thing that strikes me is that this elegant fullness that Eckhart talks about—he keeps bearing witness to the fact that it is in no way whatsoever other than the concrete immediacy of the way we are in the present moment, just the way we are. Sometimes he’ll say in the sermon, “This unitive mystery that I’m talking about—you can experience it before you leave this church today.” Or he’ll say, “You may experience it before this sermon is over.” He’s always inviting us to come back to listen out of a very vulnerable place. He’s never talking about anything other than the virginal immediacy of the very moment in which we’re listening to what he’s saying. I would say those are the qualities that most strike me about him.
TS: Jim, one of the themes in the series that I think there’s a lot of confusion about is the idea of detachment—that detachment is an important spiritual principle. I’m wondering if you can help us understand Meister Eckhart’s teachings on detachment.
JF: I want to go back to the image I gave earlier about the circle of our soul, looking outward at the surrounding world, and all that comes into the senses. And then the smaller circle—the innermost center where the ground of God and the ground of the soul are one in the innermost depths. I also then want to compare this stuff to these moments of awareness, and I want to focus for a minute on intimacy with another person—like being deeply loved [by] and loving another person. It could also be a moment of prayer, a moment of death, a moment of service to the community, or a moment of poetic surrender.
The detachment would be this, I think: Let’s say in loving and deeply loving someone—you know, Gabriel Marcel says, “We know we love someone when we’ve glimpsed in them that which is too beautiful to die.” I think to deeply love and be loved [by] someone is to know that I cannot have closure in any thought I have about the beloved. That no idea about the beloved—that all of my ideas about the beloved are impoverished with respect to what I in my most intimate moments of communion with the beloved know the beloved to be.
That detachment is a kind of habit of constraint in not allowing me to fall into an ideology of the beloved—or I would conclude that any of my conclusions of the beloved are even capable of coming close to who the beloved is. I think that’s the essence of detachment. Detachment comes from having glimpsed such an overflowing fullness that we’ve learned not to have closure in the finite self’s finite perceptions of itself, others, or anything. That kind of obediential fidelity to that intimately realized fullness is that quality of detachment.
TS: So, how—once again, just to make this really practical in people’s lives—what would that mean in terms of being detached—let’s say—in your marriage or with your children? With the people closest to you?
JF: I’ll use an example from my own life right now. I’m 70 now. My wife’s 71. We’ve been really blessed. We’re like two hermits living at the edge of the sea together. It’s really quite wonderful. Growing older, we talk about the fleetingness of life and death, and so on.
In these conversations that we have—and sometimes, when I just kind of reflect upon it—it’s like a love that’s just too beautiful to die. It’s realizing there’s something deathless in the fleetingness of it all. To kind of live with the poignancy that in just three-and-a-half seconds, we’ll both have been dead a thousand years. And yet, in the very fleetingness of it, there’s a kind of deathless beauty that we intimately rest in, or celebrate and live in together. All the intimate details of the day-by-day.
The closer I would get to try to find words that would do justice to that, the more I find myself at the edge of what words are even capable of saying. To constantly renew my willingness to live at the edge of that vulnerability in the day-by-day interactions of all this—that’s detachment.
TS: Tell me what you mean by that—”living in that vulnerability.”
JF: To me, it’s like this, I think: It’s like the truth is—here is how I put it again using married love as the example—that the two are having a conversation. Back to two people who [have] loved each other for a long time very, very, very much.
She says to him, “You know, before we met I didn’t even know that love like this existed.” And he says to her, “Me either.” She says, “I suppose if we keep going on this way that it’ll get even deeper.” And he says, “Me too.” And then she says, “I wonder if we’ll ever get to a depth of love so deep that there’ll be no deeper depth of love beyond the depth of love that we’ve gotten to.”
That is, what she’s really asking is, “Is there an end to love? Will we ever get to the end of this?” When she asks that, she already knows the answer that she’ll never get to the end of it. They’ll never get to the end of it because love never ends. That’s the moment of freefall.
That is: In the moment, they mutually realize that together—for Eckhart—that’s the birth of the Word in the soul and breakthrough into the Godhead.
Here’s another way that I put it to get at this poetically with Eckhart: Say if you’re walking out at the edge of the ocean and you’re just ankle deep. It’s true you’re only ankle deep. But it’s true if you just keep going, it’ll get plenty deep soon enough—which is true. In relative consciousness or relative reality, there’s ever deeper degrees of the realization of the depths we’re entering into. That’s true enough.
But here’s what Eckhart is saying: What if the center of the ocean is infinitely deep? That is, it’s bottomless. It’s a bottomless abyss. What if the bottomless abyss of the infinite is infinitely giving the infinity itself away as each incremental degree of awakening to it?
In other words, if I think anyone would love someone—they’re family or anyone you love—you look back at the very first moment you met each other. In your kind of fumbling ways, how you were so unaware [of] what you were getting yourself into. The kind of awkwardness of love’s unawareness—how in hindsight love was taking perfectly good care of you. You were already in the depths of the fullness of it all, unbeknownst to you. Then you know no matter how ripe you get with all of this, it’s always like that. We will not live long enough to even begin to fathom in the fathomless depths of what unspeakably and unexplainably keeps giving itself away. In every moment of our life when we stand up and we sit down, it’s just utterly unspeakable.
I think that’s Eckhart. I think that’s why Eckhart—when he’s talking about the birth of the Word in the soul—he says, “The one who understands what I say about the just person understands everything I say.”
So, in our collective psyche for us today, if we think of Dr. Martin Luther King as the just person—and Eckhart would say, “If we really look at somebody like this, it’s that they have no life of their own. They have no life of their own. The just person completely gives [his or herself] to justice.” So that, Eckhart says, they become what justice is.
You get the feeling when you’re in their presence of somebody like this [that] there’s not an ego there that has attained something. [Rather], it’s an ego that’s lost everything. And in the loss of everything, you’re in the presence of someone who’s come upon what all life is about.
My sense of Eckhart is that he’s saying, “Find that act, find that person, or find that community, which when you give yourself over to it with your whole heart, it unravels your petty preoccupation with your self-absorbed self.” In doing so, [it] strangely brings you home to yourself. Everything is so strangely unexplainable—so unexplainably self-evident. That’s my feeling of—I guess—the tonal quality of Meister Eckhart.
TS: Jim, what would you say in your life you’ve been able to give yourself wholly to?
JF: Well, I guess we’re doing it right now with this conversation. How I put it is that it so amazes me—I came out of all this trauma at home and all of it, and I went to the monastery. In the monastery, I was completely taken unawares by all of this. We lived in silence. I didn’t talk for six years, basically. And the silence had a very profound effect on me. It’s hard to explain it, really.
When I would talk with Merton about this, he just so encouraged me to be faithful to this and to surrender myself to it. There’s just no words for it.
So when I left the monastery, I felt this call as much as ever to, “How can I live this way out here?” True monasteries create optimal conditions for the sweet surrender to the unexplainable. It’s true. But most of us are called to live it out here. Like, “How do I, in the ordinariness of myself, come upon the unbearable sweetness of my ordinariness in all my wayward ways?”
So, it’s meditation, prayer, studying the mystics in my daily life. Going through my own therapy and becoming a therapist and in my marriage. I feel that I am trying to do what you and I are doing right now—I try to share with people. I try to pass on what was passed on to me on silent retreats and in my writings. I try to be faithful to my wife and I by this kind of vulnerability with each other in this. And sitting with people in therapy. Just having a talk with somebody in a hallway. I feel I’m just always trying to be faithful to this.
TS: In the program, Jim—in the section where you’re teaching on Meister Eckhart’s view of detachment—you talk about this idea of “assuming the inner stance that has the least resistance.” I wonder if you could talk some about that. What’s the inner stance that has the least resistance?
JF: Yes, I think this is Eckhart’s insight into the nature of the path. Let’s go back for a minute and let’s say we’re talking about moments of awakening. These fleeting, spontaneous moments of serendipitously finding our way into this oneness—whether it be psychologically intense or very subtle. In the arms of the beloved, in solitude, or prayer. Whatever it is. The darkness of the night.
Then I return back to my customary state of being so habituated to the density and intensity of the finiteness of myself in relationship to the outer world.
So then I say, “Well, how can I then see what’s the path?” That is, what can I do here? How can I learn to live in a more daily, abiding awareness of the depths so fleetingly glimpsed? In my most childlike hour, there was this quickening—like these flashes of awareness.
I’m powerless to make these moments happen. I cannot make the moments of awakening happen. But I can freely choose to assume the inner stance that offers the least resistance to be overtaken by the grace to [that which] we cannot make happen.
It’s true—we cannot make it happen. But what we cannot make happen overtakes us in our inability to attain it.
So, this is meditation practice and this is vulnerability in love. Or this is the essence of healing and deep therapy. This is the poet and the pause between two lines of poem. The poet cannot make poetry happen, but the poet can assume an inner stance that offers the least resistance to the grace to then of poetry occurring. Lovers cannot make moments of oceanic oneness happen, but they can freely choose the inner stance that offers the least resistance to the grace of oceanic oneness happening. A person committed to healing cannot make healing happen, and so on.
This is practice. The essence of meditation practice—of all practices—is kind of a paradoxical activity of really choosing to assume an inner stance of sustained receptivity to what I cannot make happen—so that it can overtake me in my powerlessness to make it happen. It comes welling up unexplainably out of the sincerity of my vulnerability to it. Little by little by little, all life can become practice. That is, little by little by little I can learn to ripen or mature in this habituated stance.
So I live in a habitual underlying consciousness of this one thing that’s always happening—which is the infinite mystery is infinitely giving itself away as every breath and heartbeat. I can live in a visceral, underlying certainty in my heart that that’s true—that I can’t explain, but I know that it’s true.
TS: I know you teach Christian meditation retreats, contemplative weekends, and you’ve also created a series with Sounds True on Christian meditation. I’m curious if you [could] lead us in what you could call an “Eckhartian” meditation practice—a meditation practice that draws on the work of Meister Eckhart. Do you think that might be possible? Could you take us through something right here and now?
JF: Yes! Yes, I could do that. Yes, I could do that. My guidelines I use for meditation—which are very influenced by Eckhart. Other teachers too: John of the Cross, Cloud of Unknowing, Buddhism, and yoga—they’re sources that have come into this. But this is how it has formed in me as a practical way to meditate that has helped me.
The guidelines are—with respect to the body—to sit still, to sit straight, eyes closed or lowered toward the ground. Hands in a comfortable or meaningful position in our lap. Slow, deep, natural breathing.
And the guidelines for the mind are to be present, open, and awake. Neither clinging to nor rejecting anything.
And the guidelines for attitude are nonjudgmental compassion towards ourselves as we discover ourselves clinging to and rejecting everything. Nonjudgmental compassion towards others and their powerlessness—one with ours.
I would like to walk down through these guidelines for practice. So, when we sit in meditation, the authenticity is we bring our whole life to the practice—like, “Here I am, Lord.” Just bring our whole life to the practice. At one level, we sit still to quiet the mind—like we can learn from the body how to be. By sitting still, we can learn to be still. But in the stillness, we bear witness to ourselves and to the whole world that there’s no place to go. We sit still because there’s nowhere to go. If I can’t find it here, I won’t find it anywhere because everything I’m looking for is perfectly giving itself away as the concreteness of myself right here.
Also, this is the stillness of death. I’m here to die—to my dreaded and cherished illusions about myself. That I’m anything other than this generosity. So, I sit still with all my heart.
I sit straight in the sense in which the image I have of this is that a mother whose baby is crying finally goes to sleep. When she lays the baby down, she slides her hand out from under the baby, being very careful not to wake it up. But usually, when we’re alert, we’re tense—and when we are relaxed, we fall asleep. But we’re trying to be very awake and relaxed at the same time.
If I sit in meditation—if I’m sitting still and sitting straight—sometimes I’ll notice my head drooping forward as I get sleepy. In the straightness of my posture, I start to slump over. So, I’m to renew the straightness of my posture with the same carefulness with which the mother eases her hand out from under the sleeping baby. That is—I’m to renew the straightness of my posture without disrupting the heightened delicacy of the practice.
In myself, I think that a lot of what eludes us in meditation is it takes us a while to realize the intimate interiority of it—that it happens right there in something as intimate as the way in which we renew our posture.
We’ve closed our eyes or lowered our eyes to the ground so that, “Lord, that I might see.” Lord, that I might see. Lord, that I might see You and everything that I see. Lord, that I might see the infinity of Yourself giving itself away as everything that I see in this nothingness without you.
So, if I’m looking down at the palms of my hands—that I might see the infinity of Your generosity. In the palms of my hands, Lord, that I might see. Jesus said that “You have eyes to see and you do not see.” We rest our hands in our lap because this is Sabbath—that is, this is not a work achieved with human hands.
So I actively choose to rest in this wakefulness—this sustained stance that offers the least resistance to be overtaken by what I am powerless to attain.
Then there’s the breath. In the breath, God breathed into Adam the gift of life. God’s breathing into me, right now at this very moment—like mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. The God that is life itself. God is the infinity of the inhalation. When I exhale, I can exhale myself as a love-gift to the love that gives itself to me. In the reciprocity of the breath—sometimes I suggest to people [that] they take a word or phrase to use when they meditate. If we would take the words, “I love you,” then when we inhale, if we listen to God’s silent, “I love you,” which is the infinity of love giving itself away as the concreteness of our life.
Then taking that in when we exhale, I exhale myself as a love giving myself in love to the love that gives itself to me. So in the reciprocity of love, destiny is fulfilled. That’s the body-grounded foundations of meditation practice.
To be present, open, and awake—neither clinging to nor rejecting anything—when I sit like this in this unguarded vulnerability, thought arises. As I watch it, thought endures—like it goes in an arc—and then it passes away. And then a thought arises, thought endures, and then it passes away. So, sitting here, I’m not trying to stop thinking—which would just be the ego imposing itself upon itself. But I’m also to try to not think the thought that I’m thinking, because if I get thinking about the thoughts that I’m thinking, I’m not sitting there—I’m off in my thinking.
But I can watch thought arising. I can be aware of thought arising, thought enduring, and thought passing away. Now, the awareness of thinking is not thinking. So, the awareness of thinking is already the transcendence of thinking. This is very subtle. I can learn to patiently ground myself in this subtlety.
So too with feelings that arise and endure and pass away. So too with memories that arise and endure and pass away. So too with bodily sensations that arise and endure and pass away.
And I can sit in sustained receptivity to the arising, to the enduring, and the passing away, grounded in the awareness of the absolute nothingness of the thought that’s arising. In the awareness of its nothingness arising, I can become intimately aware that the thought arising is God. Completely giving yourself away to the totality of God; giving yourself away as the thought arising; giving yourself away as a thought enduring, as a thought passing away. And so with memory, so with feeling, so with my whole life.
I can unexplainably, unexpectedly come upon—in the vulnerability of practice—this unitive mystery that is itself all that God is and all that I really am, which is the unitive mystery Eckhart is attempting to lead us to.
Now, when I commit myself to such a practice, compassion—as I experience a lot of slippage because I see that I’m halfhearted or that I’m discouraged or that I’m whatever. I meet myself as I really am.
I watch two things happening when I meditate: One is I attack the very part of myself that needs to be loved the most—namely, that in me that’s the most inept at achieving what I’m sitting there to achieve. In that violence, I violate the great way.
Or I give up. I abandon myself.
I catch myself in the act of either perpetuating violence on the preciousness of myself and my fragility or I abandon it. So, I ask for the grace to neither invade nor abandon—to not attack myself for my ineptness nor to abandon myself in my ineptness. Rather, to surrender myself over to the infinite irrelevancy of my fragility in the face of the love that carries me along as infinitely loved and loveable—in the midst of the fragility itself.
This is then, the loss of all reference. This is freefall, I think. This is surrendering ourselves. That compassion is that love that recognizes and identifies of the preciousness of all that is lost and broken in ourselves and others. I think this is what Eckhart’s calling us to.
Then, when I look out at the world, I see that the whole world is this. Everyone’s walking around like me, hypnotized by attacking that in them that needs to be loved the most and by abandoning it. We inflict it on ourselves and upon each other.
So how to live in this world not cynical or jaded—not part of the violence nor part of the abandonment? How to keep our mind open and our heart open and our life open breath by breath in every interaction, and so on?
That’s my sense of it. Every day, when I practice my practice I ask for the grace not to break the thread of this childlike sincerity. I go about my day. I try to ground myself in that habituated state of the unspeakable holiness of every moment throughout the day. It’s slippage, slippage, slippage, slippage. And I come back the next day in this renewed rendezvous. I sit still, I sit straight. Slow, deep, natural breathing. I ground myself in my practice, and I try my best to live this way. A month later, two years later, 40 years later, I just find myself immensely grateful that I was led to follow this path.
I think, then, for me I find in the sermons of Meister Eckhart someone who did live this way to a very profound degree. I find that when he talks in his sermons, the depth of his integrity—his obediential fidelity to this—resonates with my call to live in obediential fidelity to this. This is the timeless lineage of this awakening that Eckhart calls us to.
TS: Now, Jim, I’m curious: If someone’s listening and has heard your references to this “childlike sincerity,” and what they notice in themselves is a gap—that that’s not really where they’re at. They want to be there, but that’s not where they are. They’re in an adult [mindset], somewhat holding back, wanting to be more sincere, but they’re not there. What would you say to them?
JF: I would say what I would say to a real person sitting before me now. So let’s say this is where the rubber hits the road, right here—where it’s a real person listening to this. These are the kinds of things that people say all the time on retreats and this is what I’ve said to myself many times.
Here’s the way I would say it: You know, when you hear something like this, you have to take in where you are with all this right now. You’re living your life and obviously something’s going on or you wouldn’t even be sitting here having this conversation, asking me about this. So something’s happening and you’re living your life and just much to be grateful for and all the richness of your life.
Let’s say you’re listening to this and you’re drawn to it. In being drawn to it, no sooner do you start that you notice this gap. Like you said, it sounds lovely when you say it. There’s a kind of poetic beauty in that. But as soon as I sit down, I just meet my customary self the way I am. I would ask them to describe to me what that was. I’d want them to tell me what that was—about their worries, about their day, or it’s usually things like that.
Then I would say, “Well, a good place to start might be this.” And sometimes when I model it for people, I’ll put it in the form of a prayer. So I would put it in the form of a prayer [and] I would put it this way: “Lord God, help me to begin to recognize Your presence in this gap. Because the gap is real, sure enough. I live with it every day. But I also sense down in the depths of the gap the stirrings of a possibility. And the possibility is the shimmering of something that draws me even to talk to You like this. Help me. Instead of being dismissive towards the gap—or instead of seeing the gap as a problem—help me to listen very, very deeply to the gap. Help me to lean into it in a kind of attentive vulnerability—to see what I might discover about myself as I listen to You like that in the midst of myself being the way I am.”
I would then ask them to respond [with] where they were with that. That’s what I would do.
TS: There’s a word that you’ve used several times in our conversation: “vulnerability.” I’m curious to know more [about] what that means to you. Like “leaning in with vulnerability.”
JF: I put it this way—I’ll use the image from therapy or just from life—about vulnerability. The image I use is to say a father puts his little girl up in the low branches of a tree. He reaches his arms up and he says, “Jump.” There’s a moment there of hesitancy like that, and then she jumps. When she jumps, let’s say—tragically—he steps aside, she hits the ground, and he laughs. That is: a child is very vulnerable.
But in the optimal conditions that every child deserves, they’re safe in their vulnerability because they have loving parents that watch over and take care of them until they learn to take care of themselves.
Now, we all have within ourselves our own history of intended and unintended slights in love—where we can live invisible in our own home, or we feel we’re not seen, or we don’t belong. It takes all kinds of forms. In that, we learn to be guarded. In a certain sense, we need to learn to be guarded.
But the trouble is [that] we learn to get so guarded, we lose faith in our right that we can be completely vulnerable and completely safe at the same time.
Now, sometimes we find this through a healing process. Sometimes we can find it in the friend—like the person with whom we can venture into this territory. Sometimes it can come in deep meditation—like long sitting [or] getting to a very, very, very vulnerable place. That is, it’s a place of unguardedness. In the complete unguardedness being unexplainably invincible in the vulnerability. That’s what I mean by that.
In other words, Thomas Merton says, “It is that in defining that in us that is not subject to the brutalities of our own will.” Nor is it subject to the brutalities of anybody else’s will. That is, I unexpectedly come upon within myself that which no one can do anything to destroy or diminish because it belongs completely to God. And I can’t destroy it either.
Once I find this—that is, once I taste it for myself—then I can learn to honor it. I can learn to ground myself in it habitually. I can learn to have inner peace—[an] inner way that is not dependent on the outcome of the situation. [After all,] no matter the outcome of the situation, I already know in my awakened heart that it’ll just be one variation of this one thing that’s always happening. It’s a presence that protects me from nothing, even as it unexplainably sustains me in all things. That’s what I mean by vulnerability.
TS: Jim, I just have one final question for you. You mentioned that you’re 70 years old. What I’m curious to know is here you’ve devoted your life to the life of the mystics, continuing their teachings, and to the life of spiritual direction, writing, teaching, and healing. I’m curious to know: At this point—at age 70—is there anything you feel is incomplete? Undone? That you have a sense of, “You know, I’m not ready to leave this Earth because this hasn’t been completed.”
JF: You know, the truth is I don’t—for this reason (in the light of the talk we’re having): I would say there is incompleteness. I’m working on this healing book for Sounds True and I did this thing with Eckhart. I’ve got some other thing like this. Different things I’m working on. Mystical sobriety. I always have these things that I’m working on.
I always have things about myself too. I feel have not yet been as completely vulnerable as I could be. I find myself with my leg sometimes having a hard time walking. I’m inclined not to use my cane out in public because I just don’t want to admit that I might need one.
[Laughs.] There’s all kinds of—a little repertoire of unfinished things.
But I don’t, because I would say in the light of this dialogue that we’ve had—I would say that, God, there is incompleteness. But God is the infinity of the incompleteness of myself. Because God is the completeness of my incompleteness, in some way I could die my sleep tonight. Really. I just feel everything’s so unexplainably complete in incompleteness that that’s how I feel.
But I also feel it’s true of everybody. The suffering rises just from varying degrees of realizing that.
How I experience it is this: Imagine we draw a line from left to right, like a curve in a trajectory toward the future. So we’re in our passage through time, growing older by the minute through our life, moving into the future. There’s this sense of incompleteness, real and imagined.
But the present moment—that trajectory through time is being intersected by the infinite depth dimension of a mystery that’s giving itself away as a virginal immediacy of every moment on that line—which is the moment right in this conversation we’re having right now.
In the zero variance of the infinite and the manifested immediacy of this present moment, that’s the one thing that’s always happening. So, in the light of that, there’s a sense that there is incompleteness, but I sense God’s infinity of incompleteness. So I see it. So I experience it.
TS: You have a quote from Meister Eckhart’s Living Wisdom: “When we die, we are not annihilated but consummated.” I thought that was beautiful.
JF: Yes. It is beautiful. Yes. It is beautiful.
See, that’s why I loved that phrase—Schürmann really quoting Eckhart: “See what is the joy that death does not have the power to destroy, and how might I discover it?” Then the great paradox for Eckhart is I discovered my dying—moment by moment by moment—to the illusion that anything real apart from the generosity that’s giving itself away is every moment of my life.
I share this story in Eckhart too: An image I use—a point to end on, maybe—is Eckhart is talking about a mirror. He says, “Imagine you’re looking at yourself in a full-length mirror.” I’ll paraphrase Eckhart. And he says, “Imagine this in each of yourself that you’re looking at in the mirror is conscious—that it’s a conscious reflecting image of you. Imagine this conscious image of you has been through a lot of therapy. It’s read a lot of self-help books. And it’s come to point that this image of you feels it no longer needs you. It kind of tells you it’s setting out on its own. You say to this image that you don’t think life will go well for it without you since it’s an image of you. But it refuses to hear [anything] of—it won’t hear anything about it. ‘You’re holding me back.’”
“So, to demonstrate your point, you step halfway off the side of the mirror and half the image disappears. It has panic attack. It has to go back into therapy. It says to the therapist, ‘I’m not real, I’m not real. I was trying so hard.’”
Now, the image is real—it just isn’t real the way it imagined it was real. Therefore, we are not in any way “real” other than the infinite generosity that’s completely giving itself away as the immediacy of our self and our nothingness without God. That’s the joy that death does not have the power to destroy. My sense of Eckhart is that’s really the intonations of his language that he’s trying to guide us toward. That deathless joy.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Jim Finley. Jim, I always enjoy speaking with you. It’s a special treat for me here at Sounds True. Thank you so much.
JF: Thank you, Tami. I always enjoy—it’s always great too when we talk like this. It’s a gift. Thank you once again.
TS: With Sounds True, Jim has created a new six-session audio learning series called Meister Eckhart’s Living Wisdom: Indestructible Joy and the Path of Letting Go. He’s also created a series of recordings on Christian Meditation: Entering the Mind of Christ, and an audio series on Thomas Merton’s Path to the Palace of Nowhere.
SoundsTrue.com. Many voices, one journey. Thanks for listening.
