Ordinary Mysteries, Extraordinary Grace: Insights into Unitive Contemplative Practice
Opening Minds, Opening Hearts Season 3 Episode 5
with Dr James Finley
Episode Title ~ Ordinary Mysteries, Extraordinary Grace:
Insights into Unitive Contemplative Practice
“The mercy of God is oceanic and boundaryless in all directions.
And when love touches suffering, the suffering turns love into mercy.”
- Dr James Finley
These conversations with our guests this season have been a profound privilege and truly humbling experience. Together, Colleen and Mark have embraced the role of students, exploring contemplative practice and meditation from diverse perspectives, and our guest in this episode is offering us some profound insights into the wisdom of the mystics within the Christian perspective.
We are honored to ‘sit at the feet’ of Dr James Finley, a student of Thomas Merton and also a clinical psychologist. Jim teaches how connecting to our divine indwelling can transcend fear and shame, and awaken us to our true self. He is a faculty member at the Center of Action and Contemplation.
Jim has authored numerous books, including Merton's Palace of Nowhere, The Contemplative Heart, The Healing Path and Christian Meditation. He also co-hosts, with Kirsten Oates, the Center for Action and Contemplation's podcast, Turning to the Mystics.
Join us in exploring the way contemplative practices, particularly within the Christian mystical tradition, opens us up to a unitive experience of God's presence in all aspects of life, transforming both suffering and the ordinary into expressions of extraordinary grace.
- Unitive Experience and Mystical Interconnectedness: Jim emphasized the interconnectedness of all existence with the divine. This unity transcends dualistic thinking, fostering an experience where God's presence permeates everything, even the mundane.
- Mystical Christianity and Interspirituality: Drawing from Christian mysticism and other spiritual traditions, the discussion highlighted the universal aspects of contemplation. It bridges insights from mystics like Thomas Merton and practices like Centering Prayer, showing parallels with other mystical paths such as Zen or Sufi traditions.
- Contemplative Practices as Transformative Pathways: The conversation delved into the transformative potential of contemplative practices. Practices like Centering Prayer help us experience God in the immediacy of each moment, cultivating inner stillness and awakening to divine love.
- Spiritual Growth through Vulnerability and Surrender: We acknowledged the human tendency to resist vulnerability and the unknown, which are essential to deep spiritual growth. And touched on embracing our brokenness as part of the journey toward divine intimacy.
- God’s Presence in Suffering and Ordinary Life: Jim articulated a theology of God’s sustaining presence amid suffering, emphasizing that divine grace can be found in ordinary moments and life’s struggles.
“The contemplative path is the way to abide in the divinity of every moment, every breath you take. It’s about learning to die of love at the hands of love until nothing is left of you but love.”
- Dr James Finley
To learn more about the founding theological principles of Contemplative Outreach, visit www.contemplativeoutreach.org/vision
- On the Center for Action and Contemplation website: https://cac.org
- We recommend, if you have not already, that you tune into the presently ten seasosn of the Turning to the Mystics podcast available where you find other podcasts or directly at the CAC website.
- Visit our website: www.contemplativeoutreach.org
- Find us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/prayerofconsent/
- Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/prayerofconsent
- Check out our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@prayerofconsent
Season 3 of Opening Minds, Opening Hearts was made possible by donors like you from the community that is Contemplative Outreach and also a grant from the Trust for the Meditation Process a charitable foundation encouraging meditation, mindfulness and contemplative prayer.
This episode of Opening Minds, Opening Hearts is produced by Rachael Sanya 👉🏽 www.rachelsanya.comOpening Minds, Opening Hearts Podcast Season 3 Episode 5 with Dr. James Finley Episode Title - Ordinary Mysteries, Extraordinary Grace: Insights into Unitive Contemplative Practice Mark: Welcome everyone. Colleen: Hi, Mark. Mark: To season three. Hello, Colleen. Colleen: And hi, everyone. Mark: It's good to be together again, for another episode. Colleen: It is we are swimming in these deep waters and I'm loving this season. I think ever since I was a child, learning and being able to have space for my curiosity is what is most life-giving for me. And I feel like in a lot of ways, this season is all about that. Mark: We've had some wonderful guests already, and we have a wonderful guest today too and really exploring contemplation and meditation from different perspectives, not only different religious perspectives but as we'll hear today even within the Christian perspective, bringing in the wisdom of the mystics and language that some of us are not so familiar with, even if we've grown up Christian. I'm excited about diving in that way too, in terms of the depth of those teachings. Colleen: It adds breadth to the Christian experience to be hearing from Sufis and Buddhists and seeing what Father Thomas experienced in these dialogues at Snowmass where the opening of our awareness to the commonalities across traditions– it deepens my own experience of my Christian faith. It's been a delight and, I'm super excited about today in particular. Mark: I am, too, so shall we get to it? Colleen: Let's get to it. Mark: Yeah, I am happy to introduce our listeners to James Finley, a student of Thomas Merton and also a clinical psychologist. Dr. James Finley teaches how connecting to our divine indwelling can transcend fear and shame and awaken us to our true self. Jim is a faculty member at the Center of Action and Contemplation. He's the author of many books, including Merton's Palace of Nowhere, The Contemplative Heart, and Christian Meditation. Jim is also the host of the Center for Action and Contemplation's podcast, Turning to the Mystics. Jim, both Colleen and I have appreciated the work that you've done for several years. So it's a real delight to have you here with us today. Welcome. Jim: Yes, I'm so glad we can be together. Colleen: Yes. it's so good to see you. I'd like to mention that before Jim was a faculty member at CAC, he was a faculty member at a small spiritual direction training program in Los Angeles that I attended at Mount St. Mary's Spirituality Center there, and you've been so formative in my spiritual journey. You used to tell us, and you still do say this, find a teacher, find your teacher. In many ways, you were and still are my first teacher. So it's really great to be with you in this setting, and grateful that you're able to spend some time with us. Jim, we're grounding all of these episodes in inviting our guests first to share a bit about their own faith tradition, but in the context of what Father Thomas Keating termed the Ultimate Reality. And this term grew out of these interspiritual dialogues that he would have at Snowmass over the course of 20-something years. So I'm curious if maybe a way that you can get us started into this conversation is to share a bit about how you might describe or how the mystics might describe this Ultimate Reality. And even setting that into the context of just this overall worldview of the Christian Contemplative Tradition and how that shapes this understanding of Ultimate Reality. Jim: Yes. I think what I find helpful, is I want to share with you several poetic images to convey this. Because it’s non-linear, it's not explanatory. You can't define it, but you can poetically bear witness to it. And the spiritual worldview, the timeless wisdom of contemplative Christianity, is also in concert with the timeless wisdom of the mystical traditions of all the world's great religions. But I'm going to be speaking here mainly in the mother tongue of my own Christian faith of mystical Catholicism, the mystical tradition. So Father Thomas Keating was steeped in this, and he drew his teaching from the anonymously written classic, The Cloud of Unknowing, and he's bringing it and making it available for us today. So when I was in the monastery, under the guise of Thomas Merton, he also embodied this lineage. And he led me into these classical texts of the mystics, which has had a deep effect on me. So I would like to share some images of this, because– see the question about Centering Prayer is, what's the inner logic of praying that way? What's the context in which it finds its meaning? It has to do with this worldview of the mystics. So I'd like to share a series of poetic images of this and we'll see where it takes us. Colleen: Yes. Jim: Okay. The first is that, I was really struck when I entered the monastery. I entered right after high school, it was 1961 and Thomas Merton was novice master. Then he would give talks to the novices. He'd give talks on creation, the mystery of creation. “In the beginning, God said let there be light,” and so on. I was just struck by this, that creation is perpetual and absolute. And that's what I'd like to reflect on first. The creation, it isn't just that when God said, let there be light and let there be stones and trees and stars. That God gave reality an initial push, walked off and let the universe get by on its own as best it can. The creation is going on; we're being created right now. And that's what I'd like to reflect on first. The poetic image is this, here's what helps me to see it is - that ultimately speaking, just one thing is happening. The infinite presence of God is presencing itself. That is, it's pouring itself out and giving itself away whole and complete in and as the intimate immediacy of the gift and the miracle of our presence, the presence of others, and the presence of all things in our communal nothingness without God. So it isn't that we are God, matter of fact it's our absolute nothingness without God. But it's a very nothingness without God that makes our presence to be the presence of God. That, if you have another image would be - if you're holding a stone in your hand. It's the infinite presence of God is the presence of that stone. And it's nothingness without God. In ego consciousness, we don't see this. But in meditative states, we're quickened by it. St. John of the Cross, he talks about walking alone in the mountains. He said at first, because of possessiveness of heart, we can try to own it or possess it like real estate. He said we get a little deeper. We realize that the Beloved has passed this way in haste. We see traces of the Beloved in the mountains, and at the end he says My Beloved is the mountain. That the world is God's body, and it is bodying forth the love that's uttering it into being. That's the image of it. There's another way of saying this also, about it being absolute. Is that if God, this ongoing self-donating act, the infinite presence of God is presencing itself as the gift in the miracle of my presence. If at the count of three God would cease pouring the infinity of God out as my very reality and my nothingness without God, at the count of three, I would disappear. Because I'm nothing, I'm absolutely nothing outside of Him. It isn't as if I sure hope God helps me give this talk. I'll get by. I'll muddle through. If God doesn't pour himself out as a reality of me giving this talk, no talk, no Jim Finley. We're not used to thinking like. If anyone listening to this, if God would cease loving you into the present moment you're listening to at the count of three, you'd disappear. If God would cease loving the whole universe into existence at the count of three, the universe would disappear. We're not used to thinking like this. We have this idea everything just goes along on its own, like this. So this is a stunning kind of thing about the God-given godly nature of reality. Jesus says in the Gospels, he said, “You have eyes to see and you do not see.” There's your God-given capacity to see the God-given godly nature of yourself and your nothingness without God, and you don't see it. This is the source of all your fear. This is the source of all your confusion. This is the source of all the traumatizing things you do to yourselves, to each other, and to the earth. And so our prayer is, “Lord that I might see.” What if we would close our eyes right now, or with our eyes closed, be interiorly awakened so that when we opened our eyes, we'd see through our own awakened eyes what Jesus saw and all that he saw. What would we see? We'd see God. Because Jesus saw God in all that he saw. And what's so stunning about it, too, when you prayerfully sit with the Gospels, it didn't matter whether Jesus saw his mother or a prostitute. It didn't matter whether Jesus saw the joy of those gathered at a wedding or the sorrow of those gathered at the burial of a loved one. It didn't matter whether Jesus saw his disciples or his executioners, or a flower or a bird. Jesus saw God in all that he saw. Lord, that I might see through my own awakened eyes the divinity of myself, others and all things. And so this then is like a deep contemplative understanding of the mystery of creation and of ourselves. And so this is true of all of nature. Now for us as persons, see this is true of stones and trees and stars and the rivers of the world, the oceans, but we're created as persons. We're created by God in the image and likeness of God. We're created by God in the capacity to realize this. And we're created by God to realize the divinity of ourself in all things. And then to say yes to it, because love is always offered, it's never imposed. And so here's another meditation then on this poetic understanding of this mystical worldview of identity - for Thomas Merton, the true self, the ultimate identity. And this is from, I studied medieval philosophy under Dan Walsh at the monastery. This is the Franciscan school of Duns Scotus and Bonaventure, Augustine. So this is a poetic creation. That before creation, there was no capacity for love in God. Because God is actus purissimus; God's the overflowing infinity of love itself. If you have a glass on a table and you're pouring water in the glass and it's overflowing, there's no capacity for water in the glass, it's full. And so in the need for God to give himself, to give the infinity of himself away, God creates a capax dei. God creates the capacity to receive the infinity of God, and that's you. That's your true self. You're created in a generosity of the infinite is infinite, and you are the generosity of God. You are the song God sings. This is your identity. It's a trans-subjective communion with God. And then God makes it real. And this is in God from all of eternity, hidden with Christ and God forever before the origins of the universe. From all eternity, this is like God's dream for you contemplating. So when he created you like, let there be you, let there be me, God didn't have to think up who I might be to create me when I was born, created, conceived. From all eternity, God the Father eternally contemplated me in the Word. And since everything in God is God, this is the divinity of me. This is the unborn me, because God has never not known who I infinitely am as a capacity for God. And the me that was never born is the me that will never die. This is the person that I am. But it needs to be lived. It's a capacity. And so, when God says, let there be Jim Finley on my birthday, here I am. God then makes this real by giving me a nature to make me real in time and space in the world. And my nature in one sense, it's a rational nature, it's a reason, which is science and culture. But the deepest thing about the nature is the capacity to recognize the person. So in the story of the garden, the mythic story of the garden, their nature was translucent with divinity. They were created by God in the image and likeness of God, and it shined this way. The mystery of the fall is trying to be like God without God and that's the fall because there's no such thing as a self without God. So in a certain way, all these mystical traditions teach we're still trapped in that wounded. In ego-consciousness we don't see the divinity of our self. We don't experientially realize this divinity this way, and this is the law of faith. So this is the gift of faith in Jesus, the revelation that God's response to us in our wayward ways, our confusion is to become identified with us as precious in the midst of our wayward ways. And the word became flesh and brought among us. Then through the gift of faith, when I hear that God loves me, through the power of the Spirit who dwells in my heart, I experientially know God does love me. This is my discipleship. I walk this earth this way as an infinitely loved broken person. And the acceptance of my brokenness is the preciousness of myself. So we're in this sense of God where this is faith. It's an obscure certainty. We're a primitive inner assurance ourselves said, but it's veiled. See, it's veiled. So it's veiled in the mind as insights of God, and it's veiled in the memory as being touched by our own story of awakening and the path of sacred history. And it's veiled in the will our aspirations to be more Christ-like, to be more loving, and so on. Veiled. But when we die and pass through the veil of death, it'll be unveiled in glory. So it's infinitely true now but veiled. But when we die, it'll be unveiled forever. Now here's where mystics come in. In The Cloud of Unknowing, in the first chapter, he sees that there are four phases of Christian life. There's the common life, which is your religion, is cultural, or it gives you moral guidelines or it gives you a way of belonging. The special way is God becomes personally real to you, like devotional sincerity. So when Jesus says, follow me, we ask Jesus, help me to follow you. We follow in faith, this efficacious unto holiness. And then when we die, this oneness with God and devotional sincerity and unveiled in glory. But what happens is that for some people, living this Christian life, this devotional life– and by the way, in this phase, prayer, our daily rendezvous with God, is Lectio Divina, discursive meditation, and prayer. So in Lectio, I sit in a quiet place, say I open the scriptures. And Jesus says, fear not, I'm with you always. So in faith I believe that the deathless presence of Jesus is personally telling me right now not to be afraid because God's with me. And so Lectio Divina is sustained attentiveness infused with love. The meditation, God says, I spoke to you, now you talk to me, what do you think? This is where you might journal it out. About fear and about love, and you have to sign off on it. And the prayer is from the heart, help me with this. You have your daily rendezvous with God, you're living your daily life, you have your life, I have mine. But The Cloud of Unknowing says this is a little foreword to The Cloud of Unknowing. “In the midst of this, there's an awakening event. In the awakening event,” he says,” there's a blind stirring of love in your inmost being, stirring you to love.” He says, “I'm not saying you experience this all the time, the way experienced contemplatives do, but now and again, you taste something of contemplative love in the very foundations of your being.” And so this is the quickening that happens. And I think everyone has these moments. Thomas Merton gives examples of these. Sometimes in the midst of nature, he says, we're out walking, we turn to see a flock of birds descending, and as if out of the corner of our eye, we catch something in their descent that's primordial, vast, and true. We sense that life already is unexplainably sacred. Sometimes it's in the arms of the beloved. It washes over us like the sacredness of life. Sometimes it comes in reading a child a good night's story. You know that in the presence of the child, you're in the presence of God, we're quickened with this touch. I think this comes to all. Sometimes it comes to us in suffering also, sitting at the deathbed of a dying loved one, the touch can happen. So I think from time to time we're blessed with it, but what happens with some people is the desire to abide in the death so fleetingly glimpsed. Longing. And this is the contemplative path. It's a charism. See? I will not abandon my awakened heart in my most childlike hour, in my hour of love, my hour of loss, the quiet hour at day's end, the quiet afternoon in an art museum, sitting between two lines of a poem that touches me. I was quickened. And having tasted the oneness, I will not play the cynic. I will not doubt it. And I also know, I intuit, it isn't as if in these precious little moments, sometimes these awakening moments are very intense really, in the aftermath of which you're never the same. Sometimes when quite young they can start, where you're quickened. But there comes to be, having tasted the oneness. It's a God-given desire to abide in the oneness, and that's the path, not everyone feels that. It's a charism. So the author of The Cloud of Unknowing says, insofar as you understand what I'm saying, this book's just for you. Because I'm gonna tell you how. What's the path by which you can abide in the divinity of every moment, every breath you take? Merton says it beats in our very blood whether we want it to or not. This is the teaching, in a way. This is the felt sense of thing. Where Centering Prayer takes on its meaning, we can start to see the inner logic of what Centering Prayer is. And this is also true of the Jesus prayer, the way of a pilgrim use of a word, and it's also strikingly resonating with Zen meditation, deep yoga, namaste, I am that, the Sufi way of Rumi and Atheist and so on. So you see these resonances of these mystical unitive state. You taste the unitive state. You know the fleeting taste was a fleeting taste, so it's always there. And so what is the path along which I can be habitually established in this ultimacy of the divinity of every breath I take? And that's the teacher. See, to find your teacher. And so the author of The Cloud of Unknowing is a mystic teacher. He's someone who abides in it. And he said, let me offer a way for you. And then that's what it is. And so, here then is the logic. I want to give one more poetic image of this too before I do prayer itself. In the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu, he said, that the Dao is the interior flowing divinity of reality itself, the Dao. He said, the Dao is like water. It seeks the lowest places to give life to all that lives. And so the grace of God pours itself out and gives itself. We live in incremental realizations of infinite generosity. So the infinite generosity of God, there's nothing incremental about it. Infinity is infinitely giving itself away as every grain of sand, every leaf on every tree. Standing up and sitting down, it's the generosity of divinity being poured out. What's incremental are the degrees to which we're aware of it. A lot of times we're not aware of it at all. I'm already late for the next meeting, the cell phone goes off, you know what it's like. But now and again, we get a touch. We look up at the face of the beloved walking into the room, where we smell a flower, where we see a child running up the street. Or, you're lying awake in the dark at night listening to your breathing and you're touched by it, once in a while. And then being touched by it, how can I then seek to abide in this? And this is the path of the seeker. And here's the seeker's dilemma. I want to give an example of this. I want to choose nature. It could be intimacy, it could be solitude, it could be silence, it could be poetry, it could be service, whatever. I'm going to choose nature. Let's say you're driving home at the end of the workday and the sun is setting. And you don't make much of it, it sets every night. But this night the sun is particularly eloquent. And so you take the car off to the side of the road, you get out, you go down a little embankment and you sit there. And you give yourself over to the beauty of the setting sun giving itself over to you. That's the moment. I'd like to make some observations about this moment. First of all, it's a moment of heightened awareness. It's not lethargic or dull. It's vivid. But also notice this, you're not thinking. You may be thinking about sunsets. But none of your thoughts about sunsets measures up to the richness of this heightened awareness beyond thinking. And the thinking you and all that it thinks is being transcended. Likewise, you sit there. It isn't as if you know it's called a sunset, because when you were little your mother or father told you what it was called. It's not an act of memory, because it's virginal. From the beginnings of the universe till now, the sun has never set before tonight. And through all the eons to come, it'll never set again. It's the virginal newness of now, and so the remembering you and all that it remembers is being transcended. And the desiring you is this, it does not lie within your power, to be able to explain this fullness. It's beyond you. Therefore, the desiring you and all that you desire is being transcended. And also notice it's very sensual. It is so sensual. But if you turn to be gratified by it, you fall out of the richness of it. You have to somehow keep surrendering yourself over to the flow of the spirituality of sensuality, like the divinity of the embodiment of God. You get back in your car, you drive home, you stop and get groceries. And you're standing in your own kitchen. You get the mail, take out the garbage, and you're going through the mail throwing the bills out, and you remember the moment with the setting sun and you ask yourself this question - this is the seeker's question - Why do I spend so many of my waking hours trapped on the outer circumference of the inner richness of the life that I'm living? Why does the centrifugal force of the days demands send me spinning out to the edge of this oneness that alone is real? I'm not at home in my own home. How can I? And that's the seekers question. And so all these mystic teachers, John of the Cross, Cloud of Unknowing, Teresa of Avila, Julian of Norwich they're lineage holders who offer us guidelines to know how do we consummate this longing, which is really an echo of God's longing for us, because God's infinitely in love with us, and in the reciprocity of the longing, destiny is fulfilled. How do I go about this? So now the prayer is not Lectio Divina, meditation, and prayer. You still do that, but now it takes a different form. So here's the logic. Yes, The Cloud of Unknowing says what you do is you sit still, remind yourself you're in the presence of God all about you and within you, closer to you than you are to yourself, St. Augustine said. And you take a word - a simple word is better than a long one - so your word might be love or mercy or yes, or help, or might be afraid. And you sit, and here's how the practice works. You sit this way with your word. And by the way, for The Cloud of Unknowing too, you use the word as needed. See, if you're sitting a kind of open, empty, childlike attentiveness, you sit in it. The moment you get carried off by a thought, you use your word, like Jesus. You center back again. So you sit there like this. Here's the practice, and you notice the thoughts arise and fall off to the edges of your mind. They're rising and falling. The key is not to think about the thoughts that are arising. Because if you do, thought will carry you off, and you'll be in thought again. What you do is you quietly sit there, and Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. We often have to say, you sit there, a thought comes into a room and says something to you like, I wonder if this is real, or how do you know you're not misguided, or how do you, not get into a discussion with a thought. It'll seduce you again and you'll be thinking again. So what you do is you turn to the thought and say Jesus. And the you that has thoughts and the you that is thoughts dies in the emptiness in which you wait for God. Also, you'll notice that memories arise in your mind, all kinds of painful memories, happy memories off to the side. Do not get carried off by a memory, a coup de tat carries you off again. What you do is you turn to the memory Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, and by the grace of God you keep returning back to the virginal immediacy of this longing, and the remembering you and all that it remembers dies in the emptiness in which you wait for God, the sinking you and all that it sinks is dying in the emptiness in which you wait. How can you learn to die of love at the hands of love until nothing's left of you but love? That's your agenda. That's what you're doing. And the ordinariness of yourself, you're still just you, with all you're crazy, I'm crazy, we're all crazy. We're all trying to get through another day. What's so amazing about it is it washes over us in the ordinariness of ourselves. Also you'll notice desires arising, longing. You wish this didn't take so long. Or you wish you could not be distracted so much. Always wishing for something. Your wishings, the desiring self is always desiring something. Notice the desires arising and falling, but do not get carried off by desire. Turn to every desire Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. And the desiring you and all that it desires dies in the emptiness in which you wait for God. Mid-roll meditation… And you sit that way, and at the end of the rendezvous, you ask God for the grace not to break the thread of that as you go through the day. And you'll notice that it breaks many times actually, but now you're aware that it breaks. But what happens in a mystical experience, in the blind stirring of love, is different. Here's my poetic image. You're sitting there in the presence of God all about you and within you, and God beyond you, like a shooting star, passes right through the interiority of yourself into the hidden place of God's oneness within you and simultaneously, the God's presence within you, like a shooting star. It shines out to the interiority of yourself and to God beyond you, and you're transfixed within you and God beyond you as if there's no between. But just divinity in all directions and you and God mutually disappear as dualistically other than each other. And so what happens, The Cloud of Unknowing says, so what happens with this, really, is that this is longing because he calls this the singular way. He said you live now because it's the imperative of your awakened heart. See, that which is essential never imposes itself, and what's essential is infinite love, is what's essential. What's unessential is constantly imposing itself. That which is endlessly passing away, it carries along the ego self that itself is passing away. But by the imperative of the awakened heart, we can choose to keep re-grounding ourself in the eternality of each passing moment of our life, and it becomes the imperative of your heart, I must do it. It's like an inner integrity, I can't explain it, but unless I'm faithful to this empty-handed poverty in the presence of God, I will not be calm with God's grace so I know deep down I really am and God's calling me to be. And this is the singular way. And he says the singular way, this is an important step. It's an echo of the perfect way, which is eternal life, which is heaven. And then, this is what's so stunning about these mystics, The Cloud of Unknowing says, the first three, the common way, the special way, and the singular way, they begin and they end here. The perfect way is eternal. But here's the thing about it. The perfect way that is eternal has already begun in you. So even though you're not dead yet, you're dying to everything less than God. Here's the other way that I put it. Imagine you and God are praying, you're in this state of devotional sincerity. I'm going to be God now, I'm talking. I'll be God. Mark: We think that as well. Jim: Yes. There you go. It feels so natural for me to be God. It feels right. It just suits me. For all of us, actually, to tell you the truth. I'll be God talking. “Isn't it wonderful how you and I are becoming so one with each other? I've always been one with you, but you've not nearly been so one with me. And I hope this is as good for you as it is for me because I'm into you. Actually, we're an item. And this is so wonderful. But invite you to notice something, please. Notice that you're giving yourself over to me on your terms. That is, you're giving yourself over to me and your beliefs about me and your aspirations and your inspirations and your understandings, and your ministry,” and he said, “and it's wonderful.” I said, I understand that. I created it. I get it. Seriously. But understand something very, very soon now it's not going to be like this, because very soon now you're going to be dead, and for all of eternity we'll be one with each other on my terms, and I can hardly wait to see the look of surprise on your face. Seriously, you don't have a clue. And so I want to make you an offer, and there's no commitment to take this offer, it won't affect anything at all. How would you like to not wait until you're dead to be one with me on my terms? And before you answer, I owe it to you to tell you two things. You can't do it. The survival instinct is too strong. But I'll personally see to it that your life will become unmanageable. I won't let you down, see. That nothing less than an infinite union with me will put to rest the restless longings of your heart. I will see to it this way, so what do you think? And you go, “Well, I'll get back to you.” But here's the thing. It's already too late, it's already started. Something infinitely bigger than you is infinitely willing up and giving itself to you in the simplicity of your sincerity. And it's your calling, it's a charism in the world. Thomas Merton once said in the monastery, “There are certain things we simply have to accept as true where we go crazy inside, and they're the very things we can't explain to anybody, including ourselves.” That's a great saying. Merton said that to understand with God, in the presence of God, to understand is to realize that you're infinitely understood. Dan Walsh, teaching medieval metaphysical philosophy said, “I know it, I know that I know it. But the thing is, it's I who know that I know it. When I try to tell you what it is that I know, I don't know what to say.” John of the Cross says to have no light to guide you except the one that burns in your heart. And sit then in this; this is the inner logic of the prayer. So the thinking you and all that it thinks is being transcended in love. The remembering you and all that it remembers is transcended because you're not in time anymore. This is why if you're deeply in a deep meditative state, you have to look at your wristwatch at the end because you weren't in time. You were in the eternality. That which never passes away, that flows through everything, endlessly passing away. It's so mysterious, really. And in your desire, you realize that you're brought to the precipice of a longing that you're powerless to fulfill. Then the infinite love of God fulfills that union in you that you're powerless. We can't attain it, but it attains us in the deep acceptance of our powerlessness to attain it. And that's the gift of tears. The gift of tears that we’re caught up and carried along by that which we're powerless to attain, which is our destiny. So there's a critical text here I'd like to read. It's in The Cloud of Unknowing, and this is chapter, thirty-eight, and I use the William Johnston translation of the cloud, it's the one that I'm used to. So here's this little prayer then, here's the word, it's very subtle. “Why do you suppose that this little prayer, a one syllable is powerful enough to pierce the heaven? Well, it is because it is the prayer of a person's whole being. A person who prays like this, prays with the height, the depth, the length, and the breadth of his spirit. His prayer is high, for he prays in the full power of his spirit. It is deep, for he has gathered all his understanding into this one little word. It is long, for if this feeling could endure, he would go on crying out forever as he does now. It is wide, because of the universal concern he desires for everyone what he desires for himself. It is with this prayer that a person comes to understand with all the saints the length, the breadth, the height, and the depth of the eternal, gracious, almighty, and omniscient God, as St. Paul says. Not completely, of course. But partially, in that obscure manner, characteristic of contemplative knowledge, length speaks of God's eternity.” And here's the insight, I cry out this longing, Jesus longing, if I could, I could cry out forever. But my longing would cry out forever, merges and becomes non-distinct from the eternality of God. It's an infinite longing for me. It's this divinization of myself and my nothingness without God, and it is wide because I desire for everyone what I desire for myself. But my desire merges with God's oceanic desire that everyone's invited to the kingdom, and the breadth of my desire is nondistinct from the boundaryless breadth of God. And so it's, so high you can't get over it. It's so low you can't get under it, so wide, you can't get around it. This is a word of the law. And you realize it's the trans subjective reality of yourself and you're nothingness without God. And the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, just when we're sitting in prayer, ratted in earnest, but all through the day we're at it playfully, and what you can start to happen is it shows up as if out of the corner of your eye throughout the day. Something as simple as pouring a cup of tea while wiping down the kitchen counter. Something as simple as the view out your kitchen window. Something as simple as listening to someone who says, Do you have a minute? Sure, what is it? And you realize, it's this one thing that's always going on, and that's how Jesus lived. Jesus lived in the constancy of incarnate infinity, incarnate in the immediacy of the mystery of being alive and real in the world. So I think this is spiritual worldview, the timeless wisdom of contemplative Christianity. And the prayer then, the inner logic of the prayer, provides a practical experiential way to pass beyond the claustrophobic world of sequential time into this eternality that transcends and permeates time itself. And so that's my sense of it, for me. Colleen: Just, in that last sentence that reminds me of this, what Keating says, that God is more like a verb, ‘is-ing’ all the time and inviting us to ‘is’. This deep sense of always being on the way. It's like everything we wanted to talk with you about, you covered. But I'm sure there's so much to which you've shared. And Mark, I was looking at a section that I know you had, I don't know if you want to jump in here too, because there's also all of what you were inviting us to hold with your illustrations with regards to this invitation and the invitation on God's terms here. Not our own terms. Mark: Yeah, there was so much you said Jim, that it just has me want to soak it in, absorb it. There was one thing when you were talking about, giving yourself over on your terms, which you're referring to Colleen also. It reminded me of a piece from Keating in Reflections of the Unknowable, when he says we need to distinguish carefully the no-self that is God made and the no-self that is self-made. Jim: Yes, that's true. Mark: The whole quote is, “to be the servant of God is to be willing to accept God's invitation on God's terms. This amazing proposal may seem intolerable to human pride and a misuse of the extraordinary creativity we have received. And so we need to distinguish.” I guess that stuck out for me because that's my struggle. I think I'm doing great, but I'm doing it at all, you know. Jim: I hear you. You know, the thing that touches me often like the intimacy of it. Let's say I'm sitting for my rendezvous with God and let's say there's my racing mind and I keep getting carried off by my racing mind. And here's the thing. I catch myself attributing substance to my racing mind instead of God being infinitely in love with me in the midst of my racing mind. And my need, every time I slip away, every time I fall, here's another image I use for this. Sometimes when we hear this kind of mystical language, the image I use - it’s like an Olympic high jumper, like how high can you jump over the bar? But the bar seems so high, how can I do this? We keep exhausting ourself, but I keep, I'm so half-hearted, I'm so distracted, we can't get past the ordinariness of ourself. But what happens in the midst of it? Is in the midst of the inability to jump over the bar of this divinity, God steps out and does a surprising thing. God takes a bar and places it flat on the ground. Approaching the bar, perplexed by the simplicity of the task, we trip over it and fall into God's arms. And that's the gift of tears. It isn't that I couldn't achieve it, but rather, that I didn't realize what Jesus called the Pearl of Great Price. It's infinite love of God achieving itself in me, not in spite of, but in the midst of my frailty itself. It's like the good thief dying with Jesus on the cross, remember me when you come into your kingdom. Jesus didn't say well, it all depends we need to go down a checklist here. He just says, this day you'll be with me in paradise. Father, forgive them, they know not what they do. Said the mercy of God is oceanic and boundaryless in all directions. And when love touches suffering, the suffering turns love into mercy. And it really, the prayer of the heart, the prayer of the Qadhaf, is mercy. Really, this is mercy of God on all of us. Colleen: Yeah. I'm actually really drawn to this different awareness I have. I often am inclined to think of non-duality as a concept and listening to you, it's an invitation to a way of being in relationship. And when you say that there's this God-given desire to abide in the oneness. And I'm holding that in context with the way you talk about practice as awakening to a capacity for this infinite and, it's like this– the container needing to be empty, and yet our instinct always to fill it with so much. Jim: Exactly. Here's an image that helps me with it. An image from marital love. Imagine two people in a moment of marital union, and they say to each other in the moment of union, we are one. But notice that in being one, they don't cease to be two. But they don't live by the twoness, they live by the oneness that gives meaning to everything they are doing. Because the non-dual is not dualistically other than the dual, it's the infinite ground of the dual. We all know oneness, that we all have these moments in silence, or solitude, or art, or love. I know the saying by Zen Master Dogen always helps me with this. He said, when one side is light, the other side is dark. So if I'm in the mind of otherness, everyone and everything around me is other than me, including God. But if I'm in a deep meditative…And by the way, if I'm in the mind of otherness, no matter what comes over the horizon next, it'll be one more thing that's other than me. But if I'm in a deep meditative mind of oneness, every, all is one. It's an all-pervasive oneness. And no matter what comes over the horizon next, it's more oneness. When one side is light, the other side is dark, isn't it what enlightenment is? Is it that the many and the one swallow each other up bottomlessly, forever? Mark: Yeah, and it's just dynamic too like of being so grounded in that truth. A grounding that's not limiting, as I sometimes think of it, solid ground, because there's also this, as you were saying, it's kind of infinite potentiality in this. Jim: It's true. There's another thing I think too is important. It isn't as if I'm to walk around habitually stabilized in this, because in the ordinariness I'm going to have to go fix lunch. Fixing lunch is the concrete manifestation of this. If I'm tired and lie down, accepting that I'm tired and lie down. Everything is manifesting itself in ordinariness. It's like being with a small child or say an elderly loved one with Alzheimer's. My wife died of Alzheimer's right here in the living room. I was sitting next to her when she died. But everything is unexplainably is this. And it doesn't depend on the extent that we realize it. But we can realize that the ordinariness of the human experience God is the infinity of the immediacy of standing up and sitting down, just simply by standing up and sitting down. Merton once said about monks in the monastery, where there's no active ministry of any kind, he said, why did we come here? He said, we've come here to live, just life, just the rhythmic simplicity and the gift of life. God's the infinity of that simplicity incarnate in the world. It's us, and we're going to be here for and with each other. And it makes community possible, because everyone around us has endless variation of someone who thinks they are what's wrong with them, someone who doesn't realize they themselves are the manifestation. And maybe by the way we listen to them, or sit with them, or reel with them, they might get a little glimpse, that their life matters more than in a way that can't be calculated. And that's how we pass it on, I think. Colleen: I have this question, but I feel the response. But maybe even just for the audience, it might be good to hear you reflect on then our resistance to this invitation and where this emerges from. Why do we so desperately want to abandon our awakened heart? The poetry of it sounds so lovely. Who would ever want to leave this place? But it's not an easy path either. The way you describe it too. There's also this tinge of danger in it all. Jim: Sometimes I had people say to me in a spiritual direction, one prayer I'm afraid to say is, Thy will be done. God just might take me up on it. God's saying, you asked for it. Here's my sense of it, really. We're afraid to lose the control that we think that we have over the life that we think that we're living. Because there's no control in joy. But here's the thing, there's that place of fear, I'm afraid to let go of what's infinitely less what I'm looking for. But even you, Lord, you infinitely understand my fear of letting go, and you're one with me with the fear. Help me to be tender-hearted towards my fear. Help me to understand you're already one with me in my fear itself, my confusion itself, and that's what helps me with it. I was a psychotherapist for 30 years, I worked with trauma. What trauma is really all about is that we internalize moments of betrayal and abandonment, and so we're very protective not to let it happen again. We guard over it. And so we're afraid to completely surrender because the surrender would leave us vulnerable again. We realize how intimate this is, but somehow there's something even holy about our fear-based resistance if we just sit with it. See, there's that in us that sees this because we're touched by it. And there's that in us that doesn't see it yet. And we're to be endlessly tender-hearted towards the part in us that doesn't see it yet. I see you, dear one, and I'm here for you, Thich Nhat Hanh says. No wonder you're afraid. Look what you went through. I'm here for you. And then we're Christ to ourself, if that makes sense. Mark: Yeah. I know sometimes get caught up in wanting things to go better for me as a result of this practice. And Jim, I recently in a spiritual direction session, used your line with a directee. The one about, with absolute love of God, that God protects us from nothing and sustains us in everything. It didn't go over very well and I could relate, I want to be protected. I want things to change, my things anyway, the way I see it. And it's something else you're saying now, it's just God sits with us. That idea of suffering as being carrying, that God helps us to carry and it doesn't necessarily change the struggles and the traumas and the suffering. Jim: That's actually right. God depends on us to be a non-violent protective person in the world. And when suffering arises, God depends on us to rise up to touch the suffering with love that it might dissolve in love and put it into action. But here's the thing. But to engage in it, not being bound up to the outcome of our effort to do so, because, Merton once said, people committed to social justice must be very careful not to be overly invested in the outcome of their effort because by human standards it may go down in flames and that's the mystery of the cross. See, that's the mystery of the cross. Because really it's the peace of God on which everything depends. It's sovereign in all directions. So we should protect ourself as best we can, we should protect others, but God's oneness with us. Notice, Jesus didn't say, Fear not, I'm with you always, because I'll personally see to it that nothing bad or scary or wrong happens to you. But no matter what happens to you, I'm one with you in it. And so Jesus, are you telling me not to be afraid of being afraid? You were afraid in the garden of Gethsemane. You were afraid. And how can I find your presence in the unfoldings of my days? Colleen: That just reminded me, I just was reading this in the Reflections on the Unknowable last night and underlined in this chapter on Centering Prayer where Father Thomas says, “too much effort at letting go, however, is itself a vestige of the false self.” Jim: That's true. In The Buddha, he talks about the middle way. And then it says, but the middle way must be middle weighed. If you're overly strident in the middle way, it's another kind of stridency. And so we have to have this kind of we moved with the rise and the fall of the grace unfolding of what love asks of us in the present moment and go with the flow of that. As best we can. Colleen: I can only imagine. You said that you did visit Father Thomas at Snowmass at least once. I can only imagine the conversation the two of you must have had. Jim: It was great. He said to me, we were in his room and he said to me, he really came there to die, he thought it was the end of his life. He said I came here to die. He said, I'm not dying. So he kind of like, I wake up the next morning, I'm still here. And he thought that was so funny. Eventually, he died. Mark: He did so much dying along the way to his dying that… Jim: No he really did. I was touched by it because it was so human. Thomas Merton was that way too when I was with him. He was so transparently human. He was just like right there and Father Thomas was very much that way also. Mark: Well, that's the dynamic that comes through in your teaching, Jim, and how you frame the whole contemplative journey. It's both very ordinary in many ways and it's about everyday life and it's also extraordinary and if we can see the two touching each other that's when we're there, even for a moment. Jim: I love the saying, this is in the Zen tradition, it says the Zen teacher, the spiritual teacher, recognizes your reverence for them as the teacher. The mystically awakened teacher knows that everything in them is also completely true of you. But you wouldn't believe them if they told you that and because teachers don't argue they accept your reverence as a temporary arrangement because you can't bear yet to realize your boundarylessness. I think it's so true, really. So strange. Mark: Jim, this has been wonderful we could go on for another few hours very easily and happily listening to you. Thank you so much for spending time with us. We want to mention a couple of things that you're involved in. You're still doing the podcast, Turning to the Mystics. Jim: Yeah. I just love doing that. We just finished The Way of the Pilgrim, the Jesus Prayer. And we did just finish T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets. Colleen: Wow, I, saw that. Jim: I love that poem. And I'm thinking next, I don't know, I might do next Simone Veil, the Jewish mystic. Colleen: Oh yes, please. Jim: So it's just an ongoing sharing of the mystics who touched my life, in an ongoing way. And so, yeah, that still goes on. We're doing that. Mark: It's beautiful. And folks can find you, the podcasts or recordings, as well as your books and all through the Center of Action and Contemplation if they go to the website. Jim: Exactly. Mark: Yeah, we'll put that in our notes to link to that. Jim: I am writing a book now on mystical discernment in the Enneagram. I'm looking at the Enneagram on the limit on how to see what is the nature and the art of discernment that ego consciousness, religious consciousness, and mystical consciousness, and what is the contribution the Enneagram can make in that? What is the point at which it's useless? Because you cross over into, ah, there's no categories. But then once you cross over, you can come full circle. What's it like to be a mystically awakened 1 on the Enneagram, a mystically awakened 2, and to move back and forth across all nine, not reducible to any of them? So I'm writing that book with Kirsten Oates. Mark: Oh, wonderful. Jim: Because I was a contemplative clinician, my goal as a clinician is for the psychology and the mystical to touch each other. So I'm working on that too. Mark: That's the work that I'm doing. So I really love what you've said about that as a psychotherapist and a mindfulness teacher. Yeah. Jim: And next year, there's a big event at the Vatican, Robert Hess wrote a book on faith and science. And he went to the Vatican, there's going to be a four-day long event on faith and science at the Vatican with world religion leaders and scientists who are devout in their tradition. I've been invited to speak there. How on religion becomes mystical. I think it's so good that's happening at the Vatican on science and faith touching each other this way. Colleen: yes. Mark: Well, if you want a couple of co-hosts to be following along with you, you know, Jim: But wouldn’t that be fun! Mark: That would be fun, yeah. Colleen: There's already been conversation about that within the Contemplative Outreach board and staff. I can't remember who brought the Vatican conference to our attention, but everyone raised their hand to volunteer to be sent to that, so. Mark: Right. Jim: I feel so blessed they asked me. Colleen: What a gift. Jim: I've invited my daughters to come with me to have that experience and my son. It'd be really so providential. It's such a gift Jesus. Wow. So anyway, but thanks for inviting me. Colleen: Thank Jim. Jim: I am so committed to Thomas Keating and his teachings and just contemplative living in the world. I have such an affinity with it so, I feel so much at home with you people. Colleen: Thank you, so much. You're such a blessing to us, and so many. Just blessings on all of your work, and your travels, and your writing, and you'll be in our prayers. Jim: Thank you so much. Thank you. Mark: Thank you.