Contemplative Prayer

“…Contemplative prayer helps the process of spiritual formation by grounding the entire process of awakening to God, already perfectly present, already perfectly given to us in life itself. In contemplative prayer we seek to discover at deeper and deeper levels of awareness that everything we could possibly attain from God—that God himself—has already been given by God in Christ. All is being given in the ongoing, moment by-moment mystery of creation itself, in which God is giving himself to us in and as the miracle of our very existence as persons. Contemplative prayer is a way of opening ourselves to the intimate experience Jesus spoke of in proclaiming that the coming of the Kingdom has already occurred: the kingdom of God is within us…

I was in the monastery with (Thomas) Merton in the 1960s, during the Vietnam War. The Berrigan brothers would come there to visit him, and he corresponded with people like Boris Pasternak and Bob Dylan. He was one of the Catholic intellectuals who helped fuel the peace movement. My sense is that what Merton would say today would be consistent with what he was saying then. That is, we face the individual dilemma of estrangement from contemplative experience and the preciousness of our own lives, as well as society's estrangement from this awareness. And that estrangement perpetuates violence. Therefore the task of the contemplative today is to be a prophetic witness – a nonviolent witness to the preciousness of all life, at a level that precedes and transcends all ideological positions...

Thomas Merton was the first living mystic [I encountered]. And being with him personally, with his writings, he played a major role in opening up this whole world to me. I internalized it. Then with his guidance, I started reading John of the Cross. I just thought it was so profound: we find God in passage through a dark night. The night is where God weans us off our dependencies on anything less than an infinite union with infinite love, which is the sole basis of our security and identity. And then he cries out in his poetry: "It's not fair, that you do not carry off this heart that you have stolen!” That’s so beautiful, because it was so true. From there, next for me was Meister Eckhart. Then the others: Cloud of Unknowing, Jan Van Russbroec, Teresa of Avila, Julian of Norwich, Megthild of Magdeburg. But in the beginning, I’d say Merton, John of the Cross, and Eckhart.

And I’ve been reading them over and over for years. I was also introduced to Buddhism through Merton. And when I started reading Dogen, a little book called The Heart of Shobogenzo, these were his dhrama talks in the monasteries. I’ve been very moved with the dharma, and how those interface with the gospels. These have been my teachers.”

~ James Finley