Through Christ's Eyes

“Since the time of the Desert Fathers in the third and fourth centuries, Christians have practiced meditation as a way of experiencing and responding to God’s presence in their daily lives. Legendary figures such as Meister Eckhart, Saint Teresa of Avila, Saint John of the Cross, and numerous other mystics have left a body of writings that contain trustworthy and encouraging insights into how meditation can help us experience the presence of God in our own lives…

In the Judeo-Christian tradition God is understood as infinite, and, as such, beyond all finite categories, including the categories of masculine and feminine. At the same time, God is creator of all that is. As such, God is the infinite source, ground, and fulfillment of the feminine and the masculine. But because of the patriarchal culture in which the Judeo-Christian tradition has emerged and in which, for the most part, it has continued to evolve, the Judeo-Christian scriptures and classical texts of theology and spirituality have tended almost exclusively to use the masculine personal pronoun in referring to God…

The reflections in these pages are intended to serve as a guide in understanding and practicing Christian meditation. In broader terms, these reflections are intended to help those who are being interiorly drawn toward meditation as a grounding place for learning to be a more awake, compassionate, Christlike human being… Our inquiry will be, at times, challenging. This is so primarily because meditation itself is challenging in the ways it draws us into a wordless awareness of oneness with God beyond what thoughts can grasp or words can adequately convey. The truth is that we can venture into meditation only in our willingness to be, at times, perplexed. What is more, we must be willing to befriend our perplexity as a way of dying to our futile efforts to grasp the ungraspable depths that meditation invites us to discover.

It is with more experienced meditators in mind that these reflections explore more refined and subtle levels of realized oneness with God. This does not mean, however, that we will be dealing with lofty matters far removed from the concerns of those just beginning their spiritual journey. For, as you have no doubt discovered, the further we travel along the self-transforming path of meditation, the more we realize ourselves to be immersed in beginnings that never end. To be more advanced in meditation means, paradoxically, to discover that the oneness with God we seek was wholly present, without our realizing it, in the humble origins of our spiritual journey. To be more advanced in meditation means to be in the process of realizing that God is wholly present in each step along our way to divine fulfillment. It is to be someone slowly awakening to the divine destination of our journey manifesting itself in the divinity of our own breathing, our own beating heart, our simply being who we are. Or, to paraphrase a line in T. S. Eliot’s poem Four Quartets, to be more advanced in meditation means to realize that “the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

I am committing myself to being as true as I can to the essential spirit of the Christian contemplative traditions. This essential spirit is the Spirit of God, groaning within us that we might awaken to our eternal oneness with God as revealed to us in Christ (Rom. 8:26). Down through the centuries and into our own day, Christian mystics, monks and nuns living in monasteries, hermits, and countless seekers living in the world have yielded to the transforming power of the Spirit of God within us. It is to these monastic, mystical traditions of Christian faith that we will be turning for guidance and inspiration.

This specifically Christian focus is not, however, intended to suggest that Christians cannot benefit from Yoga, Zen, and other faith traditions. It would, in fact, be tempting as we go through these reflections to note the stunning affinity that sometimes exists between Christian and non-Christian sources of spiritual wisdom. But to do so would take us away from this work’s intention of exploring specifically Christian ways of understanding meditation as a way of experiencing oneness with God, one with us in life itself.

This stance of limiting myself to specifically Christian language within a broader context of respect for the contemplative wisdom of non-Christian traditions is something I learned from the contemporary Christian monk Thomas Merton. Near the end of his life, Merton became very committed to Buddhist-Christian dialogue; and in this commitment he went to Asia to have firsthand exposure to Buddhists and the Buddhist tradition. On December 10, 1968, while on that trip, he died. Shortly before his death he wrote a letter back to his own monastic community at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. One of the things he said was that in going to Asia he discovered he never had to go there—that everything he was searching for was present in the monastery, was present in his own hermitage, was present in his own Christian tradition. And so it is in this spirit of sensitivity to and respect for the non-Christian contemplative traditions that we will be focusing here on meditation as practiced and understood within the context of the ancient and ongoing contemplative traditions of Christian faith.

In these reflections, I will be sharing with you what I experienced and have come to understand of Christian contemplative spirituality during the five and half years I lived as a monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani, a cloistered Trappist monastery in Kentucky. What may seem surprising is that in my years of living as a monk in the monastery I was not taught how to meditate. In fact, no emphasis was given to practicing any specific method of meditation. This is consistent with the Rule of Saint Benedict, which does not offer instructions in any specific form of meditation. This does not mean that meditation is neglected. To the contrary, Benedict wrote a Rule prescribing a way of life in which the chanting of the psalms in the monastic choir, manual labor, and everything the monk or nun does is to become a meditation. Which is to say, everything becomes a way of entering into a more interior, meditative awareness of oneness with God. It is in this pervasive atmosphere of meditative living that each monk or nun is left free to find his or her way to whatever form of meditation he or she might be interiorly inclined to practice.

It is in this spirit, then, that I express my hope that I might write and you might read these reflections in a meditative manner that will become itself a meditation, which is to say a way of entering into a more interior, meditative awareness of oneness with God. One way to allow these reflections to become a meditation is to pause and reflect on the simple fact that you and I have most likely never met. As I sit here writing these words, I, of course, cannot see you. But I know something about you that helps me to feel less isolated from you, more connected to you, as I write. I know that you were motivated to read this book on Christian meditation. I do not know with certainty why you are reading this book. But I know that most likely you are reading it in the hope that in doing so you might learn to practice meditation as a way of further deepening your awareness of a response to the presence of God in your daily life. Insofar as this is so, I say, “Me too.”

It is my intention in sharing these reflections that you find in meditation practice a way of experiencing and responding to God’s presence in your life. As I reflect on this shared intention of our hearts, I come upon a paradoxical fact: It is true that on one level I am alone in this room; I look about me and you are nowhere to be seen. And yet at a more interior level you are here with me as I write. And of course all of this applies to you as well: you look about you and I’m nowhere to be seen. But insofar as you are sincerely reading these sincerely written words, your reading becomes a means of quietly awakening to more meditative modes of awareness in which we are alone together in the shared intention of our hearts. As the circle of our shared meditative awareness expands we can begin to discern that we are, in some interior sense, one with all who are reading these reflections.

As the circle of our meditative awareness expands still further, we can discern the presence of countless men and women, living and dead, who have experienced in their hearts the desire for deeper union with God that we experience in ours. And beyond this we can sense that we are all alone together in God, the awakener of our hearts, the one “in whom we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). Insofar as we have actually begun to be carried along in this expanding circle of awareness, the divine destination of our lives begins to come into view. In our awareness of being here together in God, we have already begun to meditate. For meditation is this transformative process of shifting from surface, matter-of-fact levels of consciousness to more interior, meditative levels of awareness of the spiritual dimensions of our lives…

Imagine that you are in your car, driving alone on a long journey in a remote area of the country. You are searching for a certain county or small town that your map tells you should be close by, but which you cannot find. Exhausted by your long drive and frustrated that you cannot find your destination, you pull off to the side of the road. You go into a small gas station and ask one of the locals standing there, “Can you tell me how far it is to such and such a place?” The person looks at you, laughs, and says, “You’re in it!” You can’t believe it. At once pleased and perplexed, you say, “I am?” “Well, yes,” the person says, obviously enjoying your obvious surprise.

The path to God is like that. God is already here, all about us and within us—the very source, ground, and fulfillment of our being. But, subject to the limitations of ego consciousness, we tend not to experience the divine mystery that is the very reality of who we deep down really are and are called to be as persons created in the image and likeness of God. Subject to the limitations of ego, we do not realize directly the divine reality of reality itself. This is why we meditate: that we might awaken to the already present nature of the oneness with God we seek.

You may feel that you have a long way to go before realizing the degree of habitual meditative awareness of oneness with God exemplified by the great mystics. But the intention of your heart that motivates you to read this book bears witness that a transformative journey, not of your own making, is already under way. Imagine that you go to the ocean, take off your shoes and socks, and wade in ankle-deep. It’s true that you are in only ankle-deep, but it’s also true that you are in the ocean. If you bend down, touch your fingertips to the water, then touch them to your tongue, you taste salt. You feel the wind in your face. You look out at the horizon where the waterline meets the sky. You look down the shoreline. You feel the water about your ankles and, yes, you are in the ocean. In order to get in deeper, you simply need to move forward and it will get plenty deep soon enough.

Awakening the spiritual path is like this. We have but to remain humbly open to the first stirrings of our journey into God, and our journey, will, in God’s good time, get plenty deep, soon enough. Actually, it’s more mysterious than that. Imagine a man and woman who, even in the beginning of their relationship, loved each other very much. Over the course of many years, their love, in the midst of countless ups and downs, continues to grow even deeper. And yet it’s also true that love itself did not get any deeper for all that. For from all eternity love is abysslike. From the very first moment love stirred within them, they were already in water over their heads. It is not that love got deeper, but rather that their awareness of and response to the abysslike nature of love grew deeper. This is how it always is with us spiritually. It isn’t as if, in journeying forward, we move into a deeper presence of God, for the presence of God is already infinitely deep. Rather, by moving forward we become ever more deeply aware of the abysslike presence of God in our lives.

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

This is how Christ lived. Whether he was seeing a child crawling up into his lap or a leper wanting to be healed; whether he was seeing a prostitute or his own mother; whether he was seeing the joy of a wedding feast or the sorrow of loved ones weeping at the burial of a loved one; whether he was seeing his own disciples or his executioners—he saw God. We meditate that we might learn to see through Christ’s eyes the divine mystery of all that surrounds us."

~ James Finley, Christian Meditation: Experiencing the Presence of God
James Finley, Ph.D. lived as a monk at the cloistered Trappist monastery of the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, where the world-renowned monk and author, Thomas Merton, was his spiritual director. James Finley leads retreats and workshops throughout the United States and Canada, attracting men and women from all religious traditions who seek to live a contemplative way of life in the midst of today's busy world. He is also a clinical psychologist in private practice with his wife in Santa Monica, California.