James Finley Quotes & Sayings

As you expand your meditation practice, in concert with your faith, you will find that these divine moments come more often, until you are finally awakened to your own deepest self, one with Christ. — James Finley

We give God a name. We then equate God with the name we have given him, and in doing so we make ourselves, in effect, God's God. Instead of acknowledging God as the source of our identity and existence, we make ourselves the self-proclaimed source of God's identity. God then becomes the one made in our image and likeness.

Those engaged in the undertaking of naming God see themselves as participating in a holy work. They are the God-definers, the definition makers. — James Finley

I experienced the Church to be this refuge within and beyond myself. — James Finley

If we are absolutely grounded in the absolute love of God that protects us from nothing even as it sustains us in all things, then we can face all things with courage and tenderness and touch the hurting places in others and in ourselves with love. — James Finley

The depths of the self are the heights of God. — James Finley

We can say that, for Merton, religion refers to our deepest reality which lies hidden in our innate propensity for union with God. Our life, in other words, simply makes no sense whatsoever except to the extent it is directed toward union with God, that is, to the extent that it is authentically religious. — James Finley

ways of prayer often call forth a kind of knowing that passes beyond clear ideas and the ordinary way of thinking. — James Finley

In our zeal to become the landlords of our own being, we cling to each achievement as a kind of verification of our self-proclaimed reality. We become the center and God somehow recedes to an invisible fringe. Others become real to the extent they become significant others to the designs of our own ego. And in this process the ALL of God dies in us and the sterile nothingness of our desires becomes our God. — James Finley

It is little wonder then that the term "religious" is often a pejorative one indicating an escapist, self-righteous, other-worldly or perhaps superstitious stance toward life. Nor should this come as any surprise, in light of all we have been saying of the pervasiveness of the false self. Since religion deals with the ultimate realities of life, it is understandable that religion would draw out the ultimate in the false self's basic disorientation and blindness. The false self can have but false gods, all of which in the end turn out to be but reflections of the false self as it worships itself and sets itself up as the reason for its own existence. — James Finley

Compassion forms the essential bond between seeking God in meditation and all forms of social justice. For the more we are transformed in compassion, the more we are impelled to act with compassion toward others. — James Finley

All that we can do with any spiritual discipline is produce within ourselves something of the silence, the humility, the detachment, the purity of heart and the indifference which are required if the inner self is to make some shy, unpredictable manifestation of his presence.11 — James Finley

How strange God's ways are! He calls us to a union we do not understand. He calls us to a place of encounter which we cannot find. We search and search. Our silence reveals to us not a garden of delights but an awful nothingness. God leaves us in an awful emptiness. All our initial enthusiastic notions of prayer deteriorate into an acknowledgement of our utter superficiality and lack of authenticity before God. We can only throw ourselves completely on his mercy. We can only wait in the darkness and cry out for our salvation. We can but trust that God's love is such that our sinfulness does not even matter. We can only have faith. — James Finley

Meditation is a way of slowing down so as to descend into the depths of yourself in the present moment, where God lies waiting to grant you a deep experience of your eternal oneness with God. — James Finley