"There are those who are trying
to set fire to the world.
We are in danger.
There is time only to work slowly,
There is no time not to love." Deena Metzger
James Finley is a wise 'finger pointing at the moon.' https://www.kanshoji.org/en/kusen-en-2/the-finger-pointing-at-the-moon/ He's a mystic whose primary path happens to be Christian, AND is deeply influenced by Buddhism, AND deeply respects Hindu, Taoist, Aboriginal, Jewish, Sufi and other mystics.
“When you consider all the saints and prophets as legitimate and no longer differentiate between religions, you have arrived at the stage of truth.” Ostad Elahi (1895-1974)
“It seems to me that this transformative process continues on throughout our lives. For as long as we are on this earth, we are children of the light finding our way through darkness. The task, it seems to me, is for us to continue to pass beyond immature understanding of spiritual matters formed in times of innocence and in times of trauma and abandonment by learning to cultivate more mature, reality-based ways of understanding the deep healing that spirituality brings into our lives. At the same time, we must be careful not to allow our adult, conceptual comprehension of such things to close off the childlike opening of wonder through which the graces and gifts of God flow into our lives. We must always keep in mind, as Gabriel Marcel phrased it, that ‘we do not see the light; rather, we are the aperture through which it shines.’”
James Finley. “The Healing Path. A Memoir and an Invitation.” Orbis, 2023. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!
Tastes of 'mysticism' ...
“Let’s say that you’ve been fortunate to be in a deep marital love relationship, that has been for you so transformative and so profound and so life-changing that you feel immense gratitude. You get a phone call from someone you knew in high school but haven’t seen in years, and they say they’re passing through town and wants to catch up with you. You’re glad, because you were friends in high school, so it would be interesting. And you’re talking & sharing about your work and what’s happened, and so on. And you tell this person about your spouse – about how you met, about the person’s character, you show photographs of what the person looks like, and your friend says, ‘Yes, I know, but what I’d like to know is this, who is it that you know the person to be, not factually, but in your love for this person?’
And all of a sudden you realize that nothing you could say would do justice to who you know the person to be in love, and your heart breaks when you try. And your grace would be strangely made whole by having your heart broken by this love that can’t be expressed adequately in words. That’s mysticism. It’s like the unexpected nearness of the upwelling of a gift that cannot be explained. It washes over you and it touches you."
“You know you have loved someone
when you have glimpsed in them
that which is too beautiful to die.” Gabriel Marcel "Thomas Merton at the end of ‘New Seeds of Contemplation’ gives a litany of examples of this. He says in the midst of nature imagine you’re out walking and you turn to see a flock of birds descending. And he says, as if out of the corner of your eye, you catch in their descent something primordial, vast & true, and you’re interiorly quickened in a kind of subtle enrichment of awareness – a sensing that in some way you can’t explain, God’s the Infinity of the intimate immediacy of the birds in their decent. And the birds in their descent is the concrete immediacy of God. And the concrete immediacy of God is in you being awakened to that. And your mood is to just sit down and sit there for a while – ‘Like what in the hell was that?’ I can’t say it, but having tasted it, I will not break faith with my awakened heart. I will not play the cynic. In an unexpected hour I was quickened with this oneness.
He says, sometimes it can happen also in the presence of a child, reading a child a good-night story, and you’re just literally unraveled by the presence of this child.
Or we’re sitting in the presence of a dying loved one – like the mystery of it all.
We’re lying awake at night listening to the rain pour down all about the house and a sense comes over you like this.
So I think we all have moments like this, but we don’t live in a society that teaches us to become students of these moments. Because what starts to happen for some people with these touches that happen every so often - there’s the desire to abide in the depths of the leadingly glimpsed. That is, having tasted the Oneness, and it has about it the feeling of that which never ends.
What would be a path or a way of life, where could I find someone well-seasoned in such things that could guide me? And this is the guidance of the mystic, turning to the mystics for guidance. They offer practical guidance. First of all, how to discern that it’s happening to you? Because sometimes it’s so subtle, you don’t calibrate your heart to a fine enough scale to pick that up, and then how can you cooperate with it? How can you go along with being transformed by God into God unexplainably forever in the ordinariness of your life? That’s the feeling that it has for me.
In the momentum of the day’s demands, just the complexities of life, most of the things we notice, we notice in passing on the way to something else. Then you get the feeling that you’re skimming over the surface of the depths of your own life. And what’s regrettable is that God’s unexplainable Oneness with you is hidden in the depths over which you’re skimming. But in moments like this, like a hiatus in sequential time, you’re born again, like you’re quickened like this. And then being quickened, This is what the root world religion means – religio – a religio is a ligature to be rebound to the origin. We need to be rebound because we’ve been exiled from it. So how can I be rebound to this upwelling of this flowing out of this Divine generosity which alone is ultimately real? And how can I be more habitually sensitive to it and responsive to it so I can live it every day and share it with others by the way I treat them, listen to them, and walk the earth?"
James Finley (1hr 28mins) interview – EXCEPTIONAL : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymSfaKy4CPI
