Depth deprivation

Tuesday, April 9, 2024

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Depth deprivation

If I tell you about earthly things and you do not believe, how will you believe if I tell you about heavenly things?

James Finley, psychologist, teacher, and author, has a magical way of moving mysticism from somebody else’s experience into your own. When he writes about what he calls “the feeling of that-which-never-ends,” times of epiphany or vision, those moments seem right here, right now, able to be touched by my very fingertips. And although I cannot hold them, these moments will do the work God intends for them, and I will be transformed, not into a super-being, but into the obedient in-love son that God made me to be in the first place.

This might be too good to be true. But Jim Finley has been talking about it for a long time, since he was a novice fifty-plus years ago at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, when Thomas Merton was the novice-master. Finley’s stories of his time at Gethsemani are profound and funny, as he wrote them  into a book he called Merton’s Palace of Nowhere.

The community of believers was of one heart and mind, and no one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they had everything in common.

Finley uses many metaphors and analogies in his descriptions of, for himself and for us, the spiritual life, with its “heightened sense of communal presence.” Here are some of his thoughts about this:

In our day-by-day life, most of the things we’re aware of, we’re aware of them while we’re passing by on our way to something else. But every so often, something catches our eye and gives us reason to pause. For example, we pause to see a tree. We’ve seen many trees before, we’re going to see many more, and it’s just a tree. But there’s a certain moment where we’re called to pause and ponder and be present to the tree. In that pausing, we experience ourselves undergoing a kind of a descent. It’s very subtle—a deeper, more interior dimension of the mystery of our own presence…. 

We have the sense that in this deepening communal oneness with the tree, we’re dropping down together into an abyss-like depth that’s welling up and giving itself to us unexplainably as this moment of oneness with the tree. This depth of presence has no name, but we give it a name. In our tradition, it’s God. We experience the generosity of God, welling up and giving the infinity of God away as the mystery of this moment. We are being awakened to the divinity of the tree and ourselves and our communal, shared nothingness without God. There’s a sense of sacredness about this.

This is the fire we want to attend to. 

We could make the same observation about every foundational dimension of our life: intimacy with another person, being in the presence of a child, a path of long-suffering patience, a moment of prayer, the quiet hour at day’s end, lying awake at night in the dark. From time to time the divine grants itself with this kind of fire, a quiet luminosity that has great depth and intimacy to it. These moments are quite intense sometimes, in the aftermath of which something is never quite the same.

But usually it’s not that way at all. Such moments are so subtle that if we aren’t careful, we would miss them. They also tend to be very fleeting. We return to day-by-day life, go off to our next meeting, turn the TV up a little louder, or whatever it is we’re doing.

Finley wants to commit himself to what he calls a “contemplative stance.” By this he means taking time each day, once or twice or more, to sit still and do nothing, then sink down through my thoughts to a more or less empty place inside myself.

As we are committed to this, then little by little we start to see our day-by-day life from the standpoint of these moments of awakening.  In the light of those moments, we get this sense that in the momentum of the day’s demands, we’re skimming over the depths of our own life.

During yesterday’s total eclipse (which we saw from outside our Austin apartment, by the way) TV broadcasters on Lake Champlain in Vermont described birds winging their way almost horizontally across the lake as the blue sky darkened around 2:30 pm. Way too early for a sunset. What energy was passing through those birds? I don’t soar or skim in my heavy human body, but I can imagine it.

Returning to Finley’s analogy, as we skim, we see something of what we miss by not descending.

We see that we are suffering from depth deprivation. What’s regrettable is that God’s unexplainable oneness with us is hidden in the depths over which we’re skimming.

There’s a video from Jim Finley embedded in the meditation. And I’ll have more tomorrow.

 (Acts 4, Psalm 93, John 3)

(posted at www.davesandel.net)

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