Merton's Palace of Nowhere Quotes

“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, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

“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, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

“This disappearance, this annihilation is all a matter of appearances as seen through the eyes of the false self. The annihilation is only apparent, for the self being annihilated is itself only apparent. It is a self without God, that is, a self that can never exist. What is annihilated is our false self, our external self made absolute, the imposter, the mask (persona), the liar we think we are but are not. The annihilation therefore is not annihilation at all, for nothing real or genuine is annihilated. Rather, what is genuine is affirmed as our psychological, historical, social self and placed in its true relationship to God. All that is annihilated is the illusion of the self that cannot bear God's presence, save as an idol fabricated for the ego's own glorification. It is this "self" that is "annihilated" through God's merciful love. The annihilation is merciful for it, in fact, is the antithesis of annihilation. It is rather an obscure, inexplicable foretaste in faith of our final consummation as created persons. It is the mystery of the cross creatively at work in the foundations of consciousness, recreating our awareness that we might know God as he knows himself.”
― James Finley, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

“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, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

“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, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

“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, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

“The core of our being is drawn like a stone to the quiet depths of each moment where God waits for us with eternal longing. But to those depths the false self will not let us travel. Like stones skipped across the surface of the water we are kept skimming along the peripheral, one-dimensional fringes of life. To sink is to vanish. To sink into the unknown depths of God’s call to union with himself is to lose all that the false self knows and cherishes.”
― James Finley, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

“We pray not to recharge our batteries for the business of getting back to the concerns of daily life, but rather to be transformed by God so that the myths and fictions of our life might fall like broken shackles from our wrists. We withdraw within not to retreat from life but to retreat from the constant evasion, the constant fearsome retreat from all that is real in the eyes of God.”
― James Finley, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

“As Saint Paul expresses it, “There are in the end three things that last: faith, hope and love, and the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor 13:13). This love, which is the ultimate consummation of the true self, is first of all God himself, who is love. When God gives us the Spirit, we receive the power to love God with God’s own love. We are given a new identity, because this love given to us by God is in the end our very self-created in the image of love.”
― James Finley, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

“In prayer, like the stars before the rising sun, all the burdens of our autonomous self disperse before the “piercing presence” of God. God unclothes, undoes us, “prunes away every branch that does not bear fruit.” He even takes God away from us”
― James Finley, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

“ways of prayer often call forth a kind of knowing that passes beyond clear ideas and the ordinary way of thinking.”
― James Finley, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

“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, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

“But indeed we exist solely for this, to be the place He has chosen for His presence, His manifestation in the world, His epiphany. . . . The love of our fellow man is given us as the way of realizing this. . . . It is the love of my lover, my brother, or my child that sees God in me, makes God credible to myself in me. And it is my love for my lover, my child, my brother that enables me to show God to him or her in himself or herself. Love is the epiphany of God in our poverty.”
― James Finley, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

“But the awareness of the necessity of loving others does not bring with it the strength to do so, and in this is found a basic expression of the poverty of religious man. We are made for God and grow in union with him in and through our loving union with others, yet in the face of this we still find ourselves filled with selfishness. We discover a wound deep within us. We bear the weight of an ontological disorientation, a frightful inability to root out the death-dealing narcissism that impregnates our being, making our best intentions impotent. And so the religious man cries out for help. He intuits and experiences his poverty in which he lacks the light and strength to be of himself a child of God.”
― James Finley, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

“In realizing that union with God is achieved in and through union with others, we see that the religious person is basically a loving person. He loves others not simply out of personal inclination or an arbitrary external law, but rather because he intuits God’s presence in the presence of the other.”
― James Finley, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

“It may be true that every prophet is a pain in the neck, but it is not true that every pain in the neck is a prophet. There is a no more firmly entrenched expression of the false self than the self-proclaimed prophet. He is one who does not die to self but affirms himself in his prophetic criticisms. He is a world unto himself and rare is the person that can measure up to his standards.”
― James Finley, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

“The prophetic dimension of the contemplative’s role (or nonrole) in society is to a great extent grounded in the contemplative’s refusal to embrace the world as a god that gives meaning to life without first accepting and receiving life from God. The contemplative, the prophet, is thus for Merton the marginal person, of whom he writes: He does not belong to an establishment. He is a marginal person who withdraws deliberately to the margin of society with a view to deepening fundamental human experience. . . . We (marginal people) are deliberately irrelevant. We live with an ingrained irrelevance which is proper to every human being. The marginal man accepts the basic irrelevance of the human condition, an irrelevance which is manifested above all by the fact of death. The marginal person, the monk, the displaced person, the prisoner, all these people live in the presence of death, which calls into question the meaning of life.”
― James Finley, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

“But the most I can do for the world is to transcend it so as to serve it as a person instead of a slave. The only genuine way to serve it is to follow God’s will, in which alone the world finds its validity. And, an important expression of God’s will is fidelity to some degree of prayer in which I discover and actualize a transcendent self grounded in love.”
― James Finley, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

“This occurs whenever society makes a cult of some relative interpretation of life or sets some relative good up as the end of life itself. Success, progress, and all similar goals are examples of the world’s expression of the false self. These social imperatives hold themselves up as absolutes to the extent that we are led to believe that life is nothing but these things. And in this exclusiveness is the falsity. We are led to believe that only the world can save us. We are told that irrelevance according to the criterion of the world is tantamount to nonexistence. We are what we are to the world and all else is nonbeing.”
― James Finley, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

“The mother of all lies is the lie we persist in telling ourselves about ourselves. And since we are not brazen enough liars to make ourselves believe our own lie individually, we pool all our lies together and believe them because they have become the big lie uttered by the vox populi, and this kind of lie we accept as ultimate truth.”
― James Finley, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

“The way to find the real “world” is not merely to measure and observe what is outside us, but to discover our own inner ground. For that is where the world is, first of all: in my deepest self. . . . This “ground,” this “world” where I am mysteriously present at once to my own self and to the freedoms of all other men, is not a visible, objective and determined structure with fixed laws and demands. It is a living and self-creating mystery of which I am myself a part, to which I am myself my own unique door.”
― James Finley, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

“Since we are like God, in our depths we are useless also. So, too, are children and sunsets and the simple recognition of the song of a bird. Death is useless, and so is a simple glance of love. Life itself is useless, for life is to be lived and not ridden in, eaten, packaged, sold, or patented. The self in us that prays is useless and it is prayer that allows us to discover the positive uselessness of life in God.”
― James Finley, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

“God is He Who Is and his world is the world that is. What are extraordinary are the ordinary, concrete realities of daily life. And it is our desire to be extraordinary that, in fact, makes us less than ordinary whenever such desires move us to pull away from, reject or even just ignore God manifesting himself to us in the next hot August afternoon or the cold wind of a winter evening.”
― James Finley, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

“In our reflections on the true self in the world, we will begin by reflecting upon the world as the place where one finds God in and through simple daily experiences and contact with others. The false self often rejects this world under the guise of “spirituality” and the seeking of invisible realities in other “more spiritual” realms. Merton writes of the folly of all such attempts: Very often, the inertia and repugnance which characterize the so-called “spiritual life” of many Christians could perhaps be cured by a simple respect for the concrete realities of everyday life, for nature, for the body, for one’s work, one’s friends, one’s surroundings, etc. A false super-naturalism, which imagines that “the supernatural” is a kind of Platonic realm of abstract essences totally apart from and opposed to the concrete world of nature, offers no real support to a genuine life of meditation and prayer. Meditation has no point and no reality unless it is firmly rooted in life. Without such roots, it can produce nothing but the ashen fruits of disgust, acedia, and even morbid and degenerate introversion.1”
― James Finley, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

“Eventually and inevitably that which was too awful even to think about finally happens. Death reveals in us that eventually tomorrow is today and that we have run out of time. We discover by force of death that there is no substance under the things with which I am clothed. I am hollow, and my structure of pleasure and ambitions has no foundation. I am objectified in them. But they are all destined by their very contingency to be destroyed. And when they are gone there will be nothing left of me but my own nakedness and emptiness and hollowness, to tell me that I am my own mistake.”
― James Finley, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

“All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my own egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered. Thus I use up my life in the desire for pleasures and the thirst for experiences, for power, honor, knowledge, and love to clothe this false self and construct its nothingness into something objectively real. And I wind experiences around myself and cover myself with pleasures and glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world, as if I were an invisible body that could only become visible when something visible covered its surface.7”
― James Finley, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

“For Merton, the matter of who we are always precedes what we do. Thus, sin is not essentially an action but rather an identity. Sin is a fundamental stance of wanting to be what we are not. Sin is thus an orientation to falsity, a basic lie concerning our own deepest reality. Likewise, inversely, to turn away from sin is, above all, to turn away from a tragic case of mistaken identity concerning our own selves.”
― James Finley, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

“The spiritual life is to be earnestly pursued as though no spiritual life existed. This is the only safe and sane way to travel in the deep waters of the Spirit. Indeed, such childlike simplicity in the face of God expresses a realization that there is, in fact, no spiritual life as such separate from life itself. There is only one life, and that is God’s life which he gives to us from moment to moment, drawing us to himself with every holy breath we take. The purpose of our prayer is to help us find God, that we might consciously and gratefully live this life, and through our presence invite others to live it as well.”
― James Finley, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

“Merton makes no attempt to question the reality and importance of the empirical self we call our personality. Indeed, in the spiritual life a deep respect must be given to our whole person, including the day-by-day realities of life and the self that is formed by them. What Merton does say, however, is that when the relative identity of the ego is taken to be my deepest and only identity, when I am thought to be nothing but the sum total of all my relationships, when I cling to this self and make it the center around which and for which I live, I then make my empirical identity into the false self. My own self then becomes the obstacle to realizing my true self.”
― James Finley, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

“Let no one hope to find in contemplation an escape from conflict, from anguish, or from doubt. On the contrary, the deep inexpressible certitude of the contemplative experience awakens a tragic anguish and opens many questions in the depth of the heart like wounds that cannot stop bleeding.”
― James Finley, Merton's Palace of Nowhere