Transformational Theology

To anyone who knows me even superficially, my writing an article on contemplative prayer might seem ludicrous. By temperament I am far from being a natural contemplative. I am active (often impulsive), restless, and non-reflective. And anyone who knows my spiritual life well knows also that I have always struggled with disciplined prayer, in fact, with spiritual disciplines of any sort. How, then, could I be one who dares to offer others anything about this seemingly most advanced of all forms of prayer?

After graduating from high school, James Finley did something unusual. He became a monk. For the next six years, he lived at the Abbey of Gethsemane and learned from one of the great contemporary spiritual figures, Thomas Merton. Now married and the father of two, Finley has built a career as a teacher, clinical psychologist, writer, and speaker. He is the author of Merton’s Palace of Nowhere, The Awakening Call, The Contemplative Heart, and Christian Meditation: Experiencing the Presence of God.

The mysterious triunity of God is the ontological foundation for unity and diversity, mutual communication, and loving interpersonal communion. As God’s image bearers, we are fundamentally relational beings who were created for the summum bonum of an intimate relationship with the living and personal Lord of all visible and invisible things. No other person, possession, or position could ever satisfy the longings of the human heart, since God implanted eternity within the inner fabric of our being (Ecclesiastes 3:11).

The weekly bulletin of our Evangelical Presbyterian church indicated that a three-person renewal team from the Catholic Archdiocese of Denver would begin an eight-week education course the following Sunday. When my wife, Elsie, suggested that we attend this unexpected class offering together, I demurred, responding that as an evangelical seminary professor, I was uncomfortable with some of Rome’s beliefs. Since our tradition possesses the correct theology, the last thing I needed was to be instructed by a Jesuit priest. I had even taught an entire seminary course on Roman theology, pointing out what I judged to be the theological and ecclesial pitfalls of Catholicism.

A colleague sitting next to me offered me a stick of chewing gum during a Wheaton College chapel service. Maybe she was just being kind, or maybe she was trying to tell me my breath needed some help on that particular day. Either way, the gum looked good. Still, I turned down the offer. As my colleague put the gum back in her purse, I began wondering why I had just refused something I wanted. This is both a benefit and a liability of being an introvert—I analyze the inner contours of every decision until I understand it. I think I turned down the gum for the same reason it is difficult to borrow an extension ladder from my neighbor: because I had done nothing to earn it. Somehow, it seemed easier to turn down a piece of chewing gum than to say, “Thanks, let me give you a dime for it.”

While driving around my hometown during recent weeks, I have noticed the presence of a few unusual yard signs. Instead of the typical political messages, these signs portray a facsimile of two tablets of stone on which are written the Ten Commandments.

If the truth be told, it was desperation that first drew me into solitude and silence. I wish I could say it was for loftier reasons—pure desire for God or some such thing. But in the beginning it was desperation, plain and simple. There were things that needed fixing in my life, longings that were painfully unmet; I had tried everything I knew to fix what was broken and to fill what was lacking, but to no avail.

I recently had the privilege of going on pilgrimage to France to visit the places holy to the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph. Our first stop was in Annecy, where we stayed in the Motherhouse of the Sisters of St. Joseph. Originally this convent had belonged to the Sisters of the Visitation, a cloistered order founded in 1612. It was a wonderful old building, complete with a cloistered walk. Was it because this house had begun as a monastery that it had a cloistered walk, or was that the way all religious houses were built at that time? I don’t know. But whatever its origin, this cloistered walk had a profound effect on me. Something stirred within my soul as I walked its sacred space. I felt solitude and silence and a sense of being one with God and my surroundings.

The Sufi poet Hafiz offers this tiny, remarkable poem, “It Felt Love,” about spiritual opening to God and unfolding in that love.

In December 1985, 7,000 therapists gathered in Phoenix, Arizona, to hear more than twenty of the leading theorists and practitioners of psychotherapy in the world come together in a serious attempt at dialogue, clarity, and crossfertilization. Recognized experts such as Bruno Bettelheim, Carl Rogers, Virginia Satir, and Aaron Beck represented fourteen of the more than three hundred distinguishable schools of therapy: Behavioral, Cognitive, Ericksonian, Existential, Family (including six distinct approaches to family therapy), Gestalt, Humanistic, Jungian, Multimodal, Psychoanalytic, Rational-Emotive, Psychodrama, Rogerian, and Transactional Analysis. Most would agree these were the most prominent of the modern approaches to therapy in the 1980s.