For Further Reflection:

I encourage you to spend some time in further reflection on this theme. Below are some of the quotes from the talk for you to take this theme further.

James Finley:

“In committing ourself to this interior silence, we immediately come up against our poverty in silence; that is, we experience fairly early on how inept we are at this deep attentiveness. We meditate and pray to deepen our capacity to be genuinely present, and the paradoxical nature of prayer and meditation is not that the intention to pray and meditate immediately delivers us from our poverty in silence – quite the contrary, prayer and meditation brings us directly to the experience of our poverty in silence. We might say, in fact, that those who pray are not those who know how to pray, but those who are willing to be humbled at ever deeper levels of the realization that they do not know how to pray.”

“Not being very good at it is the point, in that meditation brings us directly to the humbling realization of our poverty in stillness. Being silent on purpose is just esoteric noise if I sit proving to myself how silent I can be – my silence is in fact my ego’s noise if I sit very still in meditation, sitting still on purpose, this is just the ego’s esoteric footwork, proving to itself just how poised, how still, how motionless it can sit.”

Thomas Merton: 

“The more elastic an ego we have, the more respectable an ego it is. It can even stretch out to nothingness, and snap back to put another score on the chalk board : "I reached nothingness", as if nothingness was the attainment that one had acquired.”

James Finley: 

“What are you gonna do, wake up some morning poor enough, like say to yourself you know, I never thought I'd make it, but I did it! I got poor enough.”

“Isn’t it true that not being poor enough is poor enough?”

2 Corinthians 4:6-7, 16-18

For God, who said, "Let light shine out of darkness," made God's light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the radiance of God in the face of Christ.  But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. ...

Therefore, we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal radiance that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”

James Finley:

 “Meditation practice brings us to the direct realization that we are poor enough, not as something obtained, but in the very real limitations of our ability to do something as fundamental, as foundational, as being simply present, open and awake in the present moment.”