A CALL TO COMMUNION | PART 1
For 6 years, James Finley’s spiritual director and mentor was Thomas Merton at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. Finley compiled his insights and lessons into a book, Merton’s Place of Nowhere, published in 1978. The book fundamentally addresses the question of ultimate human identity, which was the basis of Merton’s whole spirituality. In the book, Finley helpfully unpacks the notion “of the true self in God as opposed to the false self of egocentric desires.”
After reading the book (really meditating) over Christmas break, I am still chewing and regurgitating over what I read. It feels almost like having walked lost in some sort of enchanted forest seeing and discovering things I hadn’t seen before (but really seeing familiar things in different ways). It was also during this Christmas break that I “slew hordes of orcs” in desolate “Mordor” marshes and fields while playing my first Play Station 4 game (which my children gifted me for Christmas). It was a different kind of enchantment, so one could say I was vacillating between two different landscapes of enchantment.
Back to the forest of enchantment. There are many things still to discover in my own life in regards to how what I read in Finley's book applies to my life and beyond, but I’d like to share one insight which Finley highlighted as ‘The Insight’ as his last chapter of the book. Finley asserts that Merton “distinguished between communication and communion as two fundamentally different modes of knowing.” Finley continues, “Communication is logical, quantitative and practical in its application” while communion “carries within it the promise of renewed and deepened levels of intimacy and union.” Finley helpfully notes, “The failure to communicate is frustration. The failure to commune is despair.” While communication is motivated by clarity and order, communion is motivated by intimacy and belongingness.
MERTON WROTE…
“the function of the symbol is to manifest a union that already exists but is not fully realized.” Finley picks this up, “the ‘union that already exists’ is the true self concealed by sin.”
Finley then observes, "Purely objective statements miss the mark, for God is not an object. He is Person. Nor are we, as persons, objects. Here all is Subject. There is no 'object' 'out there' to 'see.' Here all is presence and communion."
It is a being to Being encounter which is to say, subject to Subject. We are not mere objects that belong to the Subject. There is nothing to understand and know. True transformation is ontological in nature. It has little to do with methodologies, programs, or having systems in place that promote behavioral and/or structural changes. Rather these changes are natural-by-products of the ontological transformation.