A Coaching Session on Four Quartets

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

You're listening to a podcast by the Center for Action and Contemplation. To learn more, visit cac.org.

Kirsten Oates (0:07)

Hello, everyone. This is Kirsten Oates, and I'm here with James Finley, and we want to invite you to join us for the Turning to the Mystics virtual retreat, December 5 to 8 Over the course of those four days, we'll be engaging in an interior pilgrimage, mirroring the journey laid out in the 19th century Russian mystical text, The Way of a Pilgrim.

James Finley (0:32)

In kind of wondering like what you might expect in being on this retreat, my hope for you would be encouraging insights that helps you to realize you're already on this path of longing. And also you might receive guidance in how to be true to it and follow it, because it's very subtle, because it's interior, it's in our heart. So I would hope there would be encouragement and a sense of guidance and inner clarity about this path and how to be true to it. To surrender to the path is to surrender to God, because he finds his way to the realm of the heart. And the realm of the heart is that place where our life and God's life are one. And how do we find our way to that oneness is hidden deep within us in an experiential way? And learn to live by it and share it with other people day by day? So I look forward to our time together prayerfully kind of walking through these insights about God's oneness with us in life itself.

Kirsten Oates (1:38)

If you'd like to join us, please head to cac.org/retreat to register. We hope to see you there.

James Finley (1:50)

Greetings. I'm Jim Finley.

Kirsten Oates (1:53)

And I'm Kirsten Oates.

James Finley (1:55)

Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.

Kirsten Oates (2:05)

Welcome, everyone, to season 10 of Turning to the Mystics, where we've been turning to TS. Eliot and his poetry in four quartets. Today is one of our special coaching sessions where we offer guidance in ways you might continue on with the text and deepen into it. In this episode, we're going to share a meditation that we've pulled together using seminal passages from four quartets. And this is something you can use as a meditation or a prayer in your regular practice. So I'm going to guide you in the meditation. And then after we've meditated together, Jim is going to practice Lectio using the exact same passages that are in the meditation. And he's really going to role model how you might deepen into this meditation through a Lectio practice. So what's going to happen is, I'm going to invite you to settle in and get ready for a meditation. You'll hear a little bit of music and then the words of the meditation will begin. There'll be a point in the meditation where the bell rings and that's an invitation to sit in silence. The bell will ring again. There'll be some words to close the meditation and then some music to finish. If you'd like to follow along with the meditation and have the words in front of you, you'll find them in the show notes. There's a document with the meditation there. So let's get ready to meditate together. Perhaps just start by focusing on your breath without just trying to change it, but just noticing how you're breathing. And use this as a way to settle into your own body and your own space. And then perhaps lowering your attention from the busy thinking mind down into your heart. You could do this by looking down at your heart, putting your hand on your heart and just grounding your attention there.

Now I invite you to join me in opening yourself to God's presence, wisdom and guidance. In God, we live and move and have our being. God, please guide us and inform us and give us clarity as we meditate together on these words from TS. Eliot's Four Quartets.

If all time is eternally present, all time is unredeemable. To be conscious is not to be in time. Only in time is time conquered. Come this way, leaving behind being distracted from distraction by distraction. Come to pray where prayer has been valid. Come this way, to be redeemed from fire by fire. Be still, descend only into the world of perpetual solitude. Put off sense and notion. Let go of the need to verify, to instruct yourself, inform your curiosity or report back to anyone. Allow but a little consciousness. Be still and let the dark come upon you, which shall be the darkness of God. Be still. Wait without hope, for hope would be for the wrong thing. Wait without love, for love would be of the wrong thing. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought. To possess what you do not possess, you must go by a way of dispossession. What you do not know is the only thing you know. Then the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. Restored by that refining fire. Here, the intersection of the timeless moment, the impossible union, a condition of complete simplicity. Where past and future are conquered and reconciled. Here is where you are, and nowhere, never and always. Where time has been redeemed and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.