A Coaching Session on Gabriel Marcel

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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James Finley (0:08)

Greetings, I'm Jim Finley.

Kirsten Oates (0:11)

And I'm Kirsten Oates.

James Finley (0:13)

Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.

Kirsten Oates (0:23)

Welcome, everyone, to season 11 of Turning to the Mystics, where we've been turning to the philosophy of Gabriel Marcel. And I'm here with Jim for our coaching session, where we try and make our teaching applicable to you in daily life. So welcome, Jim.

James Finley (0:41)

Yes, yes. I always enjoy these coaching sessions, and we personalise all of this.

Kirsten Oates (0:49)

Wonderful. So Jim, I think where you're going to get us started is reflecting on Marcel's vision and how that might apply to us.

James Finley (0:58)

Yes. Here's a way that helps me to kind of be present to Turning to Marcel for trustworthy guidance. Is to say, first of all, how helpful it is that he's helping us to be more aware of the quality of our awareness.

And you notice that sometimes we're aware of things that are in the realm of the problematic, like the daily task and details of the day, this way. And the problematic are things that are dualistically and objectively other than ourselves, our problems. Carbons start, roofs leaking. We're a complex math problem. And what we do is we look for a method to solve the problem, where we go to someone who's skilled in solving it, and we move on to the next problem. But Marcel says that really there's another dimension of our life, which is the realm of the mysterious.

And the realm of the problematic, he refers to that as primary consciousness. That's the objective, practical details of the day. It's real. But he says the mysterious reveals the inadequacy of primary consciousness. It's not adequate. It's not adequate because of the mystery of the nature of myself, as non-objective, non-objectifiable realities. When I ask, what does it mean to be human? It's always I, as the human being that I am, that's asking what it is to be human. What is consciousness? It's I and my consciousness asking what is love and so on. This secondary consciousness rests upon the intimate richness of our own interiority. And this extends out, that I'm included in and extend out into consciousness, humanity, to life and ultimately to God, to the infinity of being. The heart of what he's saying is that this infinite mystery of God is infinitely presencing the infinity of itself and giving itself away as the mystery of our very presence. That we're the beloved, that we're subsisting in this unitive state of this oneness. And when he says this to us, we're kind of struck by the beauty of it. And also noticing that this is just what our faith teaches us, that we're God's beloved. And he's helping us to find God outside of any religious tradition, so that it might enrich our own religious understanding. But here this is just finding God in life itself. So the question then is this. The question then is how we tend not to be aware of this mystery of ourselves. We get lost in the problematic. He says that really this is our faith as a kind of a primitive inner assurance. He says a forefeeling or like it's a felt sense, but it's subtle, it's vague. And so he looks for certain moments where what happens is this unit of mystery of God's infinite presence, one with us as our presence, shines out into our experience. That's the point. There's a certain point, it shines out into experience and he gives examples of this. So in order I think to pray with Marcel, we have to personalize this. And what we're looking for in our life are certain moments. I'm going to give a list here of the realms of existence. A certain moment where there was a moment of quiet awe, or a moment of quiet amazement, or a moment of being receptively open and grateful for a presence we can't explain. And what we're really sensing, he calls these thou moments, the thou. And what happens, and I'll give some examples, for example, that when we love someone very much, and we're aware of the person's personality, we're aware of their givens and so on. But we somehow, in our love for them, we see through the details of the givens, and we see that somehow the infinite presence of God is present in and as the gift of their presence to us. And we're kind of struck by it. So the question then would be for us, when have there been moments of love with someone? The spouse, the lover, the child, the grandmother, the grandfather, the beloved teacher, the beloved students, the dearest friend, where you sense the sacredness, like a heightened sense of enrichment this way. Likewise, where have there been moments in thinking of your own life where this has come to you in silence? They kind of, in a moment of silence, that kind of came welling up out of the silence, a sensitivity to the sacredness of life, gift of life. Or of solitude, where loneliness turns into the intimacy of solitude, like the other aloneness of ourself. The quiet hour at day's end. Say going through an art museum, like the artist as a visual mystic, where we see in the work of art, we give reason to pause and ponder it. Or sometimes the gift of music, or the voice of a poet. Sometimes too, it can come to us in moments of suffering. And in the moments of suffering, we're kind of being quietly sustained in the suffering. So the point is, if you would make a list of your thou moments, because it's part of the dowry of our being. Some of them are very intense, but a lot of times they're extremely delicate. Like we have to calibrate our heart to a fine enough scale. Because what happens is the problematic takes it over, the cell phone goes off, we're already late to the meeting, and we go rushing, but the gate of heaven flies open, we walk right past it. So we're first slowing down and journaling out our own thou moments and writing them out. And then Marcel is suggesting that each of these thou moments can be understood under the auspices of three modalities.