Bonus: The Healing Path

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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James Finley (0:07)

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 (0:22)

For! Welcome, everyone, to this special bonus session of Turning to the Mystics. I'm here with Jim to help launch his new book, The Healing Path, A Memoir and an Invitation.

Welcome, Jim, and congratulations on this stunningly beautiful memoir.

James Finley (0:40)

Thank you very much. I'm so pleased that it's gonna go out there to share with people.

Kirsten Oates (0:45)

So we wanted everyone who listens to this podcast to get a special taste of your book. And so you're going to read the entire introduction, and then we'll have a dialogue about the book.

James Finley (0:57)

Okay, the introduction. These reflections mark out a path, a way of life, in which we as human beings may be healed from all that hinders us, from experiencing the steady strong currents of divinity that flow on and on in the bittersweet alchemy of our lives. The surprising thing is that the intimate healing spirituality brings into our lives, is hidden in the muck and the mire of the very things about ourselves we wish weren't true. The secret opening through which we pass into wholeness is hidden in the center of those wounds we are most afraid to approach. The door that grants access to boundless fulfillment is hidden in the unfinished business of our lives, the places where we do not want to feel vulnerable, the things we tend not to sit with or listen to, the sometimes sad, sometimes tender, sometimes disarmingly simple, sometimes joyful things that make up the intimate substance of who we really are and are called to be.

As I write this introduction, I'm immersed in these intimate depths sitting next to my beloved wife Maureen as she lies here dying in the final stages of Alzheimer's. Even though she is unconscious and cannot open her eyes to look at me, I believe she can hear me as I speak from my heart in whispered words. Just now I told her that the ways of unbearable pain and crying that from time to time overtake me seem to soften at least a little as I learned to be more accepting of the immensity and mystery of her death. After all, immensity and mystery have woven our years together from the very start.

The slowness with which she is gently fading away from me seems continuous with the slow setting of the sun out over the ocean which is just beyond this darkening room where Maureen and I lived and shared so much over the past 30 years. I just told her that my suffering and trying to imagine life without her is eased in sensing that her soul is already beginning to pass over into God, leaving but a long vapor trail of herself in which she is still barely tethered to her body.

Over the years, Maureen and I would often share insights that came to us in our morning sitting here together in what we call our monastic silence. From time to time, she might share a passage from one of her favorite writings, perhaps an essay on Thomas Merton's disputed questions titled A Philosophy of Solitude. With that lucid little commentary on Meister Eckhart, The Way of Paradox. I in turn might share a passage from the text of a mystic in which I was immersed at the time. Then we would return to our shared silent reading. It was such a sweet and subtle way to be so inexplicably one with each other in the presence of God. I suppose that as I'm now sitting here saying these things to her, knowing in my heart that she's listening from a depth of presence that I can scarcely imagine. I suppose, too, that I'm sharing this with you as a way of inviting you to join us in these words, which are becoming our point of entry into the healing path this book explores.

I just now shared with Maureen a memory that I have shared with her many times over our years together. The memory is about how deeply affected I was by something Thomas Merton said to us novices not long after I had entered the Cloistered Trappist Monastery of the Abbey of Gethsemane in Kentucky. Merton, who was master of novices, was speaking to us about an old clay brother who had just died. He encouraged us to realize that when we die, we do not go anywhere. We do not orbit the earth a few times and take off for God in some far-off celestial realm. For as scripture tells us, in God we live and move and have our being. All the angels, along with all the blessed who have crossed over into God, are here with us in the vast interiority of God, in whom we subsist as light subsists in flame.