Coaching Session: May God Bind Us All

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 (0:22)

Welcome, everyone, to season eight of Turning to the Mystics, where we've been turning to the German mystic, Mechthild of Magdeburg. And in this coaching session, Jim is going to offer us a way that we can continue to turn to Mechthild for guidance on our own.

So Jim, thank you for being here. And I just wanted to let people know that we've put together a worksheet, and that should be available in the show notes, and that you might want to print out that worksheet and have it with you for this episode, as Jim, you're going to refer to it, aren't you?

James Finley (1:00)

Yes, and I want to add to that also about the worksheet, is that when I'm kind of modeling for you the Seleccio Meditation and Prayer using Mechthild as our guide, you'll notice on the worksheet that Kirsten and I put together under discursive meditation, and I'll walk through these in my reflection, some bullet points. So, if you find them helpful, you can have the worksheet with you in your meditation and use them as possible guides to help you kind of move along the different layers of your own meditation time.

The idea here of this session is that when I was going through Mechthild, I read her and then reflected on her in a very reflective personal way that was consistent with the prayerful way that we received her teachings, the teachings of all the mystics.

And so what I want to do now, Kirsten and I together want to do, is kind of model in an even closer way how to practice, how to pray with Mechthild, how to turn to her for guidance in the prayerful way that allows us to receive her guidance or to receive God's guidance through her with her help.

And so what I want to do is I'm going to offer some guidelines following the series that we did earlier on Guigo the Second on the Ladder to Heaven, Lectio Divina, Discursive Meditation, Prayer Leading to Contemplation. I want to follow that classical sequence here and model for you actually practicing it for you as a way to help you then on your own kind of get into the stream of this, like how to practice this. And then when I've gone through a passage and walked through it this way, Kirsten will chime in and she'll take a passage and read it and she'll do it as if she was coming to me for spiritual direction. Then I'll be asking her leading questions to elicit from her maybe looking a little deeper what that might mean to her and so on. So we hope this will give you kind of a hands-on, practical way for you to pursue this prayerfully on your own if you're so inclined this way. So we begin then with Lectio, Davina, with the Lectio. And the Lectio is we turn to a passage in Mechthild, and I have a passage here that I've selected that I wanna look at. And we turn to a passage in Mechthild, and first we would, and it's best to take a section, like one of the sections, or a paragraph. Some of the sections themselves are too long, so it'd be like a paragraph in one of the sections. And you would read it very slowly. You might read it very slowly several times. And just simply sit in the spirit of the words that you've just read. You just sit with it. Because Lectio, Davina is sustained attentiveness to a depth of God's presence not yet thought about. So you haven't yet reflected on it yet. You don't know what it means. But already in opening yourself, your soul, or the interiority recognizes a certain depth or resonance of God's presence in that. And you sit with that.

Then in the discursive meditation, I'm gonna read the text. And then we're gonna, I'm gonna model for you, walking through this as a discursive meditation. And it's real for me. This is how I would really do it in my meditation. As a guideline to think like bullet points, to be aware of this, that's guiding this. As I start reading this section, that we read it, sit with it, and then ask ourselves, I ask myself, you ask yourself, what is my present understanding of Mechthild's understanding of what she's sharing with us in this passage, or what she's sharing with us that God shared with her? Where am I presently at in understanding? And here's where you might journal. This is where you might try to write this out if you find it helpful. The second guiding question, guiding the meditatio, the meditation, is when have there been moments in my life where I've tasted a glimpser of something, of this sense of God's love that she's talking about, as subtle as that taste might have been? Where has it ever been? And so for me personally, my understanding I'll be sharing with you shortly, and for me, in my own life, I've been blessed so much in my childhood with moments like this. And spending six years in the monastery, there are a lot of moments like this. So I was kind of saturated by these kind of moments. And then in reading Mechthild's words and taking her words to heart, how would I then say, and I'll be doing it. I want to share with you how I would try to say it. But likewise, if you were doing it, you would share how you would try to say it. Either just say it out loud to yourself in the presence of God or write it out. If you were going to say it, like paraphrase, the truth in your own words, like write off on it personally for you to make it personal. And then reflect, the next point would be on how you're learning to understand this love in your life and what it means. By understanding means kind of interiorly appreciate or interiorly recognize in a personal way the truth of it or the beauty of it. So that today as you write this out, you could look back maybe just a few years back, you wouldn't have been able to be nearly so clear as you are now, that you're on a growing learning curve. Likewise, if you just keep going in the years ahead, it will get even deeper. And this ever-deepening experiential understanding of internalizing God's Word. And then the next question would be, what is this deepening love awareness of Mechthild's God Speaking to Me Through Her? What's it asking out of me?