Coming Soon: Turning to Emily Dickinson

Kirsten Oates (0:03)

Coming soon on Turning to the Mystics.

James Finley (0:07)

You know, in a previous session, we did TS. Eliot as a poet, as a mystically awakened poet. So now I'm turning to Emily Dickinson because I find her to be so gifted at helping us to see the presence of God in the ordinariness of the unfolding patterns of life itself. In silence and solitude, God's presence in nature and the sound of birds, the shapes of trees, patterns of things. And so our poetry is kind of a lexio divina. It's a kind of a spiritual reading, helping us to see and experience the move with God's presence.

It's amazing how we're strangely comfortable in being somewhat distant from ourselves. It's like we're almost like lonely for ourselves and we don't know it. We get so caught up in the complexities of the day, we kind of get lost in the complexities. So I think Emily is so good at returning us back to the intimate immediacy of who we are and who we're called to be. Each poem is kind of a homecoming.

Rather than going off into a definition or explanation, she doesn't deal with topics, but rather she helps us find words for the interiority of our own self. That's the intimate immediacy of how she helps us.

She isn't like the Missy's trying to help us find our way. What she's doing is she's just sharing herself with us. So she helps us to sit with ourself. And how do we sit in the ordinariness of who we simply are and learn to be an intimate familiarity with the holiness of that and to live by it.

Kirsten Oates (1:55)

Our journey with the poet Emily Dickinson begins September 28th and we hope you'll join us.

James Finley (2:02)

So blessings till next time.