Dialogue 1: Burnt Norton

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 10 of Turning to the Mystics, where we're turning to TS. Eliot and the Four Quartets. I'm here with Jim to discuss his first session, and welcome, Jim.

James Finley (0:37)

Yes, yes, so good to be together like this and share these teachings with the listeners.

Kirsten Oates (0:42)

And I absolutely loved the first session, diving into this poetry, and I thought it might be helpful just for you to give us a few words about how to settle in to a poem like this.

James Finley (0:55)

Here's the thing about poetry, and I'm thinking now when I was in the monastery, and we chanted the Psalms, which are poetry. And when I first went, we chanted it in Latin, like back and forth. And here's the thing, the poetic voice is not the voice that defines or explains. It's rather a voice that evokes sensitivities to the interior dimensions of our life.

And that's the poetic voice. St. John of the Cross, for example, or Meister Eckhart, even when they're doing the teaching, there's a poetic intonation to the way they talk.

Kirsten Oates (1:33)

Yes.

James Finley (1:34)

But the poetry is kind of the distilled state of an evocative language, a logos. And so Tia Sallie, that's why we're turning to the poet. To see this mystic.

Kirsten Oates (1:45)

Concentrated time with this experience, yeah.

James Finley (1:50)

And that's why to get into it, you have to tease it out.

Kirsten Oates (1:52)

Yeah.

James Finley (1:53)

See, it's so condensed, but that requires an inner work of the spirit, like a meditative sitting, to keep teasing it open, to see how it's true in your own life, and how we engage in it, or it engages us.

Kirsten Oates (2:06)

Yeah, because that's what's so wonderful about the poem is where you recognize yourself, or you recognize that sensation in your own life.

James Finley (2:16)

Yes. The way I look at it too is that clarity with the interiority of our lives cannot be found in linear explanatory language. It has to be like the language is evocative, and like the language of love, the language of silence, the language of beauty. And so that poetic language, that poetic voice allows us to find a logos for a word that explores these interior spiritual dimensions of our life.

Kirsten Oates (2:48)

Well, it's wonderful to have your guidance as we step into that. I wanted to start with where you started in that session talking about this big theme for the poem, really for the four quartets as a whole, which is that we're going to be learning about experiential salvation. And you also talked about how TS. Eliot experienced a lot of suffering, and perhaps this insight into experiential salvation is connected to all the suffering that he experienced. And I wondered if you could help me understand that connection.

James Finley (3:24)

Yes. For TS. Eliot, the autobiographical foundations for the poem is the suffering in his life, the societal level of living through two world wars, and the tragic falling apart of his marriage. And so in his earlier poem, The Wasteland, it gave voice to that darkness. Then later on, that's Wednesday, and in this poem, as in his own life, you see the light of faith shining through in a transformative way, that experiential salvation to be delivered from the tyranny of suffering and the midst of suffering.

Kirsten Oates (4:04)

So that is interesting, Jim, that his first poetry that came out of that deep suffering was really capturing emotional despair, like there wasn't a sense of hope in it. And people were drawn to that poetry because it was reflective of how people were feeling, I guess.

James Finley (4:22)

Yes. It gives voice to the tragic. And if it gives voice to it, it allows us to listen to it and be present to it in a meaningful way by acknowledging it.

Kirsten Oates (4:32)

But it took him time to then explore and have this, I guess, his own personal experience of experiential salvation to come back around and deepen his poetry with this part of his experience.

James Finley (4:48)

That's right. And so what the poem does with Burnt Norton, so we're at a scene where in the past a tragic event occurred, we're at a scene where there is suffering. But then he's inviting us to find the presence of God in the traumatising places of our life. See, the whole poem is like a meditation drawing us into that same realisation within ourselves. And the poem helps us to explore that.