Dialogue 1: The Journey Begins

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 (0:23)

Welcome, everyone, to season nine of Turning to the Mystics, where we're turning to the anonymous author who wrote The Way of a Pilgrim.

And I'm here with Jim, and we're going to dialogue about Jim's first session for this season. Welcome, Jim.

James Finley (0:40)

Yes, yes, welcome. Good, we're all together again, which is good.

Kirsten Oates (0:44)

Yes, yes, and we have a little announcement we wanna do at the beginning, which is an invitation to our audience to share aspects of their own pilgrim journey.

The idea being that as they listen to your sessions, it might bring to mind their own experiences. And so we'd love to have a, we'd love to hear from people to share about their own pilgrimage experiences.

James Finley (1:12)

And I'd like to add this also, that always when you send in questions, we're not able to read all the questions, but we always read all of them. And the same is true with any of these personal entries that you make.

We'll read all of them, but we'll be able to read a random sample.

And also I suggest it can be anonymous or not anonymous, it's up to you. And also probably to choose a decisive moment, like a turning in your own awakening. And also not with this, but in a bigger thing to consider it, is to write your spiritual memoir in the present tense at the feeling level. That is right, no matter how little you were when you got your first sense of God was real, your first sense of, to just kind of, because a spiritual practice to see how you've been led right up to this, where you are right now in your own journey of God's presence in your life and so on and so. But this would just be more of a single incident that you might care to share.

Kirsten Oates (2:16)

Yes, beautiful. So, people will have until May 6th to submit their story. We're going to have an episode dedicated to reading out people's, what they send us, or some people may choose to leave a voicemail. So the details of how to submit the story are in the show notes. You'll have until May 6th to send it and just to reiterate what we're looking for is, as you listen to this Pilgrim's Journey, where you have resonance in your own journey, please send us a couple of paragraphs or leave us a voicemail. And yes, if we can keep it to one experience and just a couple of paragraphs so we can get through as many stories as we can.

Right, well with that, we'll get started talking about session one, which I'm just loving this journey with the Pilgrim, Jim. It's just spectacular.

And I wanted to start by talking about some of the key themes. You give some kind of overarching ideas at the beginning of that session. And one of them is that this story is the ultimate dimensions of our story, our own life infused with God. And that this can make us more consciously aware of what's happening or has happened or is happening to us.

James Finley (3:46)

Yes, two things.

One, this is written as a personal narrative, like it's a Pilgrim story. So we really don't know whether it's actually the Pilgrim story or an anonymous author is writing it as the Pilgrim story. But either way, it brings home the big point that this whole journey towards God is our life.

You know, it's our very life. And so this kind of concretizes that and brings it out. And the second thing is this, is that, and this is true of all these mystics really, that the historical period and the details of this Pilgrim's life might be extremely different than ours externally. But what we're really looking for is universal themes of awakening. And we could take all the mystics and find how he or she weaves these themes as almost how grace is woven through our hearts collectively. So the details would be different, but we're looking for where we've been touched with a certain sensitivity or a certain longing or a certain concern. And that's really the subtext that runs through the whole thing, where that touches our life as it applies to us.

Kirsten Oates (4:56)

You made this beautiful statement that the Pilgrim is on a quest, but it's a quest God created in us.