Dialogue 1: The Soul Came to Love

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 eight of Turning to the Mystics, where we're turning to the 13th century German mystic, Mechthild of Magdeburg.

And I'm here with Jim. Welcome, Jim.

James Finley (0:35)

Yes, yes, welcome. Glad to be with each other again.

Kirsten Oates (0:38)

And we're here to talk about your first session on Mechthild's book, The Flowing Light of the Godhead.

James Finley (0:45)

Yes.

Kirsten Oates (0:46)

Yeah. So I wanted to start where you ended your first talk, which is saying that you can't read Mechthild for content nor explanation. It's so dense with a love language that has no conceptual content. But if we sit with each thing she says in a receptive openness of love, we can begin to get reverberations of this loving union that is stirring within us.

And you said that this love language is the dowry of our being. Can you just talk a little bit more about that?

James Finley (1:20)

Yes, the dowry of our being. It's that one way to say it is that, I would say that God is love.

That the infinite love of God in an ongoing self-donating act is creating us in the image and likeness of love as our very identity, our very destiny. And so the infinite love of God is our origin. The infinite love of God is our sustaining ground. It is our ultimate identity and it is our fulfilment. This is love. And so it's in some sense, God given us like the very ontology of ourself, very living substance of ourself is love.

And so in that sense, it's the dowry of our being.

Kirsten Oates (2:15)

And how do you create that kind of open receptivity to love that you described?

James Finley (2:21)

First of all, I think each one of us creates it or responds to it at the psychological level and responding as children to our parents' love for us.

And in our parents' love for us, then we respond with love.

And when we respond with love, we see that it delights them. And so we also learn that in the family growing up, that it's love that makes the house a home. It's love that makes the house safe. It's love that makes that life rich with love is rich with meaning, rich with fulfillment. It's tricky because sometimes we're not so fortunate to be in a house where love is the underlying crevice of reality and it's intermingled with the trails of love. So we're all trying to deal with and sort that out.

But with God, there's this infinite love, infinitely giving itself to us. And we then experience that in our faith. We experience in our faith as the contemplative understanding of the scriptures of Jesus and everything. And again, it's an act of conversion because sometimes if we carry the betrayals of love inside of us, it's hard to take in the love of God. It's hard. There's like a part of us doesn't believe it or part of us is. So there's this intermingling then of psychological healing of love wounds. And the way in which as those are healed, the love of God aids us in that healing. We can grow and emerge into a more stabilized love, discipleship of discipleship of the Lord. So that then with Mechthild, what we have with Mechthild is that she reaches such a purity of love, it becomes mystical, it's mystical. That is, it's the intermingling of God's love with our very being as the beloved of God. So as we read her, insofar as we're moved by what she says, it bears witness of the capacities for these mystical energies of love to grow in us as we turn to her for guidance and helping us to stabilize it and then to live by it and share it with others.

Kirsten Oates (4:40)

And Jim, do you think it helps to kind of slow down to find that more openness, the opening to what she's saying or what she's revealing?

James Finley (4:50)

I would say my sense of it in the broad sense is that every time we're graced with a moment of love, say a child from their parent or the friend or the below, whatever, when we experience that we're in the presence of some love, it slows us down. That is, we become present to this love, that we experience flowing from the presence of the friend, this spouse, the lover and so on, and we internalize it.