Dialogue 2: The Special Life

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 this second dialogue for Turning to the Mystics, where we're turning to The Cloud of Unknowing that was written by an anonymous author. I'm here with Jim, and we'll be reflecting on his second talk. So welcome, Jim.

In the last talk, you were reflecting on chapter seven of The Cloud, and yet again, just beautiful. The words and the intonation is just beautiful. So just to begin, Jim, just wanting to ground us in what The Cloud of Unknowing is about, which is it's guiding us in a practice of contemplative prayer.

And I wanted to start with a phrase from your talk that really touched me. So you spoke about The Cloud helping us with this phase of our life, where this way to pray finds its meaning. That's a beautiful phrase. And I just wondered what you meant by finding its meaning. What's the meaning we experience?

James Finley (1:30)

I mean, put the whole thing in context. Let's say we were looking at this in earlier sessions on creation, Merton and all these mystics, how they understand this. So how they understand it is that God's creation, God's let it be, is absolute and perpetual. That is, in creation, God is pouring God out and giving God away in and as the reality of ourselves, others and all things. So if we think of God as generosity, that we're the generosity of God as are the passing of the seasons and the darkness of the night and the sacred quality of what is. So in that sense, the plenitude of God is the very realm in which we live.

Next, God also then, unlike stones and trees and stars, endows us with the capacity to recognize that as persons.

And recognizing that are these degrees of spiritual realization that come to us.

And these degrees of spiritual realization have, like there's incremental degrees of realizing the infinite generosity of every breath and heartbeat.

And so, in the very beginning, say, with, say, Guigo, with Lexio, he starts out with how we normally tend to understand God, his presence in our life through the gifts of God, revealed to us in scripture, through the, all this revealed that God is love, God is mercy, all that Jesus reveals, all the scripture reveals. And we take that, we take that gift in and respond to it in our Lexio, we meditate on it in our Lexio, we pray to deepen it in our prayer, and we seek to live it. And that's the context for how we tend to experience God and live our life. And we also know, our faith tells us, that when we die and pass through the veil of death, that we'll move from these mediations of God's presence in our life through the gifts of God, our life, our breath, our insights, our faith, we'll pass through the veil into God, as the Cloud of Unknowing says, God naked as he is in himself. And so knowing God is God knows God with God's own knowledge of God, which is Christ, loving God with God's own love of God, which is the Holy Spirit, being taken into God, being as much God as God is God, in our eternal nothingness without God, which is the mystery of the life of glory that awaits us. Well, what happens as we're living this life in this aware of God's goodness to us, through his gifts to us, the special way, is that there's stirrings of love, like deep stirrings of love. There's moments of unexplainable oneness or communion. And they pass, and those fleeting moments enrich our faith, they enrich our gratitude. But what happens in the singular way is that those touches of oneness start to settle into us with a desire to abide there always.

So it is as if poetically speaking, there's a boundary crossing, where God crosses the boundary. And in the desire to abide in the stirring, it's a foretaste of eternal life. We're not content with the gifts of God, with the insights of God, the consolations of God, the truths of God. And that's like the person writing the word water in the sand over and over and over again. For having tasted God, very God, all these thoughts of God, as beautiful as they are, we don't reject any of them. But compared to the beloved, it is God revealing to us that we are God's beloved. The singular way, then, is that longing.