Dialogue 2: What is Mystical Contemplation?

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 (0:12)

Welcome to Turning to the Mystics. Thanks.

Kirsten Oates (0:22)

Welcome, everyone, to season four of Turning to the Mystics, where we're turning to Guigo II and his book, The Ladder of Monks.

And in today's session, I'll be dialoguing with Jim about his second episode where he turned to Guigo for guidance last week. So Jim, welcome.

James Finley (0:43)

Well, thank you, yes. Glad to be back together again like this.

Kirsten Oates (0:47)

That episode, wow, beautiful.

Just so lovely. Yeah, let's listen to it a number of times. So I'm excited to have the dialogue. I was gonna begin by stepping back and just seeing if I'm in the flow of Guigo, witnessing him doing two things. One is he's talking about a method of prayer that can open a person to God's presence.

But then he's also teaching us about trying to share the experience of each piece of this method in a way, and the experience of how God, we might experience God in the method. Is that right?

James Finley (1:27)

Yes, this is my sense of it, or way that helps me to see it. Let's say that Guigo begins by assuming that we know by faith that God is present within us, all around us, closer to us than we are to ourself, and we're reassured by that and so on.

And then what we're looking for is how to experience the presence of God that our faith tells us we know is there.

And this is in the realm of prayer.

So in the realm of prayer, and he starts at the beginning. He says, well, we begin as we begin at the beginning, and we sit in a kind of a sincere stance, a receptive openness to God, which is Alexio Divina, and so we open the scriptures or open Guigo, whatever text speaks to us. And so the text I chose, I believe at the beginning, was where Jesus says, fear not, I'm with you always. So at the beginning, what we do is we listen to that, and we take it to heart in devotional sincerity, if the deathless presence of Jesus is personally telling us not to be afraid, because he's with us. And he calls that the first rung of the ladder to heaven. So lexio is a grace state of consciousness. But it's a grace state of consciousness that's a gift to even want to do it, or to be able to do it. But we have to choose to do it.

Unless we choose to set a time for a rendezvous with God, there's no time for a rendezvous with God. We have to freely choose to be there for God like that. And in the same way, within that leads to meditation, a loving exchange with God. We might journal, whatever is like a loving dialogue back and forth, like reason a loom and by faith. But again, it's a grace to give ourselves to that, to receive that. But we have to freely choose to cooperate with it. There's like an act of participation in this passive, this gift of grace is received and as the luxio stabilizes and the meditation stabilizes, it leads to the heart center of desire, a prayer, like help me with this. I can't experience your oneness with me without you helping me. So all those three phases are consistent with our life on this earth, in which we experience God's presence with us as in a mirror darkly or through a veil. So it's efficacious unto holding us, it's real, it's important. And by being faithful to that daily rendezvous, it can soak into us and become a bitch when we carry it out throughout the day. That's the first three steps.

But when he gets to contemplation, and this is this critical turning point in which, for these mystics, is what point does it start to become mystical? Mystical meaning that it isn't us experiencing and responding to God's presence mediated through our understanding, through our consolations, through our aspirations, but rather, there's a deepening of a longing, our finite longing for an infinite union. And because our longings are finite, they can't consummate an infinite longing. And therefore, God consummates it to infuse contemplation. And so he says mid-sentence, there's a border crossing, God crosses over in a kind of an ecstatic sense of unexplainably, it's just God in all directions, like the wonder of it, like the touch.

So what he's doing in the ladder, he's trying to say, how to discern this is happening to us? Because although sometimes there's extraordinary things that can happen with this, like inner voices and visions and all those things can, sometimes they do happen. But really saying, actually, it's extremely subtle. We're trying to calibrate our heart to a fine enough scale to discern a certain oneness that may spill over into feelings, but it's deeper than feelings. It may spill over into insights, but it's deeper than insights. And what it is, it's a foretaste of heaven. When we pass through the veil of death, into infinite union with the infinity of God, not in the fullness of glory, but in an obscure and hidden way, there's something celestial about this. And so he's trying to help us to understand this and to discern, look for the signs that it's happening to us. And how to cooperate with it. How to freely move with the flow of what's happening to us. And I think that's what's going on here.