Dialogue 3: A Love That Binds

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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James Finley (0:08)

Greetings, I'm Jim Finley. Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.

Kirsten Oates (0:24)

Welcome, everyone, to Season 8 of Turning to the Mystics, where we've been turning to the German mystic, Mechthild of Magdeburg, a student of Eckhart's. And I'm here with Jim, and we're going to talk together about Jim's third session.

And so welcome, Jim.

James Finley (0:44)

Thank you, yes.

Thank you. I'd be continuing on with Mechthild. She's such a beautiful mystic to study, so.

Kirsten Oates (0:52)

Yes, and I absolutely loved the third session, and I read along with the text, and I was curious, you chose three different parts of the book and pulled them together for that episode. I was wondering what the thread is there.

James Finley (1:08)

Yes, my sense is this, of course, in the whole series of Turning to the Mystics, we're really not studying the thought of any mystic. You know, for example, if we would do St. John of the Cross, when I did the Contemplative Prayer Group, with St. Monica's, I spent a year on one mystic. So if we were going to do John of the Cross, we would have done a whole year, which would be a very worthwhile thing to do. But what we're doing is just singling out beautiful passages that shed light on helping us deepen our experience of God's presence in our life.

And so I'm choosing, that's one criteria for choosing these passages. And the second criteria is for me, is in terms, I try to choose passages that are as accessible as possible. And that we can resonate with the dimensions of love she's talking about.

And so it has to do with that pastoral practicality in terms of following this path and ways we can recognize what she's talking about. We get reverberations of it within ourself.

Kirsten Oates (2:11)

Oh, lovely. Well, I'm looking forward to digging in to the passages you chose. And so if it's okay with you, Jim, we'll turn to the first one that you read, which was from book two. And it starts at the very bottom of page 91

And I wondered if we could just go through some of the sentences and phrases. They're all so deep and it would be nice to hear your reflections. Reading the first one, yes.

Lord Heavenly Father, between you and me, there goes unceasingly an imperceptible breath in which I come to know and see many marvels and inexpressible things.

James Finley (2:51)

Here she's, I think poetically, a bearing witness to the imagery of the breath where God is perpetually, like exhaling, the infinity of God, the very reality of God, like exhaling in a self-donating act.

Exhaling out as the gift and the miracle of our very presence and our nothingness without God.

Then deep within us, there is also, God breathes into us the capacity to recognize that and exhale ourself back into the breath of God. And that point there is that communion is like a foundational abyss-like unit of reality that is the reality of ourself and God. So she's saying that is the reality of ourself between us. And then she's saying that this is what her whole book is about. Her whole book is following a path of love in which that reciprocity of love becomes more and more explicit, and she's inviting us to follow that path, too, because although it's always there from God right now, God's exhaling herself as us being present to this talk. But we're not necessarily always exhaling ourself as a gift to God. We waver. And so she's trying to draw us towards a more unwavering constancy of the constancy of love that's always sustaining us in our inconsistencies. And so that's kind of what she's setting up here, I think, poetically, you know.

Kirsten Oates (4:34)

In the next sentence, this is another theme that comes through the passages you chose. Unfortunately, they do me little good because I am such a worthless vessel that cannot endure your slightest spark.

James Finley (4:47)

You know, whenever the mystics talk this way, like I'm a worthless vessel, Thomas Merton once said in a conference at the monastery, he said, we should never confuse spiritual truths by interpreting them psychologically. For example, humility is not an inferiority complex.

So when she says I'm a worthless vessel, you don't get the feeling at all that she's walking around feeling like a worthless person. She feels like she's very present, but rather she's in touch with a certain fallenness or a certain propensity for weaknesses within us all in this exiled state. But she's sensitive to that spiritually, but as a confident, clear-minded, love-filled woman, and she's inviting us to model that also.