Dialogue 3: Chapter 5

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Jim Finley (0:08)

Greetings, I'm Jim Finley.

Kirsten Oates (0:11)

And I'm Kirsten Oates.

Jim Finley (0:13)

Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.

Kirsten Oates (0:23)

Welcome, everyone, to season six of Turning to the Mystics, where we've been turning to the mystic Julian of Norwich.

And I'm here with Jim to record our final dialogue for season six. Welcome, Jim.

Jim Finley (0:36)

Yes, yes, good to be back to Julian again, yeah.

Kirsten Oates (0:40)

Wonderful. Well, my first question is around the chapter you chose. The first two reflections were on chapter 10 in the long text.

And for this final reflection, you chose chapter five. And I'm just wondering, what was it about that chapter?

Jim Finley (0:56)

Yes, I chose it because it's an example of how all these mystics really understood creation as an ongoing act of God, in which God is present, intimately present, in each passing moment of our life and our breath, the darkness of the night, stones and trees and stars, the smell of flowers.

And that it's our estrangement from that, that causes our fear and our confusion. And it's through love we can be restored to God's mysterious oneness with us in life itself, as a consoling and contemplative way to live in the world. So that's why I chose it. That's really our focus here.

Kirsten Oates (1:42)

Like a really foundational point that most of the mystics are trying to make for us.

Jim Finley (1:47)

Exactly, exactly. Creation is absolute and perpetual.

It's a self-donating act. So if at the count of three, God would cease loving us into the present moment, having this dialogue, at the count of three, you and I would disappear.

Because we're nothing, absolutely nothing, apart from the love of God loving us into this moment. But it's our nothingness without God that makes our very presence to be the presence of God. And the experience of that is the contemplative experience. So she's talks in a very lovely poetic way that kind of draws us into cultivating the sensitivity about the divinity of the intimacy of everything. That's why I chose it.

Kirsten Oates (2:30)

Wonderful. The two chapters you've chosen, 10 and five, they're so rich and it's been wonderful to have you unpack them with us.

Given this is our last dialogue, for people who have the book and might want to look at the other chapters, are they all like this, that you could just sit with them for a long time and there's so much packed into them?

Jim Finley (2:51)

She never lightens up.

I mean, the very first sentence, the very first paragraph, it starts.

And that's why it's like listening to music. You just stay with her patiently. And she becomes internalized, so you pick up sensitivities.

She guides us, trustworthy guidance. And little by little, this constancy of her God consciousness and life and God's mercy on us and our brokenness. And that's why you could finish the whole long text and then go back and start over again and just repeat it over and over until you die. And you'd never exhaust it. The gospels are like that. And that's what's lovely about her. And then if you care to, on your own, you can read commentaries like Grace Jansen's book, Julian of Norwich, and Paul Molinari, Julian of Norwich. And if you want to, if you're inclined, you can do the commentaries and come back and look at her. But we're using them here in the podcast as kind of poetic little ways to be touched by the presence of God in our life. From the first paragraph to the last, she just holds this amazing really, her mind.

Kirsten Oates (4:04)

I was struck by her words in this chapter where she says, and these words of the goodness of God are very dear to the soul and very close to touching our Lord's will.

And it seems that she's very confident in what she's saying, that it's her words, close to touching our Lord's will. And I'm just wondering, one, you know, have you felt like that Jim, when you're kind of channeling something you've been given and do you see that confidence in her?

Jim Finley (4:33)

Yes, I think in the language of these mystics, that we're being perpetually created by God as God's beloved.

And as God beloved, God wills for us to realize that we're God's beloved. That is, the touch or the taste of God.

And when we realize that we're God's beloved, which brings peace, then with it comes God's capacity given to us to say yes to that. So God's our beloved. So we give ourself in love to the beloved who's infinitely being given to us as beloved's beloved. And that union, that reciprocity, God wants us to experience that because that's our destiny on this earth in a veiled way. But it's foreshadowings of eternal life will spend all of eternity in this reciprocity of love. And then when we hear words like this, it's inherently consoling. Do I mean it's very, it's like it's beautiful or we wanna sit with it or we become aware of how sad it is that we're not more habitually sensitized to this. And so her writings, to sit with her writings, the trustworthy guidance is to stay with it and little by little by little it becomes more an underlying habitual sensitivity to how God's unexplainable nearness, like saying Augustine closer to us than we are to ourselves. And it's a spiritual groundedness as we go through life. Mm-hmm.