Dialogue 3: The Dry Salvages

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 (0:23)

Welcome, everyone, to Turning to the Mystics, where we're turning to TS. Eliot and his poetry in the Four Quartets. And I'm here with Jim to discuss his third session. Welcome, Jim.

James Finley (0:36)

Yes, thank you. Thank you, glad to be together again with our listeners.

Kirsten Oates (0:41)

In the third session, you focused on the third poem in Four Quartets called Dry Salvages. And you opened with sharing that it's actually a place off the northeast coast of Cape Ann, Massachusetts. I actually looked it up. There's images online for the place. And it helped me to look at the images as you discussed one of the key themes of this poem, which is that our interface with the primordial.

James Finley (1:09)

Yes, you know, it shows you his sensitivity to the spirituality of place. Because when he would vacation in the summers at Cape Ann and look out, he could actually see it as a small outcrop of rocks.

Kirsten Oates (1:22)

Yes.

James Finley (1:22)

With a beacon to warn ships so they wouldn't crash on the rocks. And then he saw layers of meaning. He took something like that, and that becomes the leaping off place. You know what it reminds me of? There's a passage in Gabriel Marcel. He talks about a deep thought. And he said, well, what is a deep thought? He said, it's like standing at the shore of the ocean. And you look out in the distant fog, in the distance, in the water, there's an island. The deep thought is you realize the island is inside of you. See, that's TS. Eliot. He sees the mythic layering of concrete places in our life and invites us to be sensitive to that also. Yes.

Kirsten Oates (2:05)

Well, looking at the pictures of it, it looks very primitive. I'm going to use the word raw, which in my accent, people don't normally understand. R-A-W, raw. Although it has the beacon, it's very untouched and there's birds that cover it. There's seals on it. It's surrounded by deep blue water. The sky, all you can see is sky above it. So it feels really untouched by the industrial age, by technology, by those sorts of things.

Yeah, so I just encourage listeners to perhaps look that up, to get a sense of what he's pointing us to. And Jim, in the reflection on the poem, you said, nature is God's first scripture. I wonder if you could just, who said that? And maybe you could help unpack that.

James Finley (2:59)

That's found in the classic text, I think, of all the world religions in different ways. And because, see, when God said, let there be light, and let there be stones and trees and stars and so on. So what we have in creation is God's ongoing self-donating act of the manifested presence of God as the gift and the miracle of the world, of the passage of time, the way the light of the day yields to the darkness of the night and the night to the day, the smell of roses. And so all this is created and is being perpetually created by God. So the world is God's body and it is bodying forth the love that is uttering it into being. So we can, it's so deep in the Christian tradition too, you know, the contemplation of the world as incarnate infinity, as holy.

Kirsten Oates (3:54)

Because if we think about the Bible and Christianity and the scriptures, they came about at a certain point in time, well beyond the beginning of time. And so this primordial way of looking at things that God was always present. And there was a spirituality to humanity even prior to the Bible and scripture.

James Finley (4:15)

And so in indigenous peoples and shaman shamanistic lineages and so on, and they had primitive cave drawings that they found. So there's something like a primordial, primitive spiritual sense. So with the scriptures, the revelation of scripture, it explicates the divine origin of the holiness of the world. In the beginning, God said. But it's explicating what is there, the divinity of different lineages of that revelation to world religions.

Kirsten Oates (4:49)

It's really helpful to step back and see things in that way. And it's helpful to see why nature is so illuminating to us, where it can be a ground for these kind of spiritual experiences.

Well, let's move into the poem. And it starts off, I do not know much about gods, but I think that the river is a strong brown God. What a wonderful opening. Yeah, to see the river as a god. And then, and Jim, you show us that there's ways that these primordial aspects of creation, that we've lost touch with them. We've forgotten their power, both on the positive side, how they're life-giving, we die without water, but also how they have their own life that we can't control.