Dialogue 3: The Singular Life

James Finley (0:00)

Greetings. I'm Jim Finley.

Kirsten Oates (0:03)

And I'm Kirsten Oates.

James Finley (0:05)

Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.

Kirsten Oates (0:15)

Welcome, everyone, to Turning to the Mystics, where we're turning to the book, The Cloud of Unknowing, by an anonymous author.

And I'm here with Jim, and we're going to dialogue about his last session. Welcome, Jim.

James Finley (0:31)

Good, glad to be with you again.

Kirsten Oates (0:33)

You too, Jim. In the last session, you focused on chapters 68 and 38 of The Cloud of Unknowing, and I'm wondering why you chose those chapters.

James Finley (0:44)

I chose those chapters because, as we go through each of these mystics, I'm trying to focus the point at which they help us discern the point at which our prayer is becoming mystical, and how to understand what that means, and how to explore it and surrender to it and so on.

So there are a number of places in The Cloud where the author does that, but these two chapters in particular, I thought were particular, profound or luminous, kind of poetically beautiful. So I chose them, yeah.

Kirsten Oates (1:23)

Yeah, I really enjoyed the episode, and the poetics of it were very clear and beautiful. So thank you.

I wanted to start by reminding people that through The Cloud of Unknowing, we're learning a method of prayer. And in this episode, you focused on the role of the word and how we might use the word as a way to create a wholehearted presence towards God and so that we might experience our union with God. So there's some clear, actionable instructions in this book, but then there's also these very poetic descriptions of why we would enter into this type of prayer, how it might be helpful. And Jim, is that because this prayer isn't really guiding us to a particular outcome? So these poetics kind of put us in the realm of, I think you said in the episode about trying to help our soul resonate or sing with the idea of this union with God.

James Finley (2:32)

Let's say that for a comparison, that when Teresa of Avila speaks of the beginning of the mystical and the fourth mansion, your soul's being enlarged to divine proportions.

At which point this contemplative prayer starts to take on its mystical quality.

There's no method for her, except to keep surrendering to that. You go deeper and deeper and she offers guidance in the phases that it goes through. Same way with John of the Cross, in the passage through a dark night, this deprivation of a sense of God's presence and where God's weaning us off these finite ways of experiencing God. So there's no method in John of the Cross. Rather, it's to cooperate and surrender and understand what's happening to us as we're entering this state of more wordless, mystical union. And likewise with Merton, there's no method either. So with The Cloud, there's no method actually. In other words, it isn't like there's some method and if I perform this method, then this will happen. Rather, what it is, is a way of concretizing how to fulfill a desire. As you would go through the common life, religion is a way to fill moral norms to the special, which is devotional sincerity, in which we are grateful to God for his gifts to us, our very existence, our faith, our love and so on. And in that special way, there are these stirrings of love. And the stirrings of love tend to be very fleeting, but they kind of render the devotional sincerity more luminous or vibrant or more.

And he says in these three ways, the common and the special, those two ways, begin and end on this earth. But also what begins is the singular way, which is the way of the desire to stabilize in the oneness fleetingly experienced in the stirring. Instead of just accepting it fleetingly, to allume in devotional sincerity, you desire to abide there. That singularity, that singular way, he says it also ends here, when we die, pass through the veil of death. But it opens out on the perfect way, which is God's own life and glory. But the thing is, that perfect way, which is God's own life given to us in glory, begins here and it begins in this desire. It's really a foretaste of heaven. You're literally experiencing God accessing you as God and drawing you and transforming you into this knowledge born of love.

And so he says, well, how do we, how do we, instead of saying just cooperate with it, do it like John of the Cross, he said, here's something you can do, a way to pray. But what gives its meaning is it's a way your heart is responding to how to concretize itself in this strange desire, this mysterious desire. And that's the guidance of the person. It's a method in that sense.