Dialogue 4: Love

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 season 11 of Turning to the Mystics, where we've been turning to the philosopher, Gabriel Marcel. In this episode, I'm going to dialogue with Jim about his fourth session on love. Welcome, Jim.

James Finley (0:38)

Yes, thank you. Love's a good note to end on with Marcel.

Kirsten Oates (0:43)

Yes, yes, I'm looking forward to the dialogue. And just to give the page and book reference, you read from The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel by Kenneth Gallagher, and you read from Chapter 5, Roman Numeral 3, which starts on page 86 and goes through to page 90, the section on love.

James Finley (1:05)

The end of the chapter, right?

Kirsten Oates (1:07)

So before we dive deep into love, I found it helpful each time we look at these path elements, fidelity, hope and love, to ground us back in the vision element, just as the reference point, because the path is helping to concretize what we experience in the vision aspects. So Jim, just using Marcel's words, Marcel's really helping us to recognize that we tend to spend the majority of our time focused on the problematic. Our thoughts, our consciousness is aligned to this realm of the problematic. And Marcel's inviting us to recognize that, alongside that realm, is always present the realm of mystery. And he's helping us see ways we might be more open to and might recognize when this realm of mystery breaks through into our consciousness. And would you say also, Jim, he's saying that our life is kind of without meaning and trends towards despair without this realm of mystery being concretized in our lives.

James Finley (2:20)

Yes, I think it is good to start this way to kind of reinstate ourself in this vision. That Marcel is reminding us that yes, the problematic, which is the realm of what's dualistically other than ourself, we look for a solution or an answer, my car won't start, the roof is leaking, and so on. That's real. Mystery is different and then its dimensions of reality and turning towards them, we realize we're always included in what we're turning towards. So when I ask, what is it to be human? What is consciousness? What is love? The mystery of my very presence is meaning the mystery of extending out into consciousness and to love and to meaning and so forth. And he goes on to say, not only that, and this is really getting closer than to Marcel, is that the mystery of ourselves extends out into the infinite mystery of being, which Gallagher points out is really extends out into mystery of God. And it extends out into the infinite mystery of God, this extending itself out and giving the mystery of itself away as the very mystery of our self. And that's Marcel. So it's an intersubjective, transubjective communion that we're subsisting in. That's our ontology, that's the ontological mystery of our being. But then he says, but we tend not to be aware of that. As you point out, we're overtaken by the problematic and so forth. So what he's talking about, there are certain moments where this unit of mystery, this communal mystery of the mystery of the infinite giving itself away as the mystery of ourself, there are nothingness without the infinite. Where it breaks through into consciousness. That's his point, like moments of awakening, like thou moments. And breaking through into consciousness, he singles out three aspects of this. One is fidelity. And really, in the succinct way of saying it, is fidelity is the experience of God's infinite fidelity to us and giving the very mystery of God to us as the mystery of ourselves. God's ever faithful, that's the covenant of this communal oneness this way. And then with hope, we realize the experience of hope, in Marcelian sense, this experience, is that we realize it's a moment of awakening in which instead of in the ego self thinking, I hope that, meaning the outcome of some unresolved concern, we hope it turns out the way we hope. That hope is the realization there's nothing to hope for because nothing's missing. Because the eternal plenitude of God is being given to us as the eternal plenitude of ourself. And that's the eternality of ourself. Our body dies. That which just begins in time ends in time. But the mystery of who we are does not begin in time. When we're born, who we eternally are out of the depths of God appears in time. And the self that appears in time ends in time. And so the image of the child on the merry ground swinging around into view, that's where we are in time. And we appear, and when the child swings out of view, that's when we die and disappear. But who we are, this ultimacy of ourself, is the eternality of ourself. The self that never passes away, endlessly ripping through all this, endlessly passing away. And there's a certain moment in life where we fleetingly experience that. So now we're going to be talking about love. So we're being very free here to state explicitly in the mystical language, which is implicit in Marcel, that God is love.