Dialogue 4: The Dark Night

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 our dialogue on session five, Turning to the Mystics. Jim, good to be with you.

James Finley (0:23)

Yes, good to be with you, yeah.

Kirsten Oates (0:26)

So in session five, you did something a little different. You didn't do your normal Lectio. In fact, there was no text from John of the Cross in the episode. You did more of a meditative reflection.

Could you just talk us through why you went in that direction?

James Finley (0:44)

Yes, yes. You know, there's a previous session, that chapter, it was so deeply poetic. We thought it would be better if you and I went through it together as a dialogue. Because the goal here is to make these teachings as accessible and understandable as possible. So with that in mind, with The Dark Night, I thought it would really be helpful to see how we've all experienced The Dark Night.

Because The Dark Night is kind of a metaphor, a visual metaphor of the transformative deepening of love. So I thought if we could see how The Dark Night, as that metaphor works in our love for each other, as between husband and wife, and then by implication between parent and child and child or teacher and students, or people committed to help others with healing or to living alone or to being old or being one with the earth. Any modality of a love that calls us to a yet deeper love. How is The Dark Night part of that transformative process? And suggesting, and this is what we looked at in marriage then as an example, suggesting that first The Dark Night is a kind of, is actually a brightness that blinds our eyes and that we're living in a certain level of love. And then we're graced with an awareness of a yet deeper love that's so deep we can't comprehend it. That is, it overwhelms us or touches us or reaches us, but we don't know what to make of it. So in that sense, it's a dark night by the very luminosity of our inability to grasp it from where we presently are.

Then the dark night then takes on a different meaning in which once we've got a glimpse of that brighter light and our eyes get adjusted to it, then we see that our present level of love is a dark night and that it's a kind of a darkness because it's a deprivation of the deeper light of love that we've been graced to experience.

And then we see we want to then move into that brighter love. We want to stabilize in it and we want to leave behind that lesser degree of love because now we've seen something that's richer. And then the dark night comes, we're attached to the lesser love.

We're attached to it because these are patterns of the mind and heart.

And it has to do with issues of control about not knowing how to leave them behind. And so we need to do love's work to courageously lean beyond our present comfort levels into the bright light. And then as we stabilize in that, then a new wave starts all over again. Then there's another wave of love. And that goes on over and over and over. So it keeps refining us and refining us over time. So I was saying, if we could see how this works in married love, then we could see how it works in parenting or with the artist or the poet or the teacher or the healer or the person in sobriety or the person who lives alone or the person, you know, any deepening of a love and the foundations of life itself. The Dark Night is a poetic metaphor that gives us a language for that. So, because if we could see it in each other, then we'll return back to John of the Cross to see in the same continuous way, how does it go on between us and God on the Dark Night within this infinite love? And so that was the logic for that session, hoping to help the listeners see that.

Kirsten Oates (4:31)

Yeah, and it was very helpful, so I appreciate. And that explanation you just gave is a great summary. And I do want to repeat some things back because I think you've just provided a lot of clarity for us. So the Dark Night is about the deepening of love and how we might experience the deepening of love. That's exactly right, yeah.

And then I noticed last week, and you said it again, there's these two aspects to the way love deepens. One is that we sense the deeper love and it's so bright, we go into a dark night, we're blinded by it.