Dialogue 4: The Perfect 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. We're in season five of Turning to the Mystics, and we're turning to the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing.

And I'm here with Jim, and I've got some questions for you, Jim, about your talk last time. I wanted to start with something you said during the talk last time, which was you said that God's always meeting you where you are. I find that quite comforting, but I just wondered if you'd unpack that a little bit in relation to what you're teaching about The Cloud.

James Finley (0:51)

First of all, in the spiritual worldview of the Christian faith, in concert really with the spiritual worldview of all the world religions, but for our way in the Christian tradition, Judeo-Christian tradition, is that God's with us first in the ongoing self-donating act of God in creation, like let there be light, let there be stones and trees and so on. So what we have then, it's a self-donating act where the presence of God is presencing itself in and as the presence of ourselves and everything, and it's nothingness without God.

So in the ontology or the very being of things, we see that the world is God's body and that it's bodying forth the love that's uttering it into being. So there's that. Next, there then raises the question as persons, where we're created as persons, that we're endowed with the capacity, not just with reason, science and all that and culture, really, but we're also endowed with the capacity to awaken to that. That is, we were called with the capacity to be quickened by the divinity of ourselves in all things, which is religious experience.

And then in the quickening, in the sense of the divinity or the wonder of each moment of life, we're then called to freely surrender to it, to this love, because love is never imposed, it's always offered. And the level at which or the ways in which we're aware of the divinity of our life and the ways in which we respond to it, that God's always present in that way, that God's always waiting for us where we are. So even at the most rudimentary level of the first stirrings of the holiness of life, God's wholly there, wholly giving yourself, giving himself to us in and as the sincerity of that. And then the author of The Cloud and all these mystics, the gospels, are showing us how that can go deeper and deeper, deeper, deeper, deeper. So we're always trying to find out where we are, be present to that, because that's where God is with us, and see the mysterious path we've traveled so far to get here, and then keep leaning into it to see what God has in mind, because it's eternal and endless, and to this arc, and to being divinized, really, for all of eternity.

Kirsten Oates (3:31)

That's so beautiful. It made me wonder about people who have found this podcast, and I wonder how God's meeting them in the way they found the podcast, and as I listen to it.

James Finley (3:43)

And that's what I think, too, when we first discovered the Mystics, when I first read Thomas Merton, is you serendipitously come up on it, but then you can tell, they're talking about what your heart has tasted, see? That this, I can't explain this, but I can tell what's being spoken of, is what my own awakening heart is being awakened to, and that makes it a real find.

You know, I find your community and enter it, and yeah, I think so, too, yeah.

Kirsten Oates (4:16)

Yes, I do remember when I first found your teaching, Jim, I just didn't know life could have this kind of depth I've been longing for it to have, the kind of love and forgiveness and acceptance that I've been longing for it to have.

The book, we're turning to the mystic, we're turning to the cloud of unknowing. You talked about how this book is for a particular kind of people that have this longing for God, a stirring and a longing for God in a deeper way than they have right now.

Is that, am I saying that correctly?

James Finley (4:52)

Yes, in this sense, and this is what I was really focusing on on turning to chapter eight. Say we start first with chapter eight, and this will get us back to the forward in the cloud of unknowing. So in chapter eight, he's offered this way to pray, grounding yourself in this love, seeking God for God's sake and not for any of his gifts.