Dialogue 6: The Prayer in Ordinary Life

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 nine of Turning to the Mystics, where we're turning to The Way of a Pilgrim by an anonymous author. And I'm here with Jim to discuss your final session for this season, Jim, on The Way of a Pilgrim.

James Finley (0:39)

Yeah, it's been so good walking through this text again. It's such a touching, lovely thing. So it's been wonderful to share it with people.

Kirsten Oates (0:49)

Yes, I'm so grateful. I've really enjoyed it too.

So you covered a lot in that last session. So we've got a lot to chat about today. I wanted to start by quoting you when you said that we're following the pilgrim in this arc of transformation. And what matters is the interior depth of the meaning of the experience, rather than the exact external details.

And we're learning to sensitize ourselves to the deep meaning of things and not get trapped on the surface. So I'm hoping today we'll discuss some of those interior insights that you've been drawing out for us.

James Finley (1:33)

Yeah. One way to at least begin, we'll keep looking at it in different ways as we dialogue here in our time. But one way to look at it too is that what we're really talking about are certain moments of awareness or shifts in feeling or sensitivities. But what we're really talking about deep down is this metamorphosis of our very subjectivity that the grace of God is transforming the very depths of ourself into itself, into this realm of the heart, this oneness, which is, Merton says, just hidden in the ground of love for which there can be no explanations.

We're looking at the expressions of this ineffable transformation, how we bear witness to it.

Kirsten Oates (2:18)

Yeah. And so from that vantage point, we see the way the pilgrim was awakened to that realm you just described, the realm of the heart. And with a dilemma, the dilemma of how to pray without ceasing.

And then he was offered this prayer as a path that leads to the realm of the heart.

James Finley (2:42)

Right.

This invitation from God to these more unitive, wordless states of communion with God, these mystical dimensions, the awakening comes in different ways.

But one thing that they all share in common is that the present way, efficacious unto holiness of devotional sincerity through prayers and reflection and so on, are not an adequate context to step into what's happening to us. Somehow we have to leave behind a dependency on thought. We don't reject thought. A dependency on emotions, dependency on kind of going into a deeper place of the realm of the heart that transcends thought, transcends emotion, but reverberates to thought and through emotion. But it's no longer adequate to have that be our base of operation this way. This is a state of experiential communion.

Kirsten Oates (3:45)

Yeah, and the prayer is kind of concretizing that.

James Finley (3:49)

That's right.

Kirsten Oates (3:49)

Yeah, yeah. I wanted to start just as a reminder of where we're at with the pilgrim. So this is the text of where we begin our discussion. So he's just been told to pray 12,000 times a day now, at the end of session five and then in session six.

I did as he bade me. The first day I scarcely succeeded in finishing my task of saying 12,000 prayers by late evening. The second day I did it easily and contentedly. To begin with, the ceaseless saying of the prayer brought a certain amount of weariness.

My tongue felt numbed. I had a stiff sort of feeling in my jaws. I had a feeling at first pleasant, but afterwards slightly painful in the roof of my mouth. The thumb of my left hand, with which I counted my beads, hurt a little. I felt a slight inflammation in the whole of that wrist and even up to the elbow, which was not unpleasant. Moreover, all this aroused me, as it were, and urged me on to frequent saying of the prayer. For five days, I did my set number of 12,000 prayers. And as I formed the habit, I found at the same time, pleasure and satisfaction in it.

And so, Jim, you started by just reflecting on this idea of the constancy of the prayer. So, he went from 3,000 to 6,000, now 12,000. And this building up of this constancy of the prayer is part of the pedagogy.