Dialogue: The Fourth Mansion

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 (0:16)

Thanks.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Turning to the Mystics. In this season, we're turning to the Mystics Saint Teresa of Avila, and looking at her wonderful book, The Interior Castle. I'm here with Jim, and we're excited to be talking about Mansion Four. I'm so excited to be talking to you today about the Fourth Mansion. As I was preparing, the questions were just flowing, and I'm just so excited to enter into this dialogue with you and learn more.

It's a beautiful mansion, and it's full of content, like lots of different ideas and things to learn. I wanted to start where she starts in Chapter One, where she says, now is when we enter the realm of the supernatural. I just wanted to start there and ask you, what does she mean by that? What's she talking about?

James Finley (1:22)

Yes. I think for her, what she means is that in the first three mansions, our experience is still, it's in our experience of ourself and ego consciousness, illumined by faith.

So it's through faith that we are able to first hear that God's present in our life in a way that experientially becomes real to us and we enter the mansion of our own soul. There's all those struggles. The struggle deepens and gets more pure in the second mansion, these traumatic bondings we have to keep releasing from. And then it matures in the third mansion, psychological, spiritual maturity. So that's kind of mediated grace concretized in the human experience on this earth, which is efficacious unto holiness.

Now, so there is this faith, the fullness of faith is love and it's filled with hope that when we die and pass through the veil of death, we'll pass an unmediated infinite union with the infinite life of God. We're destined to share in God's own life as perfectly as God shares in it in our nothingness without God. So what the supernatural then is, is that God doesn't wait until we're dead to begin to give us taste of an unmediated divinity flowing into the substance of our soul. And so this is not something then mediated through insight, belief, meditation and reflection. This is an unexpected intimate influx of the unexplainable presence of God poured into the very substance of our subjectivity. And she's calling that supernatural.

Kirsten Oates (3:27)

Wow, I need to sit with that for a minute. There's a lot in there.

Yeah, so this is a taste of what we might experience on the other side of death, which will be an infinite union.

James Finley (3:44)

That's exactly right. It's a foretaste of paradise.

It's a foretaste of paradise. And don't forget, this is how she began her book, that if we understand heaven is where God lives and if God lives in the seventh interior mansion of your soul, your soul is God's heaven. But it's hidden through these layers of attachments and so on, see? And so as these layers get purified in the first three, then what happens in the fourth is the layer of finiteness itself becomes translucent to the divine. See, instead of finite consciousness of the infinite one with us, there's this influx where our subjectivity becomes translucent to this divine influx of communion with us as the very reality of our life. And it comes as kind of an intimate surprise that kind of happens to you while you're praying. And so what she's writing for is to, because she knows this can be confusing and because it's often subtle, it can go on for quite some time even before you understand what's happening.

And so to understand what's happening and how to cooperate with it. So you can go deeper still. This is Teresa then as turning to the mystics for guidance. This is now the mystic teacher who's teaching us as we enter into this crossing over into this more unitive phases of the journey.

Kirsten Oates (5:15)

And this is really the expertise of the mystic, that this dimension of resistance.

James Finley (5:21)

It is, I think for many people, and she would say this too, I think for many people graced in this way, they don't talk about it with anybody. You know, they find their way through prayer and through the scriptures in their life. They just quietly are this way.

But Teresa is one of these people who's also called then to help others find their way.

And so we're listening, she's speaking out of her own experience because she knows because this is what happened to her. And as a contemplative spiritual director, she's helped people find their way. And so she's writing this down so she can help us find our way. And that's our link then to the lineage, the mystical lineage through Teresa.