Dialogue: The Second 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 (0:23)

Welcome to Turning to the Mystics. In this season, we're turning to St. Teresa of Avila and looking at her beautiful book, The Interior Castle.

In today's episode, I will continue to engage Jim in a dialogue, going a little deeper into mansions one, two and three. Last week, we covered mansion one, and today we'll look at mansions two and three. Before we start, maybe we could just do a recap of mansion one and kind of the key takeaways about mansion one. Do you want to start there?

James Finley (1:00)

Sure. We enter the first mansion of the soul at those points in our life where God's presence in our life becomes personally meaningful to us.

And where we realize that while our lives have an outside through external events and circumstances, our life also has an inside. And that interiority of our life in which God is present becomes something personally important that we feel drawn to stabilize ourself in.

But it's difficult because when we first find our way into this first mansion, our heart is still divided with the external pressures and concerns and complexities and all of that. And so Teresa says people in the first mansion, they do pray, but they don't pray well and they don't pray often. It's hard to find the time for it. And then when you do pray, it's hard to deal with the distractions and so on. So it's the gift of it, but you're also feeling the challenge of how can I learn to stabilize in this kind of more attentive state present to God. And that whole process of that is like first mansion realities, John.

Kirsten Oates (2:30)

Wonderful, thank you. And then Jim, how does the movement take place between mansion one and mansion two?

James Finley (2:38)

This idea of the door, the leads of the second mansion, being prayer, humility and experiential self-knowledge, is that, and I think another characteristic of the first mansion also, is for the first time, we try to clarify the meaning of basic things. Like what does God mean? Or like what does God love me? Or what does it mean I have a soul? Or what is the mind? Or what, you know, we just hear these things. But for the first time, I think we try to sort out, you know, how to understand what they mean and how to be faithful to them.

And also for Teresa, she's assuming here this is in the Christian tradition of discipleship. This is the first beginnings of seeking discipleship. So what happens is that it's very personal to each person.

Over a period of weeks or months, whatever it is, just consistently, every time we stumble and fall and slip away and come back again, stumble and fall and come back again, the accumulative effect of that sustained sincerity reaches a certain point that it opens the way to the second mansion, which is a more kind of interior sensitivity or awareness of the first mansion reality. But now the interiority of it is more clear or more kind of has atmospheric intimacy about it that it didn't have in the first mansion.

Kirsten Oates (4:08)

And Jim, we were talking earlier that Teresa doesn't spend a ton of time on the second mansion, but that doesn't represent how important the second mansion is.

James Finley (4:24)

Yes, she says it, just says one chapter, but she says the reason it's so brief is she says, I've dealt with it at length elsewhere. So she wrote two books prior to this one. This is the last book she wrote before she died. And so this first mansion, going into the second mansion, it dealt with at length, and one of the books was Her Life, her spiritual autobiography. And it was dealt with in chapters 11 through 13 And the other book was The Way of Perfection. And that was in chapters 20 to 24

So the listeners could go there if they're interested, and we could see there a more kind of extended thing. She saw how important it was to be grounded in this. So right here, she's kind of synthesizing it. We're just touching on some key points in it.

But that's why it's so brief here, not that it's not important. And even the points that she makes here in this one chapter, as we look at it, we can see the importance of it. These things that she's referring to, because they're so practical and real as we move in closer to God in our life.