Gabriel Marcel: Session 3

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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James Finley (0:10)

Greetings, I'm Jim Finley. Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.

Greetings, everyone, and welcome to our time together, exploring the trustworthy guidance found in the teachings of Gabriel Marcel. In the previous session, we explored fidelity as a path or a way of life to be more habitually established in the mystery of God being poured out and given to us as the mystery of ourselves in our nothingness without God. And in this session, we're going to continue on the path, this time moving from fidelity to hope. And so I'm again, I'm still in Kenneth Gallagher's summary of these teachings with the quotes. We're in chapter five of Kenneth Gallagher's book, Access to Being, Fidelity, Hope and Love. And we're moving from fidelity and hope, which is on pages 81 to 86 of Gallagher's book. That's kind of where we are. He begins, like he always does, with practical realities of daily life. And he begins by saying that hope usually, psychologically, refers to the ways that we hope that a certain situation that we're in the midst of turns out the way we hope it will. So it may be anything from a project at work, to a relationship, to a diagnosis of health, to this kind of the normal passage of hope. And I looked at it in this way, the psychological level, which is important, it's understandable. There's a word of prudence that Marcel's going to give around this understanding of hope, and how he's going to be suggesting hope that transcends this. What is the psychological day by day way we tend to speak of hope? He's talking about hoping in the inexhaustible oneness of God in the very mystery of ourself, like an inexhaustible hope that we will ever more deeply realize there's nothing to hope for, because the infinite generosity of God already is completely given to us, and he's going to be guiding us in moments where this flashes forth, where we fleetingly taste it, and then the path in which we can be more habitually established in that hope, the kind of the ultimacy of hope. He goes back though to say someone is just listening to this for as we listen to it and day by day awareness, the way we normally speak of hope, is to hope invincibly. He's trying to help us find an invincible hope. And now I'm in the top paragraph on page 84 Gallagher says, Shedding light on Marcel. Now acting in this way seems to lay ourselves open to the disappointment of not having our demand fulfilled or hope fulfilled is against this imprudence that the responsible investors of life caution us. Hope is a risky business. We can avoid foolish risk by not expecting too much. So he's talking about this invincible hope as a path to realize that the mystery of ourselves is the home of the infinite mystery of God being poured out and given to us as a mystery of ourselves. And the hope then is that we might be more habitually established in that. There's nothing to hope for and that everything is already, the infinity of God's already being given to us is the mystery of us. And so our hope is that we might ever more deeply realize that and learn to live by it. And so he's talking then about hoping in that ultimate sense. He makes the observation, this is us now from the psychological point of view as we typically would think of hope day by day. Now acting in this way seems to lay ourselves open to the disappointment of not having our demand fulfilled. And it's against this imprudence that the responsible investors of life caution us. Hope is a risky business. We can avoid foolish risk by not expecting too much. I want to reflect on like the practicality of this is what he's talking about. If we look at life, we see that sometimes the things that we hope for occurred. And that gives us a basis for the things we're presently hoping for. The ongoing blessings that we hope will continue on will continue to occur. And therefore we continue hoping that the things we're presently hoping for, or fingers crossed, will also continue to turn out. And therefore we hope that the present situation of unresolved outcomes will turn out the way we hope it's all completely normal. But we also know that life is such, is that what we were hoping how something was going to turn out didn't turn out that way at all. As a matter of fact, it ended in some traumatizing, disastrous way for us. And here I want to speak personally for me, this is so true, I'm here in Marina Del Way in Southern California. And I'm speaking to you in February of 2025, right here at the ocean, here where I live. And just a few weeks back, there was a horrible fires here, driven by 100 mile an hour winds, and just utter devastation. So I'm on the third floor of this condo, the lady owns the second floor, they have a home in the Pacific Palisades, their house burned down, it's gone. There's a woman who lives down the street. She did her doctorate in Julianne of Norwich. Sometimes we come and talk. Two years ago, her and her husband, I think, built this dream house, had this dream house, it burned down. And so you see the footage is just ashes everywhere. We know that the hope that we hope something turns out, is always mingled with the possibility of despair. Because of the unforeseeability of life, there's more ongoing blessings ahead, but there's also more unforeseeable tragedies ahead. And we can momentarily fall into despair that the way we hoped it didn't turn out that way at all. And a lot of psychotherapy is dealing with this, sorting it out and processing it and so on. But Marcel is trying to take us to a deeper sense of hope. And here again, I'm very openly here, putting explicitly terms of faith in God that's implicit in Marcel, in which Marcel himself says is faith. But it's like finding the presence of God outside religious traditions this way. And so for us in the Christian tradition, Catholic tradition, which Marcel became Catholic and lived in the Catholic tradition, where Jesus says as a passage in the Gospels, to be wise as a serpent and simple as a dove. To be wise as a serpent is not to be naïve about how unfair and how cruel and how tragic life can be. Jesus was executed. Things don't often, often enough, they don't turn out at all the way. Everything would seem to be lost. He said don't become so aware of the times of utter loss and devastation that you become the cynic and you forget how to be simple as a dove. For how can we find in the depths of tragedy itself, an invincible presence that doesn't prevent the tragedy, but shines mysteriously in the tragedy itself? This is why often in psychotherapy, after the fact, and sometimes even during the tragedy itself, in the midst of painful loss, we discover within ourself the pearl of great price, the invincible presence which can't be lost. Why can't it be lost? Because we can't have it. Because we don't have it because it has us. Because it's the infinite mystery of God giving itself away as the infinite mystery of ourself and our nothingness without God. And this is the hope. The hope is that we might learn to be habitually established in this.