Guigo II: Session 1

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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James Finley (0:08)

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

Greetings, everyone. And welcome to our time here together by turning for guidance offered to us by the Christian mystic of Guigo II in his classic work, The Ladder of Monks. In the first session with Kirsten, kind of laid out the background information about Guigo and creating kind of a context for this text. And so we can move directly here into focusing on why I think this text can be particularly helpful to us. Because he gives such a succinct, practical guidelines for the actual experience of seeking God in prayer. And because I think when we listen to these mystics, there's the flow of all these beautiful insights. But where does it land? That is, how can I experientially get in touch with that place where I'm committing myself to the actual experience of exploring these beautiful transformative realizations of God's presence in my life? In my prayer life concretely, what's that look like? And I think that's what's so practical about this and so helpful. And so I'll begin right in, just as he starts, at the very beginning, this is chapter two of, each of these chapters, by the way, the whole thing is only 17 pages long. And so each chapter, sometimes just a paragraph long, two paragraphs long. And so the second chapter, Guigo writes, one day when I was busy working with my hands, I began to think about our spiritual work. And all at once, four stages in spiritual exercise came into my mind, reading, meditation, prayer and contemplation. These make a ladder for monks, by which they are lifted up from earth to heaven. It has few rungs, yet its length is immense and wonderful, for its lower end rests upon the earth, but its top pierces the clouds and touches heavenly secrets. Then he tells us what these four rungs are.

Reading, Lectio Divina, is the careful study of the scriptures, concentrating all one's powers on it. Then the second rung, is meditation, is the busy application of the mind, to seek with the help of one's own reason, for knowledge of hidden truth. The third rung, prayer, is the heart's devoted turning to God, to drive away evil and obtain what is good. And so the first three rungs, then, kind of correspond to Teresa of Avila, the first three mansions of the soul, and that they're the life of devotional sincerity, they're the life of prayerful experience of God's presence in our life. And how to experientially ground ourself in these grace-evolving states of consciousness, of Lectio Divina, meditation, and prayer, is then going to open out upon and blossoms in this mystical consciousness of infused contemplation, where the soul's like lifted and raised above itself.

And he repeats himself again. He kind of summarizes again in this very succinct way. The reading seeks for the sweetness of a blessed life. Meditation perceives it. Prayer asks for it. Contemplation tastes it.

What I want to do here is I want to share with you how I experience each of these graced evolving states of consciousness, both within myself and also over the years, just having sat with a lot of people and contemplated a spiritual direction on retreats and so on. I'd like to make this as concrete and practical as possible as an actual experience. So, hopefully, it will help you kind of concretize your own search for God and your own moments of prayer on this transformative journey toward union with God. So I'll begin then by saying first, I think what matters first is that we come to our place of prayer and we sit and settle ourselves.

And just inadvertently, I saw on the internet, there was an excerpt of one of the talks that Thomas Merton gave to the novices at the monastery on prayer. In his opening line, he says, the way we begin in prayer is that we belong to God. And all the prayer starts, unfolds out of that, that knowledge that we belong to God. He said, but when we talk about prayer as a topic, it gets very complicated about methods and stages and so on. And so what we're trying to do here is to get past the topic of prayer to this deep experience that we belong to God and that we're God's beloved. And so we go to our place of prayer and we sit, Thomas Merton says, with God a little sincerity goes a long, long way. And we sit in prayer renewing our faith that we're sitting there in God's presence, all about us and within us, closer to us than we are to ourselves.