Guigo II: Session 2

James Finley (0:00)

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

Greetings, everyone, and welcome to our time here together. Turning for guidance to the Christian mystic, Guigo II, that he offers us in his classic work, A Ladder of Monks.

In the previous introductory session with Kirsten, and then the following session, I was sharing with you that I think was particularly helpful for us here in our Reflections, in the series of podcasts, is that Guigo gives very practical, experiential guidance in the practice of Alexio Divina, discursive reflective meditation and prayer as an actual experience, something, a guidelines, and how do we actually engage in these modes of seeking to deepen our experience of God's presence in our life? We saw how he presents this, these teachings in the metaphorical image of a ladder up to heaven, reaching from earth to heaven. So each rung of the ladder is a great state of consciousness. And by stabilizing ourselves in the first state of consciousness, Alexio, how that evolves in a great state into a meditatio, a kind of a grace dialogue with God, which evolves in this prayer, which comes from the heart center, this desire for deeper union with God. In this session, then, we're going to turn to the fourth rung of the ladder, which is contemplation.

And contemplation is significant here, and distinct from the previous sessions, in that by contemplation, Guigo means infused contemplation, or the point at which this deepening experiential awareness of God's presence in our life starts to become mystical, this infused contemplative state. And here a clarification I think is helpful, is that in the first three rungs of the ladder, there are contemplative dimensions that are always present.

By contemplation meaning what's always present in the Lectio is we instinctively pause in taking in the beauty of a word heard, God speaking personally to us, and we pause to contemplate that, that is to kind of quietly ponder it or to sit in the presence of that. And so too with meditation, in this loving exchange with God and this reflective consciousness, there's a natural kind of contemplative pausing to let it soak in, to rest in it, and so too with prayer. Likewise, in each of these we state there are mystical awarenesses, or sure, awarenesses of God's oneness with us. Mystical, this unexplainable sense of God's oneness with us in our body, God's oneness with us in our emotions, God's oneness with us in our senses, God's oneness with us in looking up to see the moon at night and so on. But these states of contemplative mystical sensitivities in the first three rungs of the ladder, we think of as the awareness of God's oneness with us.

But here what the mystics are concerned about is first they assume the importance of that, that we do our homework in that and we work on that. But what they're concerned about is knowing that it's not just that we become transformed in surrendering ourselves over to God's oneness with us. We'll realize our destiny or our deepest identity is not simply in God's oneness with us, but the sense in which we're one with God in God. That is, when we die and pass through the veil of death, we'll pass beyond these mediations or incarnations of God's infinite presence, allumining our finite understanding, allumining our finite emotions, allumining our finite, and we'll cross over into an infinite union with the infinite union with God as our destiny.

And so what we're really talking about now, with infused contemplation, the mystical state, is the grace awareness that God with us is not waiting until we're dead to begin granting us this awareness of our oneness with God in God. That is, God accesses us and grants us a taste or a sense of God's knowledge of God, or a deepening experience of God's knowledge of who we are in God, hidden with Christ and God before the origins of the universe. And it's this mystical union of the masters that is at the heart of all these mystics that we're studying. For what they're doing is they're offering us guidance in how to discern this is starting to happen to us. Because we may think it comes from some lofty thing like a vision or a voice, and it is lofty. But what they're trying to help us to see, it's lofty in its disarming nearness. It's lofty in the surprising simplicity of it. And how do we calibrate our heart to a fine enough scale to begin to pick up the subtlety of this infused state of union with God in the sense of transcending the senses, in the emotions, transcending the emotions, and so on, the subtlety of it. And so each mystic, as you see, has his or her own way of helping us to see this based on their own experience and the people that they saw in spiritual direction and are trying to offer this direction to us in their writings. And so Guigo is now offering his. And he's also offering it to us, as I pointed out in the previous time with Kirsten, is he was living it as a hermit in solitude. That was his vocation. We're called to experience it out here in the world, in the midst of the daily work, in the midst of our relationships, in the midst of our challenges. How do we, in the sincerity of our seeking, begin to pick up this taste, this oneness of the mystical, and how do we, in discerning it, learn to cooperate with it? So this is how, this is Guigo's teaching then on this. He begins, to get at this, we have to back up a little bit and go back to prayer. So we're in the Lectio Divina, like we were exploring earlier. And then there's the meditation and the prayer. And in the prayer, we might say, is the sincerity, is devotional sincerity with God. That is, in this prayer, Thomas Merton says, our prayer begins by simply accepting that we belong to God. And in belonging to God, we sincerely seek to become more consciously aware of how deeply we belong to God. And we pray from our heart for this deepening realization of this union of God's oneness with us. Then in prayer, Guigo writes, this is section six, I seek by reading and meditating what is true purity of heart and how it may be had, so that with its help I may know you, if only a little Lord.