Instructions for The Practice

James Finley (0:01)

Greetings, I'm Jim Finley.

Kirsten Oates (0:04)

And I'm Kirsten Oates.

James Finley (0:05)

Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.

Kirsten Oates (0:16)

You Jim, I thought it might be helpful if we spent some time just going through what these practices are going to be like and what you're hoping they'll be like for the people listening.

James Finley (0:26)

Yes. You know, when I started leading retreats, and then I started the Contemplative Prayer Group of St. Monica's Church, is what I tried to do was to be faithful to the kind of contemplative, like the archetypal infrastructure of contemplative community, like to honor it. Because it's like in a way, they're like transcendental qualities of our being that we're learning to honor. And so I understood it to be to have three aspects to this.

The first is to find your practice and practice it. And a practice is any act faithfully entered into with your whole heart that takes you to the deeper place.

As you learn to practice your practice, which is the daily meditation practice, eventually little by little by little, all of life becomes practice. That is you get habituated to that meditative mind day by day. The next aspect of this is to find your teaching and follow it. And the teaching is the teaching that bears witness to the ancient way of the divinity of all things, like to the generosity of God pouring out as our life.

And secondly, offers guidance in it, see trustworthy guidance in it. And so as we learn to follow the teaching, eventually you come to realize that life is the teacher, and you're being taught by God to your attunement, to the unfolding of your life, the lives of people around you, to the world.

And the third aspect is to find your community and enter it. And the community at the deepest level is your oneness with God, that is your ultimate identity. The next circle out from this meditative standpoint is just one other person in whose presence you know you're not alone on this path.

That you bear witness to each other as seeking this path, which is like a contemplative church. In Buddhism, it would be Sangha, or ashram or different traditions.

And so, as you gather, so in that eventually you discover then the whole world is your community. So based on that, I set up my gathering, say at St. Monica's Church, and I'm modeling this after it, that it has those aspects to it. So with that said then, what we're going to be doing here in these times together is I'm going to be offering a text from a mystic. And I'm going to be, we'll be turning to the mystic as Lectio. So we'll be hearing the reverberations of God's voice in the mystic's voice speaking to us.

And I'll be sharing with you how God speaks to me in the mystic's voice. So that you, by listening to the mystic and listening to me, can realize how the mystic is speaking to you in this. And therefore, the reading and the reflection on the reading will be our Lectio. But what I'll also be doing is I'll be reflecting on what's received. I'll be sharing with you what's given to me as I sit with that. We're sent and invite you to see what's given to you as you sit with that. And this will be our Meditacio. This will be our meditation. And this is where, by the way, in this meditative process, if you're inclined to do so, because like to your own self be true, this is where you might be inclined to journal. That's like a free associative kind of open exchange of processing within yourself. How would this reciprocity of this reflective consciousness back and forth between you and God occur?

And this lexio and this meditatio will then awaken and reawaken our desire to abide in this. That is, when we're in it, we experience it as a kind of a homecoming. Like we come to rest in it. And having rested in it, we seek to abide in it.

And in that process of that desire to abide, which is the prayer, we can begin to discover the inclination in the midst of all this to pause, maybe mid-sentence, maybe not to say anything, maybe not to think anything, but to kind of unexplainably rest in this union beyond thought and beyond words. And that union might be, there are moments that might be very intense actually, but very often it's very, very subtle. It's very, very delicate. And it kind of has its own rhythm to it, just like an intimate conversation between two people. And as it dissipates, you return back to your lexio, you return back to your meditatio, and then all of a sudden like there it is again. So it's an unforced way, a kind of moving with the grace rhythms of awakening. And so I would hope here that these sessions themselves would embody those qualities. But then at the very end, at the very end when I lead us into the meditation, as you're given to do so, I'll ring the bell, will bow, be still and know that I am God. And then just for one minute, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, whatever, just sit with what struck you about listening to the reflection, either in the mystic's words, my reflections on the words, or maybe something that awakened in you that had nothing to do with what I said. Just like a grace kind of unexpected connection with something. And then just sit with that, like to sit in God's presence in this kind of intimate, subtle kind of thing. And that's a very basic way of understanding meditation practice in this whole spectrum from lexio to contemplation. Then my thought would be then, as each meditation comes to an end, whether it's one minute or half an hour, you'd ask God for the grace not to break the thread of that connectedness as you go through the day. You'd have an underlying habituated sense of the constancy of that. And of course the thread will break many times during the day because of reactivity. And we keep an eye on our heart, because we know that although we break the thread from our end, that that is never broken from God's end. And the constancy of the love that loves us so in our wavering ways is the gratitude. So then we come back, if you're so inclined, then the next day you'd listen to the same meditation again. And you'd repeat the same practice. You'd sit with it again, open to it again, the lexio, the meditatio, the prayer, ask not to break the thread. And so by the end of the week, it would have been one week of learning to live a contemplative way of life. Because what we seek to do then is we seek to live this way. And we seek to live this way that we might share it with others. By the way we're present to them, the way we listen to them, the way we're real with them, the way we're vulnerable with them, the way we care about them. And we can be a healing presence in the midst of the world.