St. John of the Cross: Session 6

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, turning for guidance to the teachings of the Christian mystics and John of the Cross.

In this session, I'm going to go back to the beginning and summarize in my own words, my own understanding of the Dark Night.

And from there, also in my own words, to move on into the Spiritual Canticle and the Living Flame of Love, to introduce this understanding of the mystical awakening that emerges out of this Dark Night. That as we go through this transformative journey that we've been following, and it comes to a point where flowers or blossoms into this mystical communion with God, this God's infinite oneness with us in love, and realizing this loving knowledge with God. And then for the lexio part of turning to a text, I also then want to turn and send it to John of the Cross directly to Thomas Merton, where he summarizes St. John of the Cross himself as a few very succinct statements and his ability to make this more accessible to us. On what this mystical union is, this union of infused contemplation.

So hopefully, this will help make these teachings more accessible. I know they're challenging, but they're also deeply rewarding. But the more we can get into the wavelength, like get tuned in to kind of an intuitive resonance with what's being spoken of here, and the light it might shed on our own experience and our ongoing search for God in prayer and in daily life. I think that's our goal here. And then in the next session, which will be my last session on John of the Cross, I'm going to turn to continue on with mystical awakening, but I want to turn to passages in St. John of the Cross instead of my own reflections and Merton's reflections. What are the ways that St. John of the Cross in his words speaks of this mystical realization of communion with God? And then I think there will be two sessions after that, I believe, with Kirsten on dialoguing back and forth in a way that will hopefully bring to light the questions you've been presenting and some of our own questions to make this even more accessible as a way to bring this John of the Cross series to a close. And we'll take a break and then move on to our next mystic. So, let's look at this together. By the way, there's noise on next door. They're rebuilding this condo next door. Now, on the ocean side of the house, it's quiet, but my equipment's in here. So, if I get overwhelmed with noise, we'll just shut this down and wait and go with the flow, we'll see what happens. We'll do our best. So, we'll begin.

John of the Cross is assuming, and all these Christian mystic teachers are assuming this, on the importance of our life of devotional sincerity in living the Christian life. And in living the Christian life, it assumes some personal, ongoing relationship with God in prayer, in that that relationship with God in prayer then spills over into an habitual underlying Christ-like attitudes towards ourself, towards others, towards the earth in our day-by-day life.

And he's assuming also then that this life of ours is this Christian life, efficacious unto holiness, that it's important to understand how limited it is. It's real and efficacious, but limited compared to the union that awaits us when we pass through the veil of death into eternal glory. For on this earth, this, our experience of, understanding of, in response to God, in devotional sincerity, is we experience the infinite presence of God in our finite faculties, illumined by grace.

So, for example, when we sit in prayer, when we go to God in prayer, and other times during the day.

We're graced with consolations. We're graced sometimes with a sense of inner warmth, or a sense of, the felt sense of the presence of God sustaining us in our life, and we're grateful for that.

But because the gratification that we receive in these ways is a gratification through our finite abilities to be gratified, it's a finite way of efficaciously experiencing the infinite presence of God in our heart, through consolations, through affect, through love. Likewise, what we know of God in the reading of scripture and reading spiritual books, in the insights that we gain through the reading of scripture, it's the infinite knowledge of God received into our finite understanding of ourselves, illumined by faith. That our finite abilities is just finite human beings illumined by faith. There is this finite modality of efficaciously experiencing the infinite presence of God and so on. And this is our life. This is our life and we walk this walk and we live this way. And that way of experiencing and responding to God in our daily life, as in a mirror darkly, as St. Paul says, as an obscure certainty in our heart, as our faith, that the measure of this faith is love. And then we live by hope that when death comes and we pass through the veil of death, that we'll move from God being mediated or incarnate in finite ways of understanding the infinite presence of God, in finite ways of experiencing the loving union with God, we'll cross over into glory, into infinitely realizing the infinite presence of God, sharing in God's own life as perfectly as God shares in God's life, in our eternal nothingness without God, in the full light of glory. And this is the picture. This is the understanding of our life and our Christian life and so on.