Teresa of Avila: Listener Questions (Part 2)

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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James Finley (0:08)

Greetings, I'm Jim Finley.

Kirsten Oates (0:11)

And I'm Kirsten Oates.

James Finley (0:13)

Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.

Kirsten Oates (0:22)

Welcome to the final episode for season two of Turning to the Mystics, where we've been turning to St. Teresa of Avila and her book, The Interior Castle. It's been an absolute joy to be a part of this season, and thank you so much for listening. We're ending on a wonderful note, turning to listener questions in a dialogue with Jim. So let's get started. Well, thank you for being here, Jim, and this is our second episode on turning to listener questions. And we're so grateful for the questions. They really help with the understanding of your teaching. So thank you for sending them in.

You ready to get started, Jim?

Okay, great. So we have a question from Amy, and she's asking, would you consider Elliot a mystic? I think he was as so many poets.

James Finley (1:20)

Yes, first of all, TS. Eliot and other mystics too will see it in a broad sense, yes. As a matter of fact, I have a retreat that I give on four quartets, and once we finish the Christian mystics, we'll see how the series goes. But I'd also like to do each one on these poets. I'd like to do Blake and TS. Eliot and Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins and Rilke. And on the poet is mystic, and Heidegger's thoughts on poetic thinking. It's thinking that transcends conceptualization and so on, yes. And so is TS. Eliot a mystic? Let's say this. I want to make a distinction between mystics in the classical sense of the Catholic tradition, Teresa, John of the Cross, and instances such as TS. Eliot. The TS. Eliot is definitely in the broad sense a mystic.

Because he has this, actually, for example, the Four Quartets, the theme of Four Quartets is realizing that we tend to be trapped in the circumstantial temporal order of the unfolding of time, trying to find happiness in time. He gives example after example how it's not possible. It's a hopeless cause because of death, because of brokenness. But if we accept it's impossible, we're never going to find it there.

The birthless, deathless love of God shines through that brokenness. The fire and the rose are one. And therefore he has a very refined mystical sensitivity about him. And then the classical mystics that he sources, with Julian of Norwich and quotes John of the Cross, and then Krishna of the Bhagavad Gita and the Buddha. So he's definitely, yes, it's very, very mystical in that sense.

Related to it is the distinct sense, and we don't know because I'm not aware, maybe I just haven't found it yet, where he self-discloses at this level. Because the mystic in this narrow sense of these classic mystics is that using Teresa's imagery of the Seventh Mansion, for example, that there's a place poetically in God where the infinite presence of God is presencing itself as our presence, like a communion, as a capacity to be realized, she says, in the imperial heaven, the highest, highest heaven. And that highest heaven of the capacity for that union is then in the very center of our soul.

And so in the classical sense, it's literally being divinized through love, so that one's very reality is realized to be the reality of God.

And so that narrow sense of the divinization and our nothingness without God is distinct from the broader mystical sensitivity that one finds in poets and some artists. It's in all of our lives, really, through dance, through music, through healing process. Intimations of the mystical dimensions or layers of these experiences.

Kirsten Oates (4:55)

That's helpful.

So the poet offers us insights into reality that we might not, the kind of the mystery, the unseen components of reality that we might not otherwise see. So in that way, it's helping us become more present, more aware, more conscious.

James Finley (5:17)

Notice there's another way of putting it, I think too, is the poet says things that we can't take in what the poet is saying by determining that I have to conceptually be able to explain it.

I have to be willing to let the need to explain fall into the background, to be present to the intimations of the unexplainable, this poetic voice. And there's something, quote, mystical, but, you know, in the very fact we can appreciate the poem bears witness to the mystical dimensions of ourselves that were nourished by that. And the same then with the mystic, see, when we read Teresa, we're struck by the beauty of it, but we can't let what she's saying enter into us.