The Cloud of Unknowing: Listener Questions

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 (0:12)

Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.

Kirsten Oates (0:23)

Welcome, everyone, to season five of Turning to the Mystics, where we've been turning to The Cloud of Unknowing. And I'm here with Jim, and in today's episode, we're going to be addressing questions that have come in from people listening to the podcast.

Welcome, Jim.

James Finley (0:41)

Yes, thank you. Good morning. Yes, good.

Kirsten Oates (0:44)

Well, we received a lot of amazing questions and reflections and notes of gratitude. So thank you, everyone, who made the effort to send something in.

And Jim, you were going to start with just some general reflections about what you read.

James Finley (1:01)

Yes, in reading, I read through all of these a couple of times, actually. And first of all, I was very encouraged by it because these are path questions.

That is, they're the kinds of questions or the kinds of things that people say who are on this path.

And also, I noticed this, how we respond here, because there were so many comments and questions, this would be a representative sample of some of the main categories. So some had to do with practice itself, things that come up in the practice, practice questions. Others had to do where it opens up feelings of trauma or feelings of... There's also a concern about what about other mystical traditions other than the Christian traditions. And also questions about different ways this relates to our life, daily life and so on. And so we'll be moving through these categories, singling out questions that are representative of that and maybe some other things besides. But overall very heartwarming questions, the responses of kind of the sincerity of the engagement was lovely.

Kirsten Oates (2:10)

Yeah, beautiful.

And Jim, just a little recap on The Cloud because there's all the questions we've chosen for this episode relate to The Cloud of Unknowing and people who are trying it out or asking questions about it. So just a little recap that The Cloud is a little different. This mystic offers a method, a method of practice. But the emphasis will correct me if I'm wrong, but what I hear from you in your teaching, the emphasis is not on the method, it's on the experience of God that the directee is longing for and how to support that longing.

James Finley (2:53)

Yes, each of these mystic teachers that we're doing, notice that all of them up until now, there's no method.

Thomas Merton doesn't give a method, John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, and so on. Among those mystics, what they're really looking for is how your devotional prayer and sincerity in prayer, on what point it starts to become mystical.

So if you want to call it a method, it's how to discern that's happening and how to cooperate with it. In Guigo, there is a method. But notice the method doesn't start out as contemplation. It starts out as the foundations in which contemplation occurs. So the lexio, the meditation, and the prayer. And then in that method, the contemplation is this unit to stay beyond method because it's mystical, it's divine.

So what you have in the Cloud of Unknowing is right from the beginning, it's a method. But notice it's like Guigo. It's not a method you just decide to practice. It's a response in the prologue to a taste of mystical love, a blind stirring of love in the hidden depths of your being. So the method is a way to concretize the intention to stabilize in that mystical state. So it's a method in that sense. So it's very similar to, say, artists who have to learn the principles of art, art school. But those principles are methods in service of the gift of art, which is beyond. Same with poets. You know, there's the discipline of poetry, but it's a discipline in the service of what transcends method.

And so we're going to see also a very similar method to this when we do the way of a pilgrim, the Jesus Prayer. It's a method, but it's the same kind of method. It's a way to get beyond the closed horizon, a conceptual thought and finite feelings into this mystical state. So that's the tone of it. I think that's my understanding.

Kirsten Oates (5:09)

Thank you, Jim. I think that's really helpful to ground us as we reflect on these questions together. So thank you for that.

I want to begin with a question from Tamsin and she says, I love Turning to the Mystics and I'm so grateful to be able to keep listening. I noticed that you're using he, him pronouns when you refer to the author of the cloud. Given that they are anonymous, would it be possible that you please use she, her pronouns sometimes? I personally have preferred to see her as a female, given that we don't know.