The Way of a Pilgrim: Session 4

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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James Finley (0:10)

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

Greetings, everyone, and welcome to our time together, turning for guidance to the Christian mystic, the anonymous author of The Way of a Pilgrim.

We left off in the previous session with the pilgrim receiving guidance from the teacher on how to say the Jesus Prayer, along with the inner meaning of the prayer and its transformative effects on the philokalia.

And knowing specifically how the saying of the Jesus Prayer evokes and embodies the heart's ceaseless longing for God that echoes with God's ceaseless longing for the pilgrim and for each of us. That's kind of the essence of the matter.

And the monk, the teacher, ends his guidance in this way.

The starlet sent me away with his blessing and told me that while learning the prayer, I must always come back to him and tell him everything, making a very frank confession and report. For the inward process could not go on properly and successfully without the guidance of the teacher. I'd like to reflect on this. On the inward guidance, inward process, is that the inward process is the process in which we're transformed in engaging in a loving act that embodies the desire to be ever more like and one with what we love.

So for example, when two people fall in love, they sincerely give themselves to each other by speaking and listening and acting towards each other in ever more loving ways. There's an inward process that transforms them in love. It metamorphosizes their heart in love this way.

Likewise, another example is a teacher who loves teaching, who loves the students, who loves the subject matter, is given over in the sincerity of engaging in the act of teaching. And in the ongoing sincere commitment to the act of teaching, they're transformed into a teacher this way. And so the same thing could be said about someone learning to be a poet or an artist or to learn to sing or to learn to dance or to learn. It also applies to commitment to solitude or to silence. There's a commitment to seek that which we love, to draw closer to it and be transformed by love into that which we love, by fidelity to an act in which we sincerely give our whole self over. So we engage in it with all of our heart. And so the secret of the Jesus Prayer, this metamorphosis, is this ongoing engagement with one's whole heart. It opens the heart up to God's heart given to us and the mercy of God revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord. And that's the essence of the interior guide, of the process.

There's a saying in the Catholic tradition, the grace builds on nature.

And so it's true that the grace of the Jesus Prayer, this theosis, this divinization into this unity, this unit of state of oneness with God, is the gift of God. But it's also true, the more we learn to stabilize in an interior attitudes that are the most receptive and supple to that grace, the more effective the grace of God can be in our heart. And so this builds on our nature being transformed in the desire for love to be ever more receptively supple and receptive to love that it might deepen and grow in us.

And there's another reason too here for the starts saying the person is to report everything. And that is to say that we're, is that ontologically or ultimately speaking, God is being poured out and given away as the gift and the miracle of our very reality this way. So that if God would cease loving us into the present moment, we would cease to exist. But this is God's oneness with us now emerging into our consciousness. And this requires going forth from our customary ways of thinking and assuming into God's ways of thinking. And because it's the ego that's being transcended, must with God's grace make this choice? We're subject to self-deception is the thing. And that's why it needs a teacher, but the teacher is someone who's been transformed into this oneness. That's what makes them the teacher. And so the teacher is skilled or trained and listening for how to negotiate a fine one's way through the obstacles, a fine one's way through the unexpected graces. They give guidance out of the depth of their own maturation process in this very oneness that the pilgrim is being led into and guided like this.

And so what we're talking then about is, you know, Teresa of Avila, she talks about a state of absorption. And so really what the prayer is, by giving oneself over to the prayer, Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, by giving oneself over to the prayer with all one's heart for sustained prayer over time, it creates an absorbed state of a quiet subtle oneness that one needs to find one's way and learn how to follow the light that shines in that oneness this way. That's the subtlety of the practice and of this process.