The Way of a Pilgrim: Session 5

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

You're listening to a podcast by the Center for Action and Contemplation. To learn more, visit cac.org.

SPEAKER_2 (0:07)

Our desire is to honor and share the best parts of the Christian contemplative traditions, so that this collective wisdom might serve the flourishing of humanity, all beings, and all of creation.

My name is Ben Kesey, and I lead the development team at the Center for Action and Contemplation. I want to thank all of you who are generous donors giving freely and cheerfully to make this work possible. If you've been impacted by these podcast conversations and are inspired to invest in the future of CAC's mission and work, twice per year, we invite your financial support. To contribute, go to cac.org/donate to make a gift. Thank you so much.

James Finley (0:51)

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

Greetings, everyone, and welcome to our time together, Turning for Guidance, to the author of The Way of a Pilgrim, one of the great classical texts in the Christian mystical tradition.

In our previous session, we left off with the pilgrim in the midst of passing on to us. The guidance, the starts offered him in the practice of the Jesus prayer that embodies what the starts called the inward process in which we find our way to the realm of the heart.

And as a way to begin this session, I'd like to share with you how I have my own prayer and in all these sessions, all the mystics, the Kirsten, Oates and I that we do together and doing a lot of spiritual direction, I'd like to pass on to you a way that has helped me to understand what the realm of the heart is.

Each mystic has his or her own words for it. But I'd like to understand what it is because what we're doing really, what's happening here is we're being offered a language that allows us to talk about things that are not easy to talk about because they're so interior and so delicate and really so beyond what can be conceptually explained. So the more we're able to discern the meaning of the words and discern the ways that it's really a way of putting words to the stirrings of our own heart. It draws us into it as subtle as those stirrings might be. You know, they're intimate and true and they bear witness that we are on this path, which is the only reason these talks make any sense. So the more sense it makes, the more accessible it is. The more accessible it is, the more helpful it is. So I would like to pause and do that for a bit for us to kind of find our way to this. First of all, the realm of the heart, one way of putting it could be this, is that the realm of the heart is a realm within and beyond ourselves, which is God's very presence or God's inmost being or God's very heart being given to us as persons created by God in the image and likeness of God. So we might say the realm of the heart then is our God-given, godly nature, our inmost being as God's beloved in our eternal nothingness without God, this way. And so it's who we deep down really are in a trans-substantial communion with God in a state of oneness, this way. So when Jesus said, I came that you might have life and have it more abundantly, the life of which you spoke was the life that was at once God's in our own. The realm of the heart is that one life, it's there. It's there, always.

Now sometimes, though, what we find in the Pilgrim, they talk about finding our way to the realm of the heart.

And that implies we need to find our way to the realm of the heart, which alone is ultimately real, because we've become exiled from it. Otherwise, we wouldn't try to find our way to it. So what we're took, in this point then, the realm of the heart is we're trying to find our way to a path in which we're healed from all that hinders us from living experientially in the realm of the heart, in consciousness this way. And so here then we see in the Pilgrim, as in all the mystics, is the story of the fall. The story of the fall and the mythic story of the garden. Adam and Eve were created by God in the image and likeness of God. And so their nature, their human nature, was translucent to the realm of the heart. It glowed with it this way. And we were like God because we were created by God in the image and likeness of God. The fall was trying to be like God without God. And in trying to be like God without God is the idolatry of this illusory split-off self this way, which is the dilemma of our exiled state. This is why we don't see God. We look around, God's nowhere to be found. Even though God's the all-encompassing reality and where God's manifested presence, we look around and we can't see God with our finite eyes. We can't touch God with our hands. We can't find words that are adequate to God. And also then, if this is also true then, we don't see ourselves either. That is, we don't see the realm of the heart where we are the beloved one with God, like we're strangers to ourself.