Turning to Emily Dickinson

James Finley (0:00)

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

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 (0:23)

Welcome everyone to season 14 of Turning to the Mystics.

And I'm here with Jim to introduce our mystic for this season, the poet Emily Dickinson. Welcome, Jim.

James Finley (0:36)

Yes. I'm so pleased that we're going to be walking through Emily to guide us to God. She's so been a big part of my life interiorly, so I'm so pleased that we're doing this.

Kirsten Oates (0:46)

And Emily Dickinson is a poet, that she's famous for writing so much poetry. So we're moving back towards poetry in this season.

James Finley (0:57)

So we already did one poet, TS. Eliot Four Quartets. Now we're doing her as a poet.

And later on, we're going to do William Blake. So we're going to be walking through poets as mystics.

Kirsten Oates (1:08)

Lovely. Well, drum roll. I'll let you begin the introduction to our new mystic, Emily Dickinson.

James Finley (1:16)

So as always, each of these mystics will begin with who Emily was historically to help her appreciate who she is spiritually. And I think also in a more interior way, it helps us to know it isn't who she was historically. She's not historical anymore because she's dead. But we are historical because we're still, we're not dead yet. So how can we know that even though we're still in history and we are going to die, what's the spirituality dimension of us that never dies?

The eternal significance of the mystery of who we are. So it's in the light of that, that we'll be exploring Emily.

Kirsten Oates (1:54)

Wonderful. I'll let you get started, Jim. Do you want to tell us a little bit about her life?

James Finley (1:58)

Yes. First of all, in terms of this kind of biography of her, there's a lovely website, The Poetry Foundation. It's an in-depth biography that people can look at on the internet. I'm basing it on that primarily. Emily was born in 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she lived until her death in 1886 at 56 years of age. Her home life was very kind of uneventful in a way. It was a quiet life. She had two siblings. There was her father and her mother. She was also in a privileged status, and that her father was a local politician, was in Congress for a while. They lived in this big, beautiful home. She lives in a privileged place. He was also one of the major contributors to Yale University. So that was kind of the daily ambiance of her home life. It's very interesting looking at her life, and what the formative influences were that were going to lead to her poetry. One was in the school that she went to, and it was a school in the Congregational Church, a kind of an evangelical Protestant tradition. They were very strong on the sciences, and also they were very strong from a faith perspective of God's presence in science. So you can see Emily's influence about birds and grass and night and water and sound, and the divinity of the ordinariness of the material world as a formative effect that was going to be coming out in her poetry. Also, she read an important essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson, and he made this statement, there is the power to speak in words, to say what is, and she was very taken by that. So she was very taken by a kind of intuitive clarity, like finding a precision to bear witness to what is, was a formative influence. There was also a professor that taught her along these same lines, and she found him very endearing in terms of this very astute in his observations. And when he died, she cried, like she grieved the teacher, that is, she grieved the one who kept leading her deeper into her own path. Another interesting thing about her, is she was an avid reader of Shakespeare. She read Shakespeare a lot, she had an illustrative edition of all of his plays. She even joined a group to study Shakespeare in depth. And in the Shakespeare class that I once took, he said, the thing about Shakespeare, someone's always stepping forward and proclaiming reality. That reveals humanity, reveals us to ourselves. And so you can see that influence in her also.

When she left that school that she was in, this church school at 15, she went on to the next school, which would have been normal for her, a girls' school, a Mount Holyoke school, an all-girls' school in faith. An interesting story about another revealing thing about her character. It says also something about the school. All the girls in the class, I want you to stand in three groups. Those of you, so crazy they did it. Those of you who know you're saved, stand over here. You found Jesus as your Lord you're in. Those of you who are not sure you're saved, but you're working on it and you hope so, you stand in the middle. Those of you who aren't saved and don't think you ever will but you stand over here and Emily was in that stand. She said something about her and someone pointed out to her how odd that must have felt to stand there. You see something about her character. She said it would have been stranger not to stand there because it would mean I wouldn't be telling the truth. And also the solitary clarity of who she wasn't standing in the truth of herself. Now this represents a new turn for us in the podcast because up till now we've been immersing ourselves in the Christian mystics that I was immersed in at the monastery and we did look at TS. Eliot as a poet. It was our first like poet mystic, but also he was so immersed in his own Anglican tradition, so woven in to the Christian ethos. It was so interesting about Emily Dickinson.