Turning to T.S. Eliot

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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

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 (0:23)

Welcome, everyone, to season 10 of Turning to the Mystics. And I'm here with Jim. Jim, welcome. And we've made it to double figures to season 10

James Finley (0:35)

Yes, we did. I'm grateful for how well this has been received, and we can continue on sharing these insights with people.

Kirsten Oates (0:43)

Well, with that, let's get started, Jim. Let's have the big announcement. Who is our new mystic for season 10?

James Finley (0:51)

Yes. You know, in all of our sessions so far, we've been turning for guidance to the Christian mystics. And we're going to continue doing that in further sessions. But here for the first time, I want to start turning to poets with a strong kind of mystical tone to their poetic voice. And this time we'll be turning to TS. Eliot in the poem Four Quartets. And as with the mystics, I'll be reading a stanza in the poem. And then translating the message of the stanza to serve our purposes here on how we can experientially allow these words of TS. Eliot to deepen our experience of and response to God in our life. And so we'll be walking through this poem in that way.

Kirsten Oates (1:44)

Yeah, beautiful. I'm so looking forward to it. And Jim, I think it would be helpful just to talk through what a mystic is. Now we're shifting from these Christian classical Christian mystics we've been studying into poetry. How do we think about mysticism and how the poet might join the mystical?

James Finley (2:06)

It would be good to keep doing this every so often because the term is so atmospheric to the essence of what we're saying, guidance from the mystics. And so what does that even mean? And how does that apply to us? So it will take a few minutes to walk through this. And here I want to share to say first that there are vision aspects and path aspects to mysticism. The vision aspect is a spiritual worldview. We might say of contemplative Christianity, of the contemplative traditions of the world of religions. And here I want to be returning, we saw this in Merton, we saw it in others, to Carl Rahner. It puts the vision this way. Understands that the grace of God is God's self-donating presence, giving itself away as the presence of ourselves, others and all things. So it's the divinity of the immediacy of everything. And this is why then every event in our life where we're awakened by the value of life, we're awakened to the goodness of life, for the call to be true to ourselves, is God. Even though we might not be explicitly thinking of God as God, it's the divinity of the immediacy of life itself, as holiness. And then when we think of it in terms of religion, like for us in the Christian dispensation of Christ, it makes explicit that divinity in our tradition. And so there's two ways of looking at this. There's the mysticism in the broad sense, which is the mysticism of daily life. And so mysticism is basically this. It's all the ways that we experience God's presence in our dreams, in the providential nature of the unfolding of the events of our life, in our relationships, that felt sense of knowing that we're being sustained by and God is one with us in life itself. And the call to be faithful to that through love and through gratitude, through fidelity and so on.

And so there's that. It's the mysticism of devotional sincerity this way. Then we saw it takes a turn of the mysticism of the masters, which are the mystics that were the exchange of the cross piece of Avila Meister Eckhart. And the mysticism of the masters is where that sense of God's oneness with us becomes so refined, we're so luminous or delicate. It actually starts becoming a sense of infused contemplation. It's like God's experience of being God accessing us and given to us as our experience of God and who we are in God, which is the mysticism of the masters. And this is a very delicate point for all of us because that devotional sincerity is a kind of a subtle tipping point where there's a strange sense of an intimate oneness, where we and God mutually disappear as dualistically other than each other. Very subtle, subtle, subtle. But for some people, it becomes an underlying habitual state that they learn to live in the mysticism of the masters. So what we find in Four Quartets is both of those. TS. Eliot was a devout Anglican. His faith, he lived devotional sincerity. But we find in his poem, he quotes the mystics. He quotes John of the Cross. He quotes Julianne of Norwich. There's allusions to the Buddha. There's allusion to the Yoga Sutra of yoga. Namaste, I am that. And of Rumi, the mystical Islam. So it's just woven with these mystical innuendos of the masters. But it's woven into the concreteness of life itself. So when we read TS. Eliot, it's a kind of Alexio Divina, where we kind of drop down into being, he's guiding and helping us to be sensitive to that mystical dimension of ourselves. So to read the poet is like a way to pray, or it's a way to carry it over into daily life. So I think that's one way to understand what we're about here, about the mystical.