Turning to The Way of a Pilgrim

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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James Finley (0:07)

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 nine of Turning to the Mystics. I'm here with Jim, and we're so excited to be launching a new season and a new year of this podcast. We're so grateful to all our wonderful community of listeners.

And Jim, why don't you get us started, tell us where we're headed this season.

James Finley (0:41)

Well, first of all, yes, it is good to start a new season and just the kind of ongoing grace this time we have together, Turning to the Mystics.

And this season, it's going to be more of the same. I'm going to speak from my heart, drawing from texts of mystics that have deeply affected me and drawing from it in a personal poetic way that I hope will arch over and touch people, touch the listeners in their own search for God. But also in a secondary sense, we're beginning a new phase here in The Reflections. And that up until now, all the mystics we focused on have been mystics in my own Roman Catholic tradition. So I was born, I grew up as Catholic and I went to this Catholic monastery, Merton Catholic Monastery, Thomas Merton, and it was him who introduced me to John of the Cross and Teresa and the Cloud of Unknowing down through the ages in this way.

But also in the monastery, it was through Merton that I was introduced to the notion that the Christian contemplative mystical heritage, to know that every religion has its own mystical contemplative heritage.

So that in all the world religions, you have an exoteric and an esoteric aspect. The exoteric is the specifically cultural, political, historical, creedal differences in customs and rituals and texts and like the structure, you can look at each religion. But the lifeblood of the religion is really this deepening of this surrendering ourselves over to this infinite love, this infinite presence, this infinite mystery of this. So we're going to be turning then to these mystics and these different traditions that have affected me, a text. So we'll be looking at Jewish, the Jewish mystical tradition, the Muslim mystical tradition, the Sufis, the Daoist mystical path, the Hindu and the Buddhist path, this way. I also want to look at some poets, mystical poets, and also I want to look at some philosophers, mystical philosophers. And so we're going to be branching out in terms of the context, but I don't want to get, I'm not going to get sidetracked into complications about history and theologies and so on. And how, the sense I make of it is this. Remember when we were doing The Cloud of Unknowing, we talked about these phases, he says, of engagement in the Christian life. There's the common life, which just serves certain social needs and so on. There's a special way of the Christian life, a devotional sincerity, where discipleship and God's presence in your life is intimately real and substantial to you about your life.

And then in the middle of, in the midst of living the special life, there can be, you can experience the grace of a quickening, like a taste of oneness.

And the oneness can awaken the path to abide in the oneness that you tasted. A oneness with God beyond lexio, beyond reflection, beyond words, beyond concepts. And that becomes such an intimate kind of necessity of your heart because of the singular way of life, which is really a foreshadowing of eternal life. It's already the beginning of heaven.

Lives still in time, but beyond time and so on. So, those same gradations are present in all the world religions. And all the world religions are people living just the common day-by-day cultural life as a Buddhist or a Jew or a Muslim, whatever. There are those who are sincere in their devotional life of experiencing the divine in their life within that tradition. There are those who are interiorly quickened with the taste of oneness in the tradition. And there are those then who seek to yield and be transformed in that divinization in their nothingness without God. And then there are those who are called to be teachers who have been so awakened to offer guidance to those who are awakened. So what we're going to be doing is moving across those mystic teachers in each one. And I want to limit myself to just the few texts that have personally touched me so we don't get sidetracked into exoteric historical things and stay with this so we can see the universality of this mystical union that's ribboned through all the religions, really, this way. So that's the tone. So with that said, then in the light of that, in this session we're going to start with a text called The Way of a Pilgrim.