Jim Finley:

Greetings. I’m Jim Finley.

Kirsten Oates:

And I’m Kirsten Oates.

Jim Finley:

Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.

Kirsten Oates:

Welcome, everyone, to season 11 of Turning to the Mystics, where we’ve been turning to the philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, and I’m here today with Jim and our special guest, Gregory Sadler. Gregory Sadler is the president of ReasonIO, associate editor of Stoicism Today, an APPA-certified philosophical counselor, an adjunct professor at Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, and a faculty member in the Stoa Nova.

He has written a book called Reason Fulfilled by Revelation: The 1930s Christian Philosophy Debates in France, among many other books. And on his YouTube channel, you can find over 3,000 videos on thinkers, texts, and topics in philosophy. And Jim and I have both enjoyed watching Gregory’s teachings on Marcel on his YouTube channel, which is why we invited him to dialogue with us today. So welcome, Jim, and welcome, Greg.

Greg Sadler:

Oh, thanks. Thanks for having me.

Kirsten Oates:

So, Jim, on the podcast, you’ve discussed how Gabriel Marcel, like many of the mystics we’ve covered, incorporates both vision and path elements in his teaching. So could you begin by reviewing the way you’ve presented Marcel’s vision? And then, Greg, I’ll invite you to comment and expand on what Jim shares.

Jim Finley:

Yes. Yeah. I’d like to start with this basic vision of Marcel, like his understanding of reality, and the approach that he takes is helping us see the distinction between problem and mystery. And he understands problems as that which we understand to be dualistically and objectively other than ourself. So my car won’t start or the roof is leaking, or what’s the answer to a complex math problem? And he said, “When we turn toward the problem, we turn towards a method to solve the problem, or to someone who is an expert in that method. Then once it’s solved, we’re done.”

And he says, “The order of the problematic is the proper domain of the empirical sciences.” And he also refers to it as primary reflection, the subjective kind of thing of that dimension of reality and of our life. He says mystery is very different in the sense in which mystery refers… When we turn towards mystery, we turn towards aspects of reality. We realize that in turning towards them, we’re included in what we’re turning towards, that is, they’re nonobjective and they’re nonobjectifiable mysteries.

So when I ask what does it mean to be human, it’s I as a human being am asking what it is to be human. And what is love? It’s I, my desire for love and experience of what is love. And what is consciousness? And it doesn’t mean that reductionistically, as everything is referred back to my sentiments or my opinions, it’s the opposite, that the mystery of myself is extended out into the mystery of humanity, into love and consciousness, and ultimately, it’s extended out into being, which he sees as transcendence or the infinity of reality itself.

And the crux of the matter, I think the turning point for him, is that the infinite mystery of being is presencing itself and giving itself and manifesting itself as the mystery of who I am, that I’m in a transsubjective, communal state of the mystery, and he’s trying to help us stabilize or kind of walk in the clarity of that unity. And he sees this end as a movement towards secondary reflection, which is a reflective process of a state of humility or amazement or quiet awe, or open-ended exploration. So if you could respond to that, how would you expand upon that or refine it or help the listeners benefit from that insight?

Greg Sadler:

Sure. So I think the thing I would want to say at the beginning is that Marcel, he’s got a lot of ways of explaining what a mystery is, and one of the ones that I particularly like is that he says it’s a meta-problematic. So it isn’t as if you’ve got mystery over here and problematic over here. In most cases, what we become aware of as mystery in the way that Marcel is talking about, it’s because we are engaged with problems and the realm of the problematic, and somehow we start asking the right questions or getting confused about it.

And so, we move from primary to secondary reflection, sometimes without deliberately doing so. And a lot of times, when we do this, people get very confused, and they tell us to shut up and go away and quit bothering them with all of this nonsense. But I think one of the good things about people like Marcel is that he’s telling us, “No, no. There’s something really, really important here. Pay attention to it. Follow it out.”

So there’s a number of things that he talks about as mysteries. I know we’re going to talk about his transformation of the traditional discussions of faith, hope, and charity as fidelity, hope, and love, but death is a mystery. My moral obligations to other people can be understood through the domain of mystery. And there’s this tendency that he sees in our late-modern world of trying to turn everything that is a mystery into a problem, because that feels more manageable, and we’re very successful in a lot of things treating them as problems. Think about the great advances in medicine that we’ve made.

And actually, maybe we’ll come back to this, but one of the things that could be very useful about Marcel would be having doctors read him and think about him, and nurses and everybody else who’s involved in the medical establishment, especially insurance people, who seem to dominate our American medical establishment, and getting them to think in terms of not just problem and what he calls technics, but mysteries that require us to be exploring our own commitment.

And as you pointed out, Jim, a mystery is something that we ourselves become aware of our own involvement in that it’s inextricable. It’s not that it renders everything subjective and we can’t say anything about it, because we can certainly share it and explain it to each other, but I cannot effectively figure out what it is to, say, love my wife or my children, or even my students, without me being involved in it, without taking account of who I am, and maybe why I’m not a great lover in that respect, and how I wound up being that way and what would need to change on the way.

What else to say about mystery? I think when I’m teaching this to students, so this might be helpful to listeners, there’s this sense of mystery as something like in a mystery novel. You get to the end of it, and you figured out who the killer was or what their motive was or something like that. That’s not the sense that Marcel is using the term mystery.

Rather, it’s something that you can certainly find intelligibility. You can say something about it. You can convey it to others, but there’s always more. There’s always a surplus there. And in order for another person to adequately understand it, they can’t transform it into a problem, which then they’ll solve. Mysteries like in mystery novels, those are actually problems. Those are not mysteries in the Marcelian sense. That might be helpful, I think, for people to keep in mind.

Kirsten Oates:

I love that, Greg. And that distinction is so helpful to me, because when I think of mystery, my mind does go to the novels I grew up reading. I read all Agatha Christie’s mystery novels, and I really love trying to solve the mystery, and I actually got quite good at it. But what I’m hearing you saying and what Jim’s been saying throughout the season is this isn’t a mystery that can be solved, but it can be experienced.

Jim Finley:

Would you say this, too, that a quality of Marcel is that when we listen to his approach, what’s so telling about it is that it rings true, that it’s almost like therapy, like insight? He helps us articulate or be more consciously aware of what’s actually real in our life. Would you comment on that? Do you think that’s significant?

Greg Sadler:

Yes. I mean, you brought up the word phenomenological earlier, and I think sometimes when people hear that, they think, “Okay. I’m going to focus on my experience, how things appear to me. Great.” And then we don’t want to leave that out. We don’t want to exclude that, but there has to be something that our experience is actually of, or else it’s just all in our head or all in our culture or something.

And it is really tough to articulate it. Anything real in this sort of superlative sense is going to take hard work to wrap our heads around and then to explain to somebody. And what you see Marcel doing in his books, and that’s part of what I like about him, but I think some people do find frustrating, he comes back to the same themes over and over again. He has a very musical approach to things.

Just as a little bit of trivia, he actually took Rilke’s letters and composed music to set them to. He was very, very, very influenced by the experience of being a musician and thinking about variations on a theme, and he kind of, what would you call it, spirals in rather than saying, “I’m going to give it to you straight. Here it is. Here’s what I have to say, and I’ll go and do it.” He keeps coming back over and over again.

But if you follow him through his works, he’s getting closer and closer to something. Right? And why take such a circuitous approach? Well, because going at it straight on is probably not going to get you where you want to be. And if we think about our own conversations that we’ve had over the years, our own processes of growth as human beings, we often need those little bits here and there. So, for example, it’s taken me a considerable portion of my life to figure out how to be a decent husband. I won’t even say a good, let alone great, husband at this point, and a decent father to my kids, and a decent friend to people, and a decent teacher.

And a good bit of that is from these seemingly random, but quite often fortuitous, encounters with people who were just a little bit smarter than me at a certain point and could see what’s going on with me, and they would say, “Hey, man, you’re screwing up. Here’s how you should look at it. Here’s an idea that you should mull over. Don’t talk to your kids that way,” or “You need to think about this factor over here.”

I think that’s part of what Marcel is offering us. He is a voice, and he’s not going to give you high pressure either. He’s not going to be like, “Hey, my way or the highway.” He’s like, “Hey, buddy, here are some things to think about. I’ve been thinking about them too. This might be helpful for you.” And then it’s up to us what we want to do with it.

Jim Finley:

Another thing that reminds me of also is, I’m a clinical psychologist, retired now, worked a lot with trauma, and a lot of therapy is nonlinear, that is, it’s an exchange where we’re at the edge of something, and then the person unexpectedly says something that they didn’t know they knew, and they let it sink in, and that goes on over… And the cumulative effect of doing that seems very Marcelian also, that his thought has that quality to it.

Greg Sadler:

Yeah. I like that word cumulative, where if you were going to try to plot out in advance, “Okay. What’s this going to get me?” because everybody is always like, “Hey, how is this going to pay off?” You’re not going to get much out of it, and it is a reasonable question. So take psychotherapy, right? A client comes in. It is reasonable for them to say, “Okay. I do 12 sessions with you. What’s going to happen? I’m going to give you these hours of my time. I’ll do the work that you prescribe for me and the reading and think about the stuff. What am I going to get out of this?”

And you can say some stuff, right? But you can’t predict with any sort of perfect accuracy how they’re going to improve, and I say this from my own experience of being kind of a screwup in life. There’s stages where you’re amenable to that sort of thing, and then there’s times when you can have the best psychotherapist in the world, and they’re not going to do anything for you because you’re not ready for it.

Jim Finley:

As a final thought to bring this first part to close, we can keep referring back to it like Marcel. But another thing that strikes me about Marcel, I often thought of it, is, as we listen to this kind of talk and we ask ourselves how has it come to pass, that I’ve become someone who’s able to be sensitive to such things, at the level at which I’m able to be sensitive. And as I look back at my life, like a lot of cul-de-sacs and this winding, circuitous path, and we’re in the midst of that now, Marcel is, in a way, finding us to find a language for that.

Kirsten Oates:

Thank you both for sharing your thoughts on Marcel’s vision. That was amazing. And we’re now going to turn to aspects of what Jim has shared as Gabriel Marcel’s path, and these are ways his vision breaks through into consciousness and real-life events, and they are fidelity, hope, and love. So, Jim, can you get us started with fidelity?

Jim Finley:

To single out a place to start, like a starting place, the example that he uses, what he’s doing is he’s looking for ways in which this ontology, this mystery, shines inexperientially into our life, where it becomes almost incandescent in our life. And one of the moments that he chooses, he says, “You’re visiting a friend who’s dying. They know that they’re dying, and they know that you know that they’re dying.” And you’re so moved when you’re in their presence, you promise you’ll stay close, “I’ll keep in touch.”

He said, “A few days pass, and you no longer feel what you felt when you made that promise. And so, should you be obligated to be true to something that you no longer feel?” This is when he starts raising the question. And the insight is, and I’ll hand this over to you to see where you can kind of go with this, he says, “The error lies in reducing it and assuming that it was just a feeling.” He said, “What happens in a sense is that in the moment you’re with a dead friend, the thou dimension of the friend shines forth.”

And I’m thinking of Martin Buber, I-It and I-Thou. So the I is almost a problematic. Buber says, “The thou fills the entire horizon of your being.” In the light of the thou, that the very presence of the thou is presencing, the infinite presence is presencing itself, and that illumines the thou nature of yourself, like thou unto thou, just like a oneness that happens. And what we’re really talking about is fidelity to that, that we live in the light of that even when we’re not feeling it. So how would you expand on that, or does the tone of that ring true to you?

Greg Sadler:

Bringing in the Buber I-Thou versus I-It relation is an interesting way to unpack that, because if you think about what we can make commitments to, so fidelity or this term fides in Latin and pistis in Greek, it gets used in Christian writing, but also in pre-Christian philosophy, to designate things that we sometimes call loyalty. It gets translated that way, faithfulness, being able to be relied upon, and it’s a disposition of a person. Right?

And we can make commitments of all different sorts. We can make commitments to ourselves. We can make commitments to other people, and those make good sense. They are a thou. They are another person. And we have a whole realm of commitments as well that we make, and we effectively reduce it to what Buber would call an I-It relation, like legal contracts and stuff like that. I guess in a way, we’re acknowledging the other person as a person, but that’s not where the emphasis is. It’s more like, “Well, I’m going to give you this. You’re going to give me this. You’re going to do it within 60 days. If you don’t, here’s the penalties for it.” All that kind of stuff.

And I think in a lot of people’s minds, it’s hard for them to grasp what Marcel means by fidelity or these sorts of problems, because they’re so used to thinking in purely transactional ways about other people. There are certain realms of life where we want to be like that. If you are a doctor in a war zone carrying out triage, you don’t want to get super, super attached to each single patient, because if you do, they’re probably all going to die. Right?

So there are cases where we do want a Marcelian problem and technics for dealing with it, but there sure seem to be an awful lot of areas of life where people should be treating the other person as a person, and instead they’re treating them as an it, to go back to Buber. Right? And so, the case of the friend, I like the reflection that our affective states are not just a feeling. They’re sensing something deeper, and we could think of the relations that we already exist in, the matrix of them.

I brought up a few already with familial relations. We could think of our relations to our neighbors, our friends, our coworkers, people like that, which might not be as close or as lasting, but are we operating within a realm of fidelity to them? If we say we’re going to do something, a great example of this that I use in my classes all the time, how can you tell who your real friends are? Ask them to help you move. Right?

And anybody can say, “Yeah, yeah. Sure. I’ll show up on Saturday.” Do they do it? Well, they can show up and then just sit on their butt and leave you to do all the heavy lifting, or they can gripe about it and all that. But if they’re really a faithful friend, and they’re not going to necessarily do it skipping and whistling the whole time, but they’re going to do it with a spirit of giving to you.

And there could be fidelity even in receiving. I mean, you could be the recipient of other people’s help and things like that, and receiving in the right way without being begrudging or resentful could be expressions of fidelity, I would say. But it goes far beyond that. Right?

Jim Finley:

Yeah. Well, would you say this too, is that in a way, these moments of fidelity in this context is, we’re kind of experiencing transcendence or divinity’s fidelity to us? And therefore, our fidelity is the reciprocity of fidelity. Would that ring true to you to put it that way?

Greg Sadler:

When we can actually look at it in that way, and it’s certainly one thing to say, “Yeah. I’m going to look at it this way. That’s going to work out for me.” It’s another thing to actually do it. Right? And there’s actually two aspects to that. There’s the looking at it the right way, and then part of fidelity is to persevere.

I go back to Anselm. He’s got an analysis of this in De Libertate. He actually coins a new term, pervelle, to keep on willing the same thing. So we’ll come back to the divine thing in a moment. You get married. Anybody who’s married for any period of time past the honeymoon knows that it can be a struggle to remain married, even if you stay in the relationship. Right? Your spouse does things that you thought were cute and quirky, now start to annoy you, and you have to make yourself not get upset about the sound of them chewing or telling you about their day or whatever, putting the dishes away the wrong way, or something like that.

And so, you have to keep on choosing. It’s not enough to choose once, “Oh, I’m going to do this thing.” You have to keep on doing it over and over again. Now, coming back to this realizing that we have these capacities, because ultimately, God gave them to us. And they’re not just ours to do whatever the hell we want with, but they are gifts, including our relationships, the fact that you are married or have a child or have a job and a vocation.

You could say, “Oh, I made that myself.” Well, if you choose that point of view, you’re probably going to screw things up for yourself, because you’re choosing the wrong mindset. If you view God as a collaborator, maybe actually the main partner, and you’re the minor partner, I think that really changes things, doesn’t it? I’ll point out too, I mean, Marcel is a married guy. So he knows all about this kind of stuff.

Jim Finley:

Yes, he does.

Greg Sadler:

Yeah.

Jim Finley:

Yes, he does.

Kirsten Oates:

And it sounds much more in the realm of mystery, much more in that realm.

Jim Finley:

Would you say this too, Greg, about Marcel? Is that when we sit with the truth of this… I love this saying in John of the Cross. He says, “Have no light to guide you except the one that burns in your heart.” So the idea that in the light of Marcel, it burns, but what we do is we become more aware of the ways we tend not to be aware of this.

There’s a kind of Marcelian, and that’s the humility comes in that I can choose to return back to the deeper place. It keeps slipping away from me, because the intensity of the life’s demands. I’m suffering from depth deprivation, and I know it’s real. There are certain moments I taste it. Would that ring true to you too, would you say?

Greg Sadler:

Yeah. And humility is one of those terms that I think a lot of people in, not just the 21st century, but this goes way back into the modern age. They have a very different conception than what people who really understand it mean by it. Typically, in medieval thinkers, it’s understood as a proper, true conception of who you are, which means you actually look at yourself and you’re like, “Boy, I’m not as good as the face that I put out there to everybody else. I am shot through with holes and damaged.”

And, I mean, you mentioned dealing with people who are struggling with trauma. We don’t all have to say we’ve all been traumatized, but we are all damaged creatures in so many ways, and it’s like damage on top of damage, on top of damage. And so, realizing that is a step forward, and it doesn’t mean like, “Oh, I’m no good,” like people imagine, like David Hume when he was saying, “Oh, humility is a monkish virtue.” Instead, it can be very helpful to know, “Wow, I’m not going to be able to do this on my own. I need somebody to guide me. I need some divine grace. I need to ask the people around me to hold me accountable.” That sort of thing.

Jim Finley:

Turning to the Mystics will continue in a moment.

Kirsten Oates:

This wonderful discussion, it’s really bringing us towards hope, Jim, and the way you’ve summarized hope in the podcast. So maybe I’ll just ask you to build on what we’ve been talking about as you introduce us back into hope.

Jim Finley:

Yeah. Let me set the tone for hope also, then we’ll initiate a dialogue. He uses the example of someone who has received a terminal diagnosis, and yet the person hopes. But it’s not hope as in time. Usually, when we think of hope, we think in time as, “I’m in the midst of some unresolved dilemma, and I hope that it turns out in a certain way.”

He said a stunning statement. He said, “The person refuses to consider possibilities.” And the stunning thing about it, and this, I think, is so mystical about Marcel, is that in the midst of the body that’s dying is the eternality of the self that never dies, that when Marcel says, “We know we learn to love someone,” this is where love and hope merge this way. When we see in them that, which is too beautiful to die, and I think of hope this way.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross talks about the stages of dying and says, “You get the terminal diagnosis. So first, there’s denial, and then there’s bargaining. When the bargaining doesn’t work, there’s anger, depression.” She says, “That’s the ego coming to the end of itself.” She says, “Some people come to a state of acceptance.” And she says, “Acceptance is a mysterious state of being free from the tyranny of death in the midst of death.”

So when you look into the face of the dying loved one, it’s like the gate of heaven. And in hope, you quote this passage in Marcel. I’d like to quote it here too now in hope. It’s a lovely passage. “Hope consists in asserting that there is at the heart of being, beyond all data, beyond all inventories and calculations, a mysterious principle which is in connivance with me, which cannot will, but what I will if what I will deserves to be willed and is, in fact, willed by my whole being.”

So there’s a kind of atmospheric reciprocity that’s kind of a death to the self that dies in time, having the final say on who we are, and starting to show is the eternality that never passes away, this ribbon through everything endlessly passing away. Does that ring true, and how would you-

Greg Sadler:

Oh, yeah. That is one of my favorite passages. And interestingly, so I give these dinner talks at places, and we call it Philosophy Eats, and it’s mostly people who can afford to go to a fancy place. So it’s not a big cross section of society. And we had hope as a theme, and I always have a couple passages and then we discuss them, and I included that in there, and there were some people who were mad hearing that.

They were like, “That’s not what hope is. What if you hope for the wrong thing?” and all that, and I’m like, “Well, let’s look at what he’s actually saying.” It’s not like that old song, “God, won’t you give me a Mercedes-Benz?” Whatever you hope for, you’re going to get. This isn’t manifesting. This isn’t any of that sort of stuff.

You actually have to be willing the right thing, hoping for the right thing, and then you can be confident that something is going to work with you so it’s going to work out. And it’s similar to Kierkegaard talking about the absurd, the guy who… He uses a funny example. He uses Abraham, of course, but he talks about the guy who’s hoping that his wife is going to have this wonderful roast for him when he comes home. And whether it’s there or not, he’s going to be fine, because he’s willing to sort of extend himself into that.

I mean, it’s relational. You’re thinking, “I’m not just entirely on my own.” And the correlative for Marcel of hope is despair, the lack of it. He says, “The realm of the problematic is the realm of fear and desire, and then the realm of the mystery is that of hope or despair.” And these are not just correlatives of fear and desire.

So there’s nothing that says that you will actually get the thing that you hope for. Your friend is dying, and you hope that they will have a decent passing away, but you know that they’re all ticked off about it, and they haven’t reconciled with people that they probably should. You can still hope for it. He also has another really great line where he says, this is on the ontological mystery, “The idea of inert hope seems a contradiction in terms.” It’s not a listless waiting. It underpins action or runs before it, but it becomes degraded and lost once the action is spent.

It’s the prolongation into the unknown of an activity which is central, rooted in being. So it has affinities not with desire, but the will. So like fidelity, we choose. In a way, if we really do hope, well, if your friend is dying and they need to reconcile with somebody before they’re dead, you call them on the phone. That’s the action that the hope leads to. And if you can’t fulfill that action because you can’t find that person’s information, well, you did your best. Right? But hope is going to be an active disposition.

Jim Finley:

Would you say this in the light of Marcel’s? Let’s say there’s this moment where this person is in this state, this, that it isn’t “I hope that” in this sense. I hope that I’ll come to the point that there’s nothing to hope for because nothing is missing, that nothing’s missing. This dying person is in this deathless, incandescent state, and when you’re in their presence, you just feel you’re in the presence of something unexplainable that reveals you to yourself, and I hope that someday I’ll be ever more habitually grounded, because nothing’s missing.

Greg Sadler:

And it’s different than resignation. Right?

Jim Finley:

It’s very different. It’s the opposite of resignation.

Greg Sadler:

Yeah.

Kirsten Oates:

Mm-hmm. Just like you were saying, Greg, these different realms. I love this idea of, if I can hope that when I die, that the truest part of me doesn’t ultimately die, and I have hope in that, and it gives me… Then if that’s me on my deathbed, how do I walk that back through my life now? To me, that’s where the idea of fidelity comes from, because I’m living in fidelity to that hope, and that hope for everyone I meet.

Greg Sadler:

It’s interesting, because you can think about non-Christian or pre-Christian thinkers in antiquity who do things where you’re like, “Well, given your mindset, why the hell would you bother doing this?” For example, Epicurus has a will that we know about from Diogenes Laërtius, and you could be like, “Listen, you clearly don’t believe that there’s any sort of soul that exists afterwards. So why the hell would you care about providing for… These aren’t even your kids. These are the kids of your friends. Why would you care about making sure that funds go to take care of this person or that the garden keeps going on?”

And that’s a reflection of Marcelian hope, I would say, probably somewhat wrongly oriented in some respects, but he buys into something, or you read Marcus Aurelius, who’s often kind of gloomy. He reminds himself over and over again, so he doesn’t treat his fellow Romans like jerks, that all of this is going to be gone soon. People are going to forget you. You’re the emperor? Doesn’t matter. And yet, he thinks it is important to not let everything go to crap, to treat people well, to try to improve his own character, even though he’s going to die not that long afterwards. That’s a reflection of hope, I would say.

Jim Finley:

I would say so too. Yeah. Right. Gotcha. Yeah.

Kirsten Oates:

Wonderful. Well, this is probably a good point to turn towards love, Jim, and bring us home with love.

Jim Finley:

Yes. I want to share the example that I use with love, but this applies to any form of love, father, mother, sister, brother, and even it applies to service to a community, but it can also, I think, apply to silence, to solitude, to creativity. But I want to start somewhere. The example I use is that imagine that someone you graduated with from high school years ago calls you unexpectedly. They’re in town. You’ve not had any contact with them. They say they’d love to catch up with you, and let’s say you’ve been blessed in being, for years, in a very deep, loving relationship with someone.

And as you’re catching up with each other, you tell the person about this person. You show them their picture about how they met and their qualities and so on, and the person says to you, “No, I just don’t want to know about that. I want to know who you know the person to be and your love for the person.” And you don’t know what to say, and your heart breaks when you try. And you’re grateful for being rendered whole by having your heart broken by love. This is Marcelian love, this love, this communal state. So picking up on that image.

Greg Sadler:

Yeah. I mean, that is a case where love shows that it’s not yet love enough, you could say. Right?

Jim Finley:

That’s right. Yeah. Yes. Yes.

Greg Sadler:

Which is kind of a happy state to be in, in some respects, better off than thinking, “Well, I say I love you. That’s enough for you.” That’s a very deficient kind of love, or, “I bought you candy on Valentine’s Day and took you out and bought you roses. That’s all I have to do.” And I was thinking one of the things that is really interesting about Marcel, he coined a term, which maybe it was around before him. In French, it’s disponibilité, and in English, we translate it as availability. Right?

And I think that that is really central to use the word caritas or charité, but also amour, love. At a literal level, it just means being available to somebody, being open, being willing to step up and do things. That can be exhibited in all sorts of ways, and it can have all sorts of depths. You’re married to somebody. You really do love them. How open are you to them? It can even happen in silence. You don’t have to talk to them all the time.

Jorge Luis Borges talks about, in one of his stories, this peculiar English type of friendship where you begin talking with the person, and after a while, you just sit in silence next to them for hours on end, never saying anything, but you’re friends. I guess, what are you actually disposing of or making available when you’re doing it? Your being, who you are. Right?

And if you ask somebody, and let’s take not quite a happy scenario. You’ve got the whole thing that you sketched out, but you’ve got a person who really has a good partner, but they’ve never really thought about what they love about them. They’re just kind of going along on habit and things are going along swimmingly, and then they meet with a high school friend, and the high school friend says the same thing that you asked about, “Now, what do you really, really love about them?”

And they’re at a loss. They have no way of getting at it in that situation. Do they really love them or not? Love is something that I guess you could say we have to work at consciously. I mean, there is a spontaneous, unconscious side to it as well, but we have to continually work at it. Right?

Jim Finley:

Yeah. Would this ring true to you, being true to Marcel too? Another way of looking at Marcel, and the mystics are saying this too, is to find that act or to find that person or that relationship, which when you give yourself over to it with your whole heart, it unravels your petty preoccupation with yourself and brings you strangely home to yourself near your origin, and that somehow… The thing about using marital love as an example, marital love includes all the times we just had to stop and say, “What are you complaining about your roses?” But love is, “I’m so sorry I did that.”

Greg Sadler:

Yeah.

Jim Finley:

And they help each other. They call on each other. So there’s something holy about the shortcomings as opportunities for the acknowledgement of the shortcomings if they’re fortunate, if they do that inner work of love, and that can be true to a teacher loving their students or the artist loving art, or the poet. Does that ring true?

Greg Sadler:

Yeah. I think that’s right, and there’s kind of two sides to it. So you could feel as if in loving the other and then having these… They don’t feel petty at the time, but they get revealed as petty preoccupations, things that you value. They start falling away, and you have to sometimes mourn their loss. You give up a job that you like. Actually, I’ll give you an example of a person who I knew from graduate school, who did this sort of thing.

I’ve kept in touch with him over the years, and he’s a much better guy than I am. So he was in the same class as me coming into graduate school as a master’s student, and he was always a little shy, not very outspoken, but a decent guy. He was from Southern Indiana. I went to Southern Illinois, so it was sort of just across the state, and he came from a huge family. I want to say he was one of 11 kids, 10 or 11, and his dad was dead. His mom was still alive.

And while we were at the doctoral level, he just disappeared, and we’re like, “What happened to him? Where’d he go?” And nobody knew. And then he came back a couple more years later, and I was like, “Oh, it’s great to see you. What’s been going on?” And I thought I’d hear, “Oh, I traveled the world,” or something like that. What ended up happening was his mom got cancer, and none of his brothers or sisters wanted to do the work of staying with her.

So he put his graduate career on hold, went back to home, stayed with her, did the hospice, all of that, taking her to doctor’s appointments. And eventually, she died, and he was like, “Okay. Now I can go back to graduate school.” And he had brothers and sisters, sort of reading between the lines of his story. They could have easily stepped up. They were all living in the area. They were selfish and didn’t want to do it. So he stepped up, and he could have easily have said, “Hey, I’m busy. I’m in graduate school.”

But I think part of what did it for him was not just he was a good guy, who was also studying Augustine. He was getting ready to write a dissertation on Augustine, who thinks love is pretty important and kind of holds you accountable for that. So he lived it out, and then he came back and finished up his stuff, several years behind, got a job near where he grew up, and that’s what he’s been doing, and he teaches students. And I’ve never actually seen him teach, but I’m willing to bet that that sort of thing shines through in his teaching. Right?

Now, he gave up a lot. It’s exactly the sort of case that you’re talking about, Jim, where you drop things that you think matter to you so you can be available to another person. So here’s the other side of it. Right? Oh, I think a lot of people are afraid to do acts of love, because they’re like, “Well, the person’s not going to really appreciate it,” or “It’s not going to have any good effect,” or stuff like that. They have a fear that’s preventing them from doing that.

And I’ll give you just kind of a more trivial example from my own life. So I currently volunteer at a cat shelter, and the whole point of the cat shelter is to get the cats adopted by somebody else, who’s going to be their person for the rest of their fairly short, compared to us, life. And one of the challenges that the other volunteers have, and I also have, is you love these animals. Obviously, you don’t love them in quite the same way as you would a human being, but there’s a lot you can do with a cat or a dog, or even animals, I suppose, like a lizard or something like that. I’ve seen people get quite attached to those.

And you do things that are to their benefit. Some of them have been abused. And so, you just sit with them and let them become comfortable with human beings, and you pet them, and you’re loving towards them, and you know that some people could feel like, “Oh, I’m giving of myself, and I won’t be connected with this animal.” Somebody else gets the benefit of the love, let’s say. Right?

And that’s kind of true, but that isn’t the whole story Marcel would say. He would say, “The love that you’re giving, that is something that is.” It has being. It’s something that is very valuable, even if it’s just chatting with somebody who is sitting next to you on the bus, and they’re having a really crappy day, and you’re only there with them for half an hour as you ride to where you’re going, and you listen to their story about all the things that have gone wrong, and you’re giving them a sympathetic ear and not saying, “Well, I want to put my earbuds in because I don’t want to listen to your crap anymore.” Right?

It’s real. It’s something that has lasting value, even though it appears like somebody else gets the value or the universe just consumes it. I’m sure that as somebody working in psychotherapy, you give to your clients. Right? You engage with them. You dialogue. You give them suggestions, and not all of them prosper. Right? Some of them, it seems like it’s wasted, but it’s not from a Marcelian perspective. Right? Same thing with me as a teacher. I mean, do my students actually pay close attention to what we’re doing in class? Maybe 30% of them. Does that mean that my attention given to the others is simply wasted? No. It can be an expression of availability or love in the Marcelian sense.

Kirsten Oates:

Great examples, Greg. And this idea of being keeps coming up over and over. So maybe we’ll just go a little bit deeper on being, Jim, in relation to love.

Jim Finley:

Kenneth Gallagher makes one of his points, kind of echoing the theological faith, hope, and love, is clearly, by being, he means God, because he says only an infinite intelligence and an infinite love, like the infinity of love itself, the infinity of intelligence itself, the infinity of presence itself, is presencing itself and presencing the infinity of itself as the mystery of itself given to us as the very mystery of ourself.

So in a way, Marcel, by being, is kind of helping us to find homo religiosus, like the religiosity of the divinity, of the concreteness, of the immediacy of what is, so that grounded in that transcendence, we can then see religions as historical, culturally specific lineages of that path, kind of deliver us from ismization, from isms, like Marcelianism, like freedom from ideological consciousness. So would you pick up on that on being in God and divinity, and how would you articulate that?

Greg Sadler:

Yeah. I mean, Marcel does talk about God explicitly in some places, but I think you’re right that being, let’s call it capital B, that is God for Marcel, which means that being is personal and is loving, and we could go on and on and on. Right? With Marcel, in a way, you could say, “Listen, you don’t have to know exactly what God is like before having a connection to God.” As a matter of fact, if that’s what you’re expecting before you commit and trust, which we could say fidelity is also a condition of trusting, then you’re always going to miss the boat. And being turns out to be incredibly complex, and none of us get to wrap our heads completely around it, and that’s okay.

Jim Finley:

Would you say this too? Do you think this is close to Marcel? Karl Rahner, one of the theologians of the Second Vatican Council.

Greg Sadler:

Yeah.

Jim Finley:

He talks about apologetics and the eclipse of mystery, and talks about proof texts and the effect of science flipping back and forth like divine facts, and he said, “And the Catholic Church joined right in.” And so, it’s almost like, but what’s missing, he says, is mystagogy, like incarnate infinity intimately realized, like the ineffability. Would you agree to that? It’s very at the heart of Marcel’s thought.

Greg Sadler:

I would.

Jim Finley:

Would you say this? And maybe we’re moving toward closure too, is that people listening to this, insofar as they’re touched by it, bears witness that they’re on the path that Marcel speaks of, which is an attempt to shed a light on our life that, in other words, we’re only stirred by what we recognize, but we are viscerally recognizing what we can’t explain.

And he’s kind of speaking to us in that way, and that makes them very continuous with the mystical understanding of Jesus and the mystics and the poets, and they’re already on this path where they would find this double-talk, and they don’t, because really, it’s helping them find a language for the intimate depths of their own day-by-day ordinariness. Does that ring true to you?

Greg Sadler:

Yeah. I think I’m kind of a pluralist when it comes to these sorts of matters. Not everybody is going to get the same thing out of reading Marcel that, say, we do, and that’s okay, because different ways of articulating these same basic ideas sometimes work better for some people than for others. Right? And then some people respond better to philosophy. Some people respond better to liturgy, to poetry, to just doing service and thinking about what’s going on with that.

What I do think is good about Marcel is that he is able to bring these things together. So he’s not just a philosopher. Right? He can speak to people from all sorts of places who are interested in all sorts of things. But if somebody gets more mileage out of reading John of the Cross, great. Let them read John of the Cross. There’s no, “You must read Gabriel Marcel,” or “You’ve missed out,” or something like that.

Jim Finley:

Two images that touch me I want to share. One is his mother died when he was young. She had a profound effect on him, and he said, “It’s amazing how present a dead person can be.”

Greg Sadler:

Oh, yeah.

Jim Finley:

And the other thing he says is so evocative. When I was going to graduate school, there’s a book on Marcel. I don’t know what it was. It was a lovely photograph of Marcel and his wife sitting under a tree, having a picnic, sitting on a blanket, and I was so touched. The ordinariness of the day by day is somehow, he’s shedding a light on our ordinariness in this way. He’s so intimate.

Kirsten Oates:

I love the way you both just draw out how… These mystics, they’re nonideological, and you’ve contrasted, Greg, him with other philosophers and theologians. So he’s nonideological, and it’s always bringing it into experience. And what I love about Marcel is, he’s so concrete with the experiences, and they’re so ordinary, but to see how the light of this being shines through the ordinary is amazing.

Greg Sadler:

And again, I’ve already talked about Anselm, but he was renowned as a just brilliant teacher and also a great spiritual counselor. People came to him for marriage counseling, interestingly, in medieval times. And one of the things that he was known for that he shares in common with Marcel is, in Latin, they’re called similtudines, likenesses, like drawing analogies.

I mean, there’s all these biblical parables. The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed. Well, how? How is it like a mustard seed? Well, explain it. Right? And so, Marcel is really, really good at that. And I think that not just ordinary people, but even philosophers, they need examples. They need metaphors, and this is like this. Here’s a case to study, because we’re not just bloodless brains in a vat doing logic all the time.

That sort of stuff is great, and Anselm was known for coming up with them on the spot. I think that Marcel, he’s writing a lot more than Anselm did, but I think that he probably gave a lot of time to thinking, “Okay. What would be a good example to convey what fidelity actually looks like?” Right?

Jim Finley:

Right.

Kirsten Oates:

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

Greg Sadler:

And they’re often paradoxical too.

Kirsten Oates:

Yeah. Yeah. I just so agree that the subtlety is tricky. And so, what I’ve been working on is trying to think about ways I could keep one foot always in the mystical, even with one foot in the problematic. And so, I was thinking about a situation where I might be diagnosed with a serious illness. My father is going through a significant diagnosis right now.

And so, of course, we’re wanting to do everything that we can to double-check the diagnosis, to work out a treatment plan, to heal what’s going on for him, but how to keep always one foot in the mystical, so knowing that my hope doesn’t depend on the outcome of that situation, and that my hope in being, my hope is bigger than life. It includes death. It’s bigger than just life. It includes death, and that even my death is trustworthy. And so, I love this conversation and how subtle this idea of mystery is and how you’ve helped us really wrestle with that today and look at it from all different angles.

Greg Sadler:

Thanks for bringing me in. I mean, I think Marcel did most of the work. I’m just kind of explaining what it is that the guy had to say.

Jim Finley:

Yeah.

Kirsten Oates:

Yeah.

Jim Finley:

Really grateful to you, and this will be so helpful to our listeners, really. So thank you so much for being with us. I admire your teaching and what you do.

Greg Sadler:

Yeah. Thanks for hosting me here. We talked about hospitality a little bit earlier. You’re great hosts.

Jim Finley:

Yeah.

Kirsten Oates:

Well, thank you, Greg. Really appreciate your wholehearted responses and your humble examples from your own life as a husband and a father and a teacher, and we honor your life here and are grateful for the time you’ve spent with us.

Greg Sadler:

Thanks.

Kirsten Oates:

Thank you for listening to this episode of Turning to the Mystics, a podcast created by the Center for Action and Contemplation. We’re planning to do episodes that answer your questions. So if you have a question, please email us at [email protected] or send us a voicemail. All of this information can be found in the show notes. We’ll see you again soon.