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 12 of turning to the Mystics where we are turning to the book, Practice of the Presence and the Wisdom of Brother Lawrence. And I’m here with Jim to discuss his second session. Welcome, Jim.

Jim Finley:

Yes, yes. I so love this Letter 12 that we explored together. So beautiful.

Kirsten Oates:

Yes, me too, Jim. I love Letter 12 and your session was just beautiful. And I wanted to just give a little bit of context about the letters. So in Carmen’s book, Practice of the Presence, the second section includes 16 letters by Brother Lawrence and in the Translator’s introduction Carmen writes, these 16 letters are what Survive of Likely Many more written by Brother Lawrence. And we know that Joseph of Beaufort, Brother Lawrence’s friend collected these letters after he died to share with people and now we have them in this beautiful book.

I also wanted to just give a little bit of context for Letter 12 that you read, Jim, and I’m turning to the Translator’s Note again, and Carmen says, in the final months of his life when he was unable to walk and was aware he was dying, Brother Lawrence addressed Letter 12 to Reverend Mother. And so I think you commented, Jim, that the context for this letter was the end of Brother Lawrence’s life and that we’d seen with many of the mystics we’ve studied, that they can become more translucent towards the end of their life.

Jim Finley:

Yes. Over the years, as they come to the end of their life, we get a sense of where it is ripened in their life. But there’s something else too that just occurred to me was so interesting. What’s interesting with these mystics is when you look back at the very beginning of the very first things they wrote as a mystic teacher, it had that same depth to it. And I think it’s because they’re writing out of the depth of their spiritual awakening. So when he’s writing out of what experience of God and beholding the tree, so in the sermons of Eckhart and John of the Cross, you see that place where it kind of starts right out sharing this like luminous awakening of God. But there is a certain way that the wording of that becomes more and more refined at another level. And you certainly see it in this letter. It’s so succinct and clear.

Kirsten Oates:

It made me curious about you, Jim, at 82 years old, if you are feeling this oneness has become more illuminated in your life, in your teaching.

Jim Finley:

Yes, I apply to myself what I just said. When I look back to when I wrote Merton’s Palace of Nowhere and over the years, I do feel that it has kind of become more a transparent or more deeper simplicity to it out in my life. At the same time, when I look back at the experiences I had in the monastery at 18 years old, there was this kind of divine luminosity that was right there for me at the beginning. And I also think people who fall in love with each other and spend years together, there is a certain way over the years one would hope it ripens, but there’s something that remains wondrous about their first moments this way, like that initial light that comes. So anyway, that’s how I see it.

Kirsten Oates:

There’s also, would you say Jim, a certain kind of wisdom that comes from living a whole life, kind of experiencing the different phases of life and seeing that, witnessing that in others?

Jim Finley:

I think so, very much so. For him, Brother Lawrence is so dramatic, like the divinity of the pots and pans in the kitchen. So I think when we’re spiritually awakened, the way we are when we’re sitting in deep meditation is not necessarily the way we are when we’re driving in rush hour traffic or at a business meeting. And so I think there’s a lot of integrating the divinity and weaving every part of our life into that divinity. Likewise, weaving the ordinariness of our life into the divinity, like incarnate infinity. That integrative inclusive process deepens over time.

Kirsten Oates:

And that’s what you really feel from Brother Lawrence, that deep integration.

Jim Finley:

Yeah. Literally the experience of seeing God in the tree and being in the pots and the pans in the kitchen and also in the ordinariness of the pots and the pan, they were distinct but none distinguished from each other. It was an all-encompassing oneness to the divinity of the ordinariness of everything.

Kirsten Oates:

Carmen also points out in the Translator’s Note, she says, “The friar’s writing echoes Teresa of Avila again when he shares his initial struggles. I had more than a few difficulties doing this exercise, but continued despite these words similar to hers in The Way of Perfection, where she states that beginnings can be hard at first. It takes work.” And so just a reminder of his lineage and his familiarity with these mystics, Teresa of Avila.

Jim Finley:

I think when we’re spiritually awakened and we’re on the path, we find we’re still invested in attitudes and habits of the mind that compromise who we’re deep down really are and are called to be, but it’s hard to break free of them because we’re attached to them. I think over time, difficult in the beginning. And AA too when someone first starts out one day at a time, just the struggle, they hand their life over to the God and so on, but as they ripen in their sobriety, having had a spiritual awakening as a result of following these steps, there’s a certain ease or freedom that comes, which at the beginning when you first started out was quite a challenge.

Kirsten Oates:

Well, I wanted to spend this time stepping back through the letter and just asking you to go a little deeper in some of the things you mentioned. The first, the letter begins, “Since you insist…” And you talked about how the Reverend Mother has obviously insisted. She really wants to know what Brother Lawrence’s method is, and so she’s seen something in him and you said, this is how the lineage is handed on. A seeker might see something in the teacher and ask them to share it.

Jim Finley:

Yes. When you’re first starting out in the path of your awakening, as you kind of go along day by day, you can tell when you’re suddenly in the presence of someone in whom your own heart’s longing has been realized.

And that could be either when I was with Thomas Merton or you’re graced to be actually in the presence of the person. But I also think even though the person has been dead for years, like Brother Lawrence, there’s such a purity to their voice. You can hear in the rhythms of their voice, the embodiment of what your own heart is looking for. And so you turn towards the person like we are now with Brother Lawrence. She’s asking Brother Lawrence, please tell me how you got here. It’s kind of amazing, really. I want to be with you and listen to you so that hopefully what God has achieved in you will be achieved in me. And I think that’s the sincerity of the relationship of the seeker to the spiritually awakened teacher. And you see that in her and he acknowledges it. That’s the thing, the teacher sees that and he honors it.

Kirsten Oates:

Yeah. It gives credibility to these internal longings that are hard to find teaching for or even express.

Jim Finley:

Yes. Some years ago I was asked to submit an essay or I was interviewed with this Israeli Jew did a book on transmission, like spiritual transmission, and he asked me to respond to the following questions, “Who was your teacher? What did you learn from your teacher? How’s it feel when you’re teaching? What do you feel you’re teaching when you’re teaching, and how does it feel that people see you as a teacher?” Those are great questions.

Kirsten Oates:

Yeah.

Jim Finley:

I mean, down through the centuries, that’s how I was handed on throughout our lives is the timeless nature of God working in the hearts of Seekers.

Kirsten Oates:

Yeah, that’s really beautiful. Well, Brother Lawrence agrees to share what he’s calling in this letter, his method, but he puts a condition on it. So he says, my condition in responding to you is that you don’t show my letter to anyone. If I thought you would let anyone see it, even all my goodwill for your spiritual advancement could not compel me to write it.

Jim Finley:

Yeah.

Kirsten Oates:

Very dramatic. He really didn’t want her to show it to anyone.

Jim Finley:

He really did. And also I think this too, but notice he’s honoring her requests because he sees the providential nature of how they’re meeting each other. And so he’s meant to share it. It’s the timeliness of sharing it with her at a place of readiness or a place of sincerity. But because it is so deeply personal, then don’t tell. It’s not for the telling. And I mentioned too that really was strange about it is you have to assume that she honored that. But then years later, whoever found this manuscript and read it and they saw that he didn’t want it to be told. He told all of us.

Kirsten Oates:

And still in there.

Jim Finley:

He’s telling us and we’re glad that person did.

Kirsten Oates:

Yes.

Jim Finley:

That I think we all benefit from it.

Kirsten Oates:

Yes. I wondered too about, I remember a teacher saying once that, be careful who you share this journey with because for many people they won’t understand it. They’ll think it’s naive and it’s a rare person that is drawn to this deeper mystical path. And so I wondered if that was part of it too. “Don’t show this letter to people because they’ll think it’s crazy.”

Jim Finley:

The Cloud of Unknowing, the anonymous author of the cloud in a little forward, he said, “These teachings begged to be misunderstood.”

Kirsten Oates:

That’s so great.

Jim Finley:

“And therefore I encourage you to suspend judgment until you get to the end,” because you’re reading it, turning it into what you’re able to figure out. But the divinity that this bears witness to is something unfigureoutable.

And I think too, we’ve all had this experience where we open up a book, we don’t know what to make of it, and maybe years later pick up the same book. It just blows us away. So there’s a certain timeliness to the very fact the listeners are moved by these teachings. The very fact they’re moved by the teachings bears witness in their heart that they’re on the path of practicing the presence of God that Brother Lawrence is talking about. Or they wouldn’t be moved by the teachings. We wouldn’t be moved by the teachings.

Kirsten Oates:

Yes, very encouraging. So he says, “I will share with you the method I have used to arrive at this state of awareness of God’s presence where the mercy of our Friend,” with an uppercase F, “has kindly put me.” And Jim, when you shared that section you quoted from the Bible, “Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for one’s friend.” I think that’s from John 15:13. And I was curious with that quote, are you suggesting that Jesus was laying down his life for God as friend or I’d always thought of Jesus laying down his life for all of us here on earth as friends.

Jim Finley:

Yes. My sense, I think this is how the tradition sees it too, this is from the words of the Cross, see, “Greater love than this,” namely me giving my very life away.

Then he lays down his life. Mainly I’m laying down my own life for you because you’re my friends, and therefore it’s kind of reassuring for all the intimacy with the infinite. There’s should be a certain kind of familiarity with the infinite. You saw this in Julian of Norwich, very strong too on the Friend. So he’s laying down his life for the friend, but also in laying down his life for his friend because the divine nature and the human nature in Christ, when He lays down his life and at the end when He says to God, “Into your hands, I commend my spirit,” and he dies in a way he’s giving because our human nature is his human nature. It’s our human nature that’s being surrendered over to God in the death which is being surrendered over into the life that never dies. And so you see this mysterious thing about the laying down in one’s life and later He was going to say in the letter to give all for all the laying down the giving of oneself to this love that infinitely gives itself to you.

Kirsten Oates:

And then you say His ability to lay down his life for his friends was achieved by God.

Jim Finley:

Just like our ability for Him as Christ, but in his humanity was given to Him by God to lay down His life. It is all that we have we’ve been given and we’ve been given to give it. We’ve been given to give it because all the God has given to us as God. So it’s in the mutuality of self donating, giving that is to practice the presence of the God. Another big thing that He says right here in the opening paragraph too, “You asked me how did I get here?” And he says, “Well, the mercy of our friend has kindly put me. I didn’t get here. The friend put me here.” And by the way, the moment He saw the tree, He was put there and also the constancy of where it would become ever more habitual. God put him there. The friend put him there in his commitment to the path to honor this way. I think that’s so helpful. We have to cooperate with it, but it’s also true of us. To what extent are we able to be touched by these teachings? We’re able to be touched because the friend has given us the ability to be touched. If the friend hadn’t given us the ability to be touched, we wouldn’t be touched.

It’s true, we cooperate with it, but we’re always cooperating with an inner yes to the gift that’s being given. Otherwise, it’s just be more and more of us attaining more and more abilities spiritually rather than being ever more grateful for the infinite presence of God being given to us as this wakefulness of our own heart.

Kirsten Oates:

That’s beautiful, yeah. So I love that because thinking back to the cross, and you’re saying for Jesus as well the same mercy kind of put Him on the cross, but it put Him on the cross in this illuminated state that He felt his oneness with God, the mercy of God in his giving of himself.

Jim Finley:

It’s so interesting too, Brother Lawrence doesn’t really tease this out, the other mystics too, but it’s so succinct, it’s so mysterious this way. See, because in a way this all giving of oneself ends in death, but death is the gate of infinite union with the infinite and the same with us. Our life is ending in death, physical death, but also for now we’re to die to what hinders us from realizing the presence of God presencing itself as our life. So this mysterious interplay between death and deathlessness, between giving and receiving this way is kind of the heartbeat of the teachings.

Kirsten Oates:

Yes. Brother Lawrence starts off with, “So here is what I can tell you about it.” And you pointed to the fact that much of it’s so hard to communicate.

Jim Finley:

Oh yeah. It’s so paradoxical when you put it that way. See, in a way it’s so hard to communicate it, but it seems as a mysterious kind of ease with which he’s communicating. It is almost like the poet where the poem flows out. There’s another thing about it too. I think it isn’t just let me tell you what I’m able to say, but always know there’s infinitely more that I’m not able to say. But the infinite that I’m not able to say is echoing of what I’m able to say. That’s why we’re moved by it.

Kirsten Oates:

And his presence was already communicating something because Reverend Mother has insisted he write this letter to her or insisted for this teaching. And so he’d already been communicating something quite deep and attractive.

Jim Finley:

That’s right. And I think when he responded to her, it’s because he was honoring that. She was honoring the continuity of the sincerity of her own longing and because of the integrity of who she was in her longing, that’s the integrity of her question. And he feels as a teacher called to honor that, to the benefit of all of us benefiting from these teachings.

Kirsten Oates:

I love the way he starts off sharing about it. “In several, I found different methods of going to God and various practices of the spiritual life. And these would I believed only clutter my mind rather than make it easier to find what I wanted.” So I wondered partly if his experience of the tree was so pure, so he was looking when he was reading things, when he was looking for a method, he was trying to find something that would support that experience. And it seems like many of the things he read did not support that experience.

Jim Finley:

Yes. You saw this in The Way of the Pilgrim too where he went to many sermons, says no one spoke of the heart of the matter. He quit going to public sermons. Those methods that they were talking about for other people, it’s just what they needed in their devotional sincerity. It’s just what they needed. But what I think where he’s coming from is this the moment he was awakened in the presence of the tree, that the presence of God, that it was incandescent. It was utterly incandescent. And therefore because I’ve been illumined by that incandescence, these ways of getting at this and getting at that, it just busying my mind and I’m kind of leaning into the purity of what gave itself to me unexplainably.

There is the presence of God, then there is the presence of God. And an ongoing self-donating act that’s presencing the infinity of itself as the gift and miracle of our very presence, the presence of all things in our nothingness without God. So our very ontology that is the very dowry of our being is the generosity of God is who we are. What he’s talking about are the extent to which it shines through in our experience. How do we begin to experience this unit of mystery where Jesus said, “I came that you might have life and have it more abundantly.” And the life he spoke of was at once God’s life and our own. And so we get the glimmer of it and then the glimmer of it is the taste to go deeper. That’s how we set out on the path as I think for most of us, we’re so different how God works with us. I think for most of us shining to the experience comes as consolations comes as reassurances comes in the sincerity of faith, efficacious unto holiness, efficacious unto holiness. God’s always right where we are. God’s never waiting for us to get to the other place we’re supposed to be.

But from time to time this incandescent quickening can occur and he’s trying to help us to become aware of our own moments because sometimes they can be a once and for all thing. You’re never the same. That happens to people, it happened to him. But very often it’s not like that. Very often these quickening start as children like subtle quickenings, like a kind of quiet amazement or a sense of unexplainably resting in the presence of God, like lying in your own bed at night in the dark. And he’s trying to help us become aware of our moments where the presence was shining through, not with insights and reflections and consolations, but with a kind of transubjective purity of presence this way.

Kirsten Oates:

Also, I guess thy audience because in a way he’s saying to the Reverend Mother, you don’t need to read a special book to discover this because he would’ve read Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, and he is engaging in the practices of the monastery, which are these deeply spiritual practices.

Jim Finley:

It’s also apparent. See, you really don’t need to read all these books.

Kirsten Oates:

Yes.

Jim Finley:

But here’s the point. We’ll use his book as an example. You open it up and it’s the one-liners that get you. You don’t need to read all these books, but thank God you opened the page and read that book because that’s the one that got to me. And I think really this is to read the Gospels this way, mystically. Everything Jesus says is like this. So once you’ve been graced with that incandescent simplicity, then trust it. Don’t go off into tangential places. They’re not tangential for other people that are at those places efficacious under their holiness, but be true to what you are and what you’re about. So when He was in the monastery, the monastic life that He was living as a Carmelite was conducive to fostering this. But for those of us who are touched by it out in the world, we have to develop a contemplative culture in our heart because we don’t live in a world that encourages this. And I think that’s what we’re sharing now with the listeners. That’s how it’s handed on to be a deeply contemplative person in the midst of a busy world that God so loved to send His only-begotten son.

Turning to the mystics will continue in a moment.

Kirsten Oates:

I also think many of us need to recapture what you said about Jesus and the Gospels. I think there’s so much teaching out there that tries to make what Jesus said, so black and white and understandable. And I loved–I’m going to read the first section from Brother Lawrence and how you compared that to the way Jesus spoke. So Brother Lawrence says, “What I was seeking was nothing other than a way of being completely with God. This led me to resolve, to give all for all. And you compared that to Jesus’s teaching the greatest commandment to love God with your whole heart, mind, and soul. And you read this teaching, “What does it mean to give all for all?” And then you referred to Jesus’s teaching, “Well what does it actually mean to love that way?” And I think some of us, we’ve lost that big questioning that this is not understandable. This is something to live into.

Jim Finley:

Yes. So when they ask Jesus, see what is the greatest commandment, that has all these beautiful things you say, what’s the one thing if we were ground our heart in that everything else would fall into place? That’s a great question. And so Jesus doesn’t say anything we’re supposed to believe. He says to love of God with all your mind, all your soul and all your heart and your neighbor as yourself. In one way you can just read it, move on to the next passage.

Kirsten Oates:

Yes, I get it.

Jim Finley:

Skim right over it. “Sure, check that off.” But the other way to look at it is preferably if we’re taken by it this way, and I think here’s the way I put it to me is that everything to experientially realize anything that Jesus says is falling off a cliff because it drops down into the bottomless abyss of God, welling up and giving himself. And what Jesus is saying is God’s presence in the world. So I love God with all my heart. So you have to go to God and say to God, “I don’t know what all my heart is, but you do because you created it.” And so I think Brother Lawrence always has that invitational invitation to go to that place.

Kirsten Oates:

I really love that and I love the way you brought in that scripture because like I said, I think I was one of those people that, well, they teach you in church what that is. It’s very clear what that is. If you go to a sermon versus this sitting in awe with the question of what is that really?

Jim Finley:

That’s exactly right. I also think of the monks chanting the Psalms back and forth and back and forth, and we can read Brother Lawrence’s way out loud like we’re doing right now. So there’s something about the rhythmic constancy of the presence he’s speaking of that his teachings embody. We never know at any given point where we’re touched, it’s almost, I think sometimes we go on, it gets deeper and deeper. We go in a way we can’t go on, we just stop and wordlessly rest in this living word that transcends what words can say, but our heart recognizes it and experiences it and it blesses us.

Kirsten Oates:

And once we open the door to the question, the longing to really, really, really love and to really, really, really be loved can open up.

Jim Finley:

Yeah. What he’s going to say too, and all the mystics say that is to know that you’re longing for God is an echo of God’s infinite longing for you because God placed the longing for God in your heart as the beloved, as the one that would seek God out. And so you and God could meet as your destiny this communion. That’s why we exist in the first place.

Kirsten Oates:

Right, you said that that’s why we exist in the first place. It’s what it means to be a person. I really liked this next section. I wanted to go through it slowly. “Then offering myself all to God to atone for my sins.” And I wanted to ask you about the word sins and the concept of sin and how is that a helpful concept for us? I think it’s been so misused in the church.

Jim Finley:

It’s true, unfortunately. There has been, it’s been kind of heavy on original sin and so there’s this almost sense of guilt and shame. It’s almost like it’s very, very hard, not impossible to even get into heaven kind of damned already. “Look at you,” you know what I mean? And have mercy on me. And there was a lot, unfortunately there was a lot of that.

Kirsten Oates:

Yeah, you’re not a beloved sinner. You’re a pathetic. You need to change yourself.

Jim Finley:

That’s a good way to put it, that you’re an infinitely loved sinner. But the very acknowledgement of your sinfulness is the portal to which the infinite presence of God is pouring itself out and giving itself to you is unexplainably precious in the midst of your wayward ways, which is experiential salvation. See, that’s the good news. So what he means by sin is this, I think. Here’s an example I use. Let’s say there’s someone you love very much and you realize that there may be certain moments in which what you said or the way you said it or your difference to it wasn’t really worthy of the love that’s there, and you’re just a human being. You’re just a human being. So what you do is not in a shame-based way, you just acknowledge that. “I’m not really capable of consistently living up to what our love ask of us and reveals us to be.” And then you say, “But I know that I don’t need to because in the acknowledgement, a very acknowledgement of that inability, love becomes all the richer for the beauty of giving itself to us in the midst of our limitations.” And that’s a subtle thing really.

Kirsten Oates:

I really like that. So it’s almost like the way you are teaching at Jim, this reality that we live in this exiled state from the purity of God’s love for us and we have glimpses of it, but all the ways we behave in our exiled nature, we might just call that sin. All the ways we behave connected to this love nature we might call love. So then it’s very, it’s the word for being human. It’s not a shameful guilt-filled word.

Jim Finley:

The whole mystery of the fall, like in the garden, the whole mystery of the fall is in this fallen state, what falls is the capacity to experientially realize the infinite presence of God presenting itself to us. It’s the only thing that’s ultimately real, it is presencing itself and it is giving itself to us. Thomas Merton says, “There is that in us that is not subject to the brutalities of our own will because as that in us, it belongs completely to God. So what’s fallen is the capacity to consistently see it and live by it. That God falls with us and isn’t fallen because it doesn’t fall because it belongs completely to God. It’s like the God-given godly nature of the divinity of ourselves in our brokenness. It’s a deep way of understanding Jesus. When you look at every story in the gospel is where Jesus met someone and this is what he invited them to realize that he could see in them an invincible preciousness that didn’t fall at all, but it’s buried under the rubble of the fallen ability to see it. And so the light shines out as a moment of liberation.

Kirsten Oates:

That’s so helpful. So then to atone for my sin, the way Brother Lawrence says here is really just to recognize that God fell with us.

Jim Finley:

Yeah. Atone for my sin insofar is I atone for my half-heartedness, whatever. But I think what he’s really getting at here is I want to atone for the sin of giving more authority to my inability to live up to this love than I do to you being infinitely in love with me and my inability to live up to it. And that’s the parable of the prodigal son. The prodigal son’s coming back. What am I going to say that he’ll take me back and let me live behind the garage somewhere? And the father doesn’t even wait for him to get… He rushes out, puts the ring on his, he doesn’t even want to hear it.

So confession to God, God says, “Yes, I know all that more than you do. I’m God, I can see it. But guess what? I don’t care. You know why? I’m in love with you.” There is the moral imperative of acknowledging and doing our best to overcome hurtful habits of the mind and heart. That’s certainly true, but the peace that we’re searching for is not the peace that’s found in our ability to be faithful to that. Paul had a thorn in the flesh. He doesn’t tell us what, it’s a stumbling place. He couldn’t get past. And I asked God to remove and God said, “Leave it there because that’s where you depend on me.” Because if you could do, it’d just be more of you. But if I’m infinitely in love with you and your inability to get past a stumbling place, and that’s discipleship, I guess.

Kirsten Oates:

Yes. It’s just a core part of the spiritual path. And really now the second half of that sentence is so attuned to what you just said. So after saying, “Offering myself all to God, to atone for my sins, for love of God, I gave up everything that was not God. And I began to live as if only love and I existed in the world,” which you said because he knew the truth of that, which is really what we just discussed. Yeah.

Jim Finley:

Another thing I said, which I think is a subtle point, see, I give everything that was not God. So he didn’t say, “Well, the pots and pans in the kitchens aren’t God, so I’m giving that up. My daily duties in the monastery are in God. I’m giving up my daily duties.” So in a way, he’s not giving up anything. What he’s doing is he’s giving up his finite understanding of anything was adequate for realizing the divinity of everything. And he’s seeking to give up that.

Kirsten Oates:

Oh, I see. Yes.

Jim Finley:

The closed horizon where we can’t see beyond what our finite eyes can see, where we can’t understand what our finite minds can comprehend, but it’s unexplainably realize what we cannot comprehend. So I don’t depend anymore on comprehending as what understanding means.

Kirsten Oates:

Because I know in my heart that love is what exists in the world. Yes.

Jim Finley:

That’s right. And I would say something too, just anytime we deeply love anybody, the more deep the love is, the less inclined we would be to claim we could explain it in a way that could do justice to it. It’s amazingly unexplainable and we live by that.

Kirsten Oates:

This part’s interesting. The next sentence, “Sometimes I saw myself before God as a poor criminal at his judge’s feet.” I wondered, it’s so part of being a human to often feel unnecessary shame. And I do wonder if this ability to come before God with our shame is a healing practice.

Jim Finley:

Yes. I say this as a psychotherapist too. I think for each of us, there’s a certain kind of interior set of certain habits that we really know are really not true to the fullness we’re called to be. And there’s a certain sinfulness to it. Insofar is that they compromise love.

Kirsten Oates:

Yes.

Jim Finley:

And what’s really interesting about it is we know we’re not done yet doing it. It is, “I put that one behind me, took care of that.” You don’t take care of it. It’s in that sense. So you’re like a prisoner to these limitations, but the message of Jesus, you’re the prisoner who’s already set free and the acknowledgement of your limitations, as a matter of fact, the limitations themselves are your teacher. Am I to actually imagine that God is going to take into account these things that I can’t get past in order to start loving me? Or is it that he’s already infinitely in love with me and the acknowledgement that I can’t get past? And that’s where it touches on humility.

Kirsten Oates:

That’s beautiful. So when you come before this judge, the judge is the love of God. And so you can own the sense of frustration and being a prisoner to things that you do that you wish you didn’t. But when you come before the right judge that it’s judged with love and yeah, that’s beautiful.

Jim Finley:

It’s like we’ve already been judged, but we’ve been judged with mercy.

Kirsten Oates:

Yeah.

Jim Finley:

That’s the judgment. And it’s amazing how punitive we can be towards ourselves.

Kirsten Oates:

Exactly. Exactly.

Jim Finley:

It’s kind of amazing. It’s kind of mysterious why we do that. I think in one way, if it’s still at the level of something I have to get past, there’s a kind of control over it. “I’m trying hard, I hope I make it,” this kind of thing. But when you talk about oceanic mercy, there’s no control in oceanic mercy. And yet the very things that we’re holding onto of control is what imprisons us. So the loving presence of God is a liberation. It isn’t as if we stop doing it, we’re still doing it because that part of us can’t help itself, but it doesn’t have tyranny over us anymore.

Kirsten Oates:

Yes. We don’t double down on ourselves with the, I love that word you say, we can be so punitive to ourselves and if we open up to God’s presence and so we don’t double down, we actually can feel a love that…

Jim Finley:

That’s right. So when we hear this spacious language of Brother Lawrence, all the mystics in Jesus, there’s that in us that really does get it. It does, but we wouldn’t be touched by it. And we get it because we know it. But there’s also that in us that doesn’t get it yet. It still gets triggered. It’s still ashamed. It’s still as you would be. So we’re to be endlessly tender-hearted toward that in us that doesn’t get it yet. And that’s to be Christ towards ourself.

Kirsten Oates:

The next heart. He says, “At other times I looked on love in my heart as my parent, as my God.” I liked that also because many of us need reparenting that we were brought up by punitive parents or we were brought up by parents that were very unwell. And so I love this idea that we can be reparented by a loving God.

Jim Finley:

Yes. In psychology and child psychology, developmental stages of children, there’s the rapprochement phase. And what it is, is this, the child is sitting on the mother’s lap and the child is able to be put on the floor and the child can crawl away and go down the hallway and explore, but it knows it can always come back for a big hug to get another dose of the golden glow. See? And that’s the parent. So I’m constantly returning back for the golden glow of the unconditioned. It’s true, I do wander off down hallways true enough, but I can always come back and being perpetually reparented by Abba, this love is always there for me in the preciousness of myself, in my midst of my limitation. And by the way, I think to the mother, to the father, the child’s limitations, it’s like a litany of limitations. It makes the child all the more endearing to the parents. They’re kind of quite taken by it. And that’s how God sees us and our limitations and encouraging us to do the same.

Kirsten Oates:

That’s really helpful. It’s not as if some people need reparenting and others don’t. There’s a way we need to be parented by God on the spiritual path.

Jim Finley:

I think that’s really true. But I also think then insofar as we’re always right up to our last breath, there’s also a certain way, although we need reparenting, we transcend the need to be, we’re established in the presence. I also think then we try to pass that on to others and the tonal quality of how we relate to them.

Kirsten Oates:

So then this is how He describes the practice having expressed this humanity, “Sometimes like a poor criminal, sometimes I’m like the child. “He says, “I loved them there as often as I could holding my mind in their holy presence and calling my mind back to them as often as it was distracted. I had more than a few difficulties doing this exercise, but continued despite these, without getting worried or anxious when I was unintentionally distracted. So I love that description of the practice because one, he’s trying to hold his mind in God’s presence. Two, he gets distracted. He admits that. Three, he doesn’t get worried or anxious or condemn himself when he gets distracted. And then I guess he just tries to faithfully return to holding his mind in the presence.

Jim Finley:

This is a big thing really. And it’s a good example of how Brother Lawrence doesn’t expound upon subtle matters like this. It just makes this a very succinct statement. But actually in the traditions, this is a big thing. It’s true that in us it’s the presence, but it’s also true that we’re in God. As a matter of fact, we’re eternally in God before the origins of the universe because from all eternity, God, the Father is eternally contemplating us in the Word. And so when God created you, when you brought into the world of time and space, God did not have to think up who you might be. From all eternity, God knows who you eternally are, hidden with Christ and God forever. This is everything in God is God. This is the divinity of you. This is the unborn you because God has never not known who you eternally are and that unborn you is you that will never die.

And so what he does, he places himself in that because he is that. With regard to spiritual matters, how should we begin? Well, we should begin where we are. But the question is where are we? See one level, I’m right here, but another level I’m in God. And so we can see how practicing the presence now fans out boundlessly in both directions, practicing the presence because who we are in God before God brought us into time. In time, we don’t cease to be who we are before we existed in time. And so time and eternity and in God and of God, you start to see the unifying oneness of the presence of God for Brother Lawrence, for the tradition, for the lineage.

Kirsten Oates:

Yes, in all these mystics. He says, “Although I’ve only practiced it in a week and imperfect way still, I’ve received many profound benefits from it.” I certainly know these blessings happened only through our Friend’s mercy and kindness. Since we can do nothing without them, and I even less so than everyone else. But when we faithfully stay in God’s sacred presence, seeing them always before us, it not only helps us avoid upsetting or not pleasing love at least deliberately, but this awareness also helps us take the sacred liberty to ask them for the graces we need.” I love that too because the humility of prayer, so just because we have experiences of oneness with God doesn’t mean we don’t interact relationally with God as almost like subject to subject.

Jim Finley:

That’s right. Another way that helps me to see this is let’s say there’s our daily rendezvous with God, like the quiet hour, whatever to whatever. But notice when you sit there in your own living room and the sincerity of the sitting, you’re just you. You’re sitting there in the day-by-day, ordinariness of yourself in the presence of God is presencing itself as the divinity of your, and so I put it another way too about everything coming from God is that when you inhale the life-sustaining power of inhaling from whence does it arise, we didn’t bring ourself into existence. We can’t keep ourself into existence if even the breath that we breathe is not the breath that we manufacture or fabricate. Everything is unexplainably given and it’s given boundlessly in the ordinariness of ourselves and the divinity of day-by-day life.

Kirsten Oates:

And he’s referring to that, I guess Jim, when he says, “I’ve received many profound benefits, but these happened only through our Friend’s mercy and kindness since we can do nothing without them.”

Jim Finley:

That’s right. Because all by ourself without God, we’re nothing. There’s if the infinite presence of God at the count of three with cease presencing itself as our very presence, at the count of three, we would disappear because we’re nothing, absolutely nothing without the presence of God presencing itself as our presence this way. We would vanish away completely like that. So it’s just like I stated, quiet amazement, but it’s our very nothingness without God that makes our very presence to be the presence of God. If God was cease creating the world of the count of three, the world would disappear because it’s nothing without God, but it’s nothingness without God is the divinity of the world. And I think that’s what he saw when he was in the kitchen with the pots in the pans. It’s like incarnate infinity, intimately realized unexplainably. And so we’re moved by it because when we hear it, we know it’s true.

Kirsten Oates:

And you’re saying he either saw it or he remained in faith open to seeing it. He knew it was there in faith and at times he saw it and at other times he didn’t. But his heart and mind remained open to it.

Jim Finley:

Again. When we really love somebody, we give ourselves to a community of people. Any self-donating act, it’s true. Sometimes we’re consciously aware of that donating act and we are. But there’s a lot of times in the ordinariness of the task at hand. We’re not aware of it, but it’s always embodied in the integrity and simplicity with which we’re doing what we’re doing. The way I put it too is what if our heartbeat was a voluntary muscle like our arms or legs? So in order for our heart to keep beating, we had to keep saying beat, beat, beat, beat, beat. And what if you were absent-minded with anxiety? And so we don’t have to tend the store. We’re being carried along. And so we’re moving in this rhythm of the constancy of the presence and give and the take, we’re consciously aware of the communal presence. We’re not consciously aware of the communal presence, but the communal presence is sustaining us in the moments we’re not aware of it because it doesn’t depend on us being aware of it because it doesn’t depend on anything because everything depends on it.

Kirsten Oates:

Before we close, Jim, I just wanted to reflect, and I’m curious what you would think Brother Lawrence was referring to when he said, “I’ve received many profound benefits from engaging in this practice.” Because he doesn’t really expand on things like you say, he keeps it so simple. I wonder what that might be.

Jim Finley:

It’s coming to mind, so I’ll share it. Thomas Merton was giving a talk to the novices in the monastery and the cloistered monastery. And he said, “We’re all in this cloistered chanting the Psalms and living in communal silence.” And he said, “We’re all walking around disgruntled because we came here with high hopes. And once you get in here, you realize half the people in here are crazy, like cloistered, neurotic, collective.” It’s true. Anywhere you go, it’s always like… And then he said, “But then you see an old lay brother coming towards you, down the cloister like a transparent child. And you know he found what you came here for.” And I think that’s what Brother Lawrence found, and he’s on the verge of death here when he is writing this. It’s like a quiet amazement that nothing’s missing.

Kirsten Oates:

That makes me want to cry. Beautiful.

Jim Finley:

Yeah, it is beautiful.

Kirsten Oates:

Well, thank you for the lovely session and thank you for the wonderful dialogue today. It’s just a gift to be able to talk about this with you, Jim.

Jim Finley:

Thank you so much. Just a gift to share with you because I know it gifts the listeners when they listen, so we keep handing it on.

Kirsten Oates:

And thank you to Dorothy and the team always supporting us in the background. We look forward to seeing you next time. 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 podcasts at cac.org or send us a voicemail. All this information can be found in the show notes. We’ll see you again soon.