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 are turning to the philosopher Gabriel Marcel. And I’m here with Jim to dialogue about his third session on hope. Welcome, Jim.

Jim Finley:

Yes. Good. I’m looking forward to our dialogue.

Kirsten Oates:

Jim, your session on hope was so beautiful and I’m looking forward to dialoguing about hope. But I find it helpful to reground us in Marcel’s vision before we move into the path aspect of hope. So if you don’t mind, I’ll take a pass at explaining Marcel’s vision and then you’ll add to it. So Marcel’s helping us understand that we can experience reality in two different ways.

We can experience it as the realm of the problematic where we recognize problems to be solved, we analyze things, we’re trying to understand things and then we can experience reality in the realm of mystery. And this mystery opens up onto things like love, like faith, and ultimately what Marcel calls being. And we might experience a sense of this oneness with being and through that relationship our oneness with all beings. So Jim, what have I got right there?

Jim Finley:

He’s inviting us to reflect on the interior dimensions of our own experience of our life and of our self-reality. And so the problematic is everything that is dualistically other than ourself where we seek an answer or a solution. So the examples that we use, if my car won’t start or if the roof is leaking. These are problems and whenever there’s a problem we look for a method to solve the problem or we look for someone who has expertise in how to solve the problem and then once it’s solved… Or a math problem, once we get the… We move on to the next problem.

But he said but mysteries are different in the sense that when we turn toward a mystery, we realize that we’re included in what we’re turning towards. So when I ask, “What’s it mean to be human?” it’s myself as a human being that’s asking. “What is consciousness?” It’s me and my consciousness that is asking, “What is consciousness?” Or asking, “What is love?” It’s me and my capacity for or desire for love on what is love? So these are mysteries and that I’m turning towards… And not to myself in a reductionistic sense, like everything back to my opinion, my feeling.

But the opposite is true, that the mystery of myself… And this is the vision for Marcel, is that the mystery of myself is that the very mystery of myself extends out into and is woven into and is an embodiment of the mystery of humanity, the mystery of consciousness, the mystery of love, and ultimately to the mystery of being, which he sees as infinite, sublime. And really Kenneth Gallagher points out it’s really God. But here he’s looking at it from the standpoint of religious consciousness of the ultimate, outside the world religions. Later in his life when he became Catholic, he lived as a devout Catholic until his death as lineages of religious consciousness.

But here he is trying to see that somehow God’s present in reality itself and consciousness itself. And so the mystery then is a mystery of myself is that I extend out into and I’m woven into and I access the infinite mystery of God that’s giving itself and manifesting itself and giving the mystery of itself to me as the mystery of myself. So it isn’t just that I have or we have a relationship with God, we are a relationship with God. We are an interpersonal communal unit of mystery. And that’s the vision of Marcel. And he calls it the ontological mystery, naming ontology meaning our very being.

So then the question is being aware of how we tend not to be aware of that, trapped in the ego. And it would then leads to moments where it comes shining through into consciousness. That is there’s a moment where we become conscious of this unit of mystery of ourself and that’s what he’s interested in are these moments. And then how in becoming conscious of this unit of mystery, how we can then… As these moments, these grace moments fade, how we can cultivate the habit of being ever more habitually established in this consciousness of the unit of mystery.

Because the intuition is it isn’t something more is given to us in these moments, but a curtain parts that we fleetingly taste the abyss-like depth-like divinity of every moment of our life including this moment. So how can I then by meditating very carefully on moments where it shines into consciousness… How can I, in my remembrance of that moment, find a path where I become habitually more established than the divinity of my day-by-day life? So that’s Marcel. That’s one way of putting it.

Kirsten Oates:

So lovely. And Jim, that statement you made that Marcel is pointing to these moments when we recognize we are our relationship with God is how you say that. So we are our relationship with God and because everything in reality is a relationship with God, we’re in relationship with everything in reality and it’s that relationship that creates the thou. Is that right?

Jim Finley:

That’s exactly right. “It’s the thou,” he says. Again, he’s echoing Martin Buber, “I, it and I, thou.” So I it is for Marcel is the problematic. This it. Thou is where we see a person and we see that the presence of the person is the embodiment of the infinite presence of God. And this is why the thou then fills the entire horizon of our being. That as we see what’s objectively real about the beloved father, mother, sister, brother, lover, spouse, grandmother, teacher, student, thou. And also extends to thou dimensions of nature, the darkness of the night, the smell of flowers this way.

So we’re very aware of the factual reality of the person, but to our love and to our awareness we’re graced to see the thou dimension of the person, the presence of the beloved as thou is that the very presence is the infinite thou of God presencing itself as the presence of thou. And then also that way it isn’t just this interpersonal but it’s interpersonal that I recognize the thou dimensions of myself.

That I myself, by the generosity of God, by very presence is the presence of the presence of God manifesting itself as my presence. It’s really then a mystical experience. And so he’s looking then for moments. He’s inviting us to reflect on these moments where we’re like a momentary mystic. And then as he describes this, where he walks to it, we listen to it. And at this level the details are never the same. But the underlying reality is always the same. We can tell Marcel’s helping us to put words to moments that we’ve experienced. He’s very practical that way. He’s helping us to reflect on this grace giftedness that we tend to be graced by it where we walk right past it, not to pause long enough to be a habitually stabilized in it. And he’s trying to help us do this. And this is where he’s a teacher.

Kirsten Oates:

Yes. And he’s writing this way to help us recognize that we spend most of our time trapped in the experience or the realm of the problematic and that’s-

Jim Finley:

That’s right.

Kirsten Oates:

… become the norm for society, the norm for individuals. And so he’s helping us recognize that about ourselves, being stuck in primary consciousness.

Jim Finley:

That’s exactly right. That I’m nothing but the self things happen to, that I’m nothing but the self… That the outcome of the present situation has the authority to determine who I am. But here is saying that’s all the realm of conditioned states of the fluctuating ups and downs of life. “But how can I then find in these fluctuating patterns of conditioned states the unconditioned presence the transcendent that is shining through these conditioned states?” And that’s what he’s trying to help us tease out or define.

Kirsten Oates:

Yes. And then what I love about Marcel is that he not only helps us recognize those moments, but also he points to the fact that then we can align ourselves to those moments beyond the moment. And he’s very much talking about the way we can align our thoughts, which then aligns our actions and behaviors. And I think that’s just so helpful from Marcel the way he gives us clear examples of that.

Jim Finley:

Yes. And I love how Kenneth Gallagher puts the two… In quoting Marcel, that these moments were graced with this unit of realization. It’s summum bonum, a supreme good in time that transcends sequential time. But it is a supreme good only if the moment and time that transcends sequential time is habituated in sequential time itself. And that’s our fidelity. That’s our habituated hope and that’s what makes it path talk…in via…on the way. “How can I live in this habituated state that I fleetingly graced my heart, but I know as an experiential touch of what this moment is? And really it was a touch of who I ultimately am as the manifested presence of God and my nothingness without God.” And that’s Marcel.

Kirsten Oates:

That’s such a wow moment for me, Jim, what you just said is such an “aha” moment. So I’m going to get you to repeat it actually so we can hear it twice so people don’t have to rewind at this point.

Jim Finley:

Yes, exactly.

Kirsten Oates:

You can say it twice in a row. But this idea of that we can’t make the moment happen. We can’t make the moment of the I-Thou moment happen. That’s not within our power to make that happen. But what is within our power is to incarnate it in time beyond the moment, I think is what I heard you say.

Jim Finley:

Yes, yes. If the ontological mystery of this transubjective communion, then my very presence is embodying the infinite presence of God being given to me as my very presence. That’s the mystery. And then there are certain moments that ontological mystery, which is the truth of ourself, the very being of ourself breaks through into our consciousness of it.

So I can’t make these moments where I become conscious of it happen. We saw this with all the mystics. But what I can do is this, I know that in this moment where this came shining through, that my heart did not deceive me and that in that moment I fleetingly was immersed in the unity of mystery. That this very moment and every moment of my life is. That as I, in this moment of my awareness as it passes, I become aware of my tendency not to be aware. But even though I’m not aware of it, it’s endlessly always aware of me and therefore I can cultivate a faith, a fidelity in these moments this way.

So my fidelity then, which is the path, is in echoing God’s infinite fidelity to me and giving the infinity of God to me as my very presence. And so he’s saying, “Well, what is that path?” He’s walking it like…What’s an habituated sensitivity to the divinity of the ordinariness of ourselves and others and life itself, really?

Kirsten Oates:

And so our freedom lies in our will and our desire to live in alignment in the resonance of the truth of what we now know, what we gained in that experience.

Jim Finley:

Yeah, you hit on a big thing. This is really true about freedom for Marcel. See, because we’re free not to do this and we often don’t. So we quoted G.K. Chesterton, “The philosopher is the person who pauses to ponder what the average person walks by in haste.” So it’s true. My cell phone just went off. I can choose to just move on. And sadly enough, I do often enough. But I can choose not to move on.

And that’s why reading Marcel is a lectio divina because as we just stay with him, the pedagogy, he slows us down enough to be present to him. So the very act of listening to him itself becomes the moment of realizing the moment we’re listening to him is itself embodying this very thing he’s talking about. And then when we close Marcel or blow out our candle and go out our day, whatever it is, we ask for the grace not to break the thread of that. And little by little it becomes an ever more habitual sensitivity to the divinity of the rise and fall, the rhythms of our day, which is path. That’s the path.

Kirsten Oates:

In sequential time.

Jim Finley:

In sequential time. It’s very close to T.S. Eliot. Lot of this is time and eternity. So it’s in sequential time, I live in the habitual grounded awareness of the eternality of what never passes away, there’s a ribbon through everything endlessly passing away.

Kirsten Oates:

So that in the end that primary consciousness isn’t our primary.

Jim Finley:

Exactly right. That’s exactly right. A Jesuit priest, William Johnston, he studied at Sophia University in Tokyo. He studied under another Jesuit priest and they were Zen senseis. They practiced Zazen as Christians, like Christian Zazen. And one of his insights is that in day-by-day consciousness, the problematic is in the forefront. And this intuitive unit of sensitivity is always there, it’s kind of the background. In certain fleeting moments, it reverses roles and the unit comes shining through the customary.

So what meditation practice is is cultivating the habit where little by little, the underlying unit of consciousness and the problematic awareness of the passage of time starts slowly changing roles. And while we’re actually engaged in the sitting, absorption. In whatever form that takes, in the presence of the beloved, reading a childhood goodnight story, lying awake in the dark, listening to your breathing, smelling the sound of the rain and whatever that practice is, you can experience yourself shifting into this more unit of state.

And then you’re saying… I’m asking as I go through my day, I have to live my life, the ups and downs of the day. But little by little over time, that would become an habitual underlying sensitivity to the unfolding details of my day, that every moment of my life is unexplainably this very abyss-like unit of mystery that we’re now talking about shining out to the gift of walking down a hallway and opening a door and the voice of the friend, the smell of a flower. We’re trying to be habitually established in this.

Kirsten Oates:

And Jim, would it be true to say it’s no small task for the ego because in that moment where we’re taken up into the I-Thou moment, the ego disappears?

Jim Finley:

Yes.

Kirsten Oates:

It’s not like it’s getting clear guidance like in a classroom, like, “Do this. Do this. Do this.” Because it kind of disappears from itself and it’s a resonant.

Jim Finley:

This is where Marcel too echoes Thomas Merton, remember the true self and the false self. So when Merton talks about the true self, he means what Marcel’s talking about, this ultimate identity. In this life, it’s veiled. When we die past the veil of death, it’ll be unveiled. Then there are certain moments it’s unveiled like it’s luminous. But it’s unveiled in a veiled way because the ego that’s transcended, it’s obscure, it’s very deep and real, but it’s obscure.

And so the false self is not the ego. God wants us to have a healthy ego. Our self-reflective bodily self and time and space and relationship with others and with the earth because if our ego isn’t healthy, we suffer and other people suffer. This is what mental health is all about. The healing of…okay. The false self is an illusion the ego has about itself and it has the final say in who we are. And it doesn’t easily give up that illusion. It can’t help itself. It’s just the ego. So what is this path where love quietly infuses that fear and dissolves or heals it or melts it so it comes shining through?

Kirsten Oates:

I really appreciate that tie back to season one that you did on Thomas Merton on the true self and the false self. So the false self would be the self that might be totally attached to the realm of the problematic and can’t see past it.

Jim Finley:

Yeah, that my false self is that my self-worth and identity is actually determined by the outcome of this present situation, is determined by what this person thinks of me or what I think of myself. And so really what it really is, it’s really the ego is the conditioned state of internalizing fluctuating conditions and I’m nothing but the sum total of those fluctuating conditions. So that’s the problem. We tend to relativize the absolute, some kind of vague ethereal thing. But we absolutize the relative that, “I’m just nothing but who I think I am, who I’m trying to be.” It’s so one dimensional and claustrophobic.

And so what Marcel is so good at, he’s helping to see these moments where there’s a luminous effulgence or richness comes shining through it all and not to break faith with our awakened heart, see how to stabilize ourself and that and that’s one way of understanding Marcel… All these mystical teachers, really.

Kirsten Oates:

Wonderful. So I love the way Marcel gives real life examples of this and that’s how he helps outline this path. And in your first session you talked about fidelity and you brought that up again today, that it’s actually God’s fidelity with us that starts to shine through in our will and our thoughts and our actions. And we talked about the I-Thou moment being like an event and then the fidelity is the way we align our will and our actions and our thoughts to that. And so I’m wondering… We’re about to start talking about hope. Is it building on fidelity or is it another aspect of Gabriel’s path?

Jim Finley:

We talked about this before where in a way Marcel is echoing St. Paul. The faith, hope and love and the greatest of these is love. And by love he means caritas, God’s love. And he says, “So faith is the substance that things hoped for.” And what’s hoped for is the realization of the love that is already the reality of who we are. And so Marcel is saying what St. Paul is doing theologically explicitly, he’s doing implicitly, is hidden in the very ontology is our very being. And then it goes on to say, “With this very goodness of being,” clearly for Marcel is God. But he leaves that implicit. He’s trying to find God in life itself and being itself. And so this is true, this is our fidelity. And fidelity is God’s fidelity to us and giving the infinite presence of God to us as a mystery of our own presence. Next is God’s fidelity to us where that fidelity is grace, where it shines through into consciousness.

Just a moment. And that’s the thou moment. Now when we see the beloved is thou, the thou always was thou. But when the thou moment, it’s like a revelation comes shining through and then we live in fidelity to the thou dimension of the friend, lover, brother, sister, mother, whoever and ourself, the thou dimensions of ourself this way. And so we seek to live in fidelity to that. So what hope then… He’s looking now it’s the same thing, but now he’s looking at it specifically in terms of time because usually when we think of hope, we are hoping for the hopeful outcome of a present unresolved situation.

“So I sure hope this situation… I’m invested in it. I sure hope it turns out the way I want it to turn out.” That’s hope. And sometimes the hopeful is kind of superficial, like, “I hope the Dodgers win the game.” But sometimes, “I hope my marriage doesn’t fall apart.” “I hope my child doesn’t die.” And really if I get the diagnosis, this is what Marcel is saying, I get a terminal diagnosis is hope. But then he’s saying this, what he’s really looking for? What is it then when a person hopes but they hope in a way that isn’t dependent on whether they recover or not?

And this is where we start comparing hope to Elizabeth Kübler-Ross on acceptance as the stages of dying. In carefully studying the patterns of death, she sees that denial… The terminal diagnosis. We deny it because we don’t believe death applies to us. Next, when we realize it is happening to us, we try to strike a bargain with God, “If you let me live.” And then when a bargain doesn’t work, there’s anger and then depression and this is the ego self coming to the end of itself. But then she says some people come to acceptance and this is what Marcel is talking about. And Marcel is freedom from the tyranny of death in the midst of death. So when you look into the face of the dying loved one who’s in acceptance, it’s the gate of heaven. So this is what Marcel is saying, that there’s a kind of a hope.

Not that just hope that I’m going to get better, but we might put it this way. “If I’m in the presence of a person who’s in this state of hope, I only can hope that I myself will come to this hope this person’s in.” And the hope we said earlier is this, when Jesus is the Christ, whatever it is to be human, whatever it is to be God is inseparably woven together into a singularity, this eternal. Jesus was also, he might say, was a Jewish mystic. And all mystics have their own language for this unit of mystery and for Jesus it was the kingdom of God.

So in some verses the kingdom of God is God’s ultimate victory over all forms of suffering and death where the lion will lie down with the lamb as victory. Secondly, he said we should, sometimes, we should work for the coming of the kingdom by being ever more Christ-like and loving and time bearing witness to this love. And then in other passages, the kingdom of God is already here. Epistemology is the philosophical understanding of what it means to understand. And so we understand that it’s already unexplainably here as an event in consciousness.

It isn’t something we’re waiting for, rather what was already unexplainably there really before the origins of the universe hidden with Christ and God forever comes shining through. And so he’s going to be talking about a person in death who’s in this deathless state transcending death in the midst of death and he’s holding it up poetically for us to reflect on and then look for certain moments where we can discern that we’ve tasted something of that. Like poetically, this makes sense, this rings true, it’s subtle, but it makes sense. And how can I learn to be more habitually established in that sensitivity, the eternality of myself that I’m eternal, that my body’s dying? But we’re all eternal. Nobody dies.

Kirsten Oates:

Wonderful. A couple of things I want to reflect back from what you just said. One is you said that Marcel’s talking about hope in terms of time. And so what I’m hearing is that the hope is that time doesn’t have the final say on who we are.

Jim Finley:

That’s right.

Kirsten Oates:

And it’s our relationship with God that’s eternal and that has the final say on who we are. And then the other thing you talked about was how fidelity, hope and love being woven and intertwined. And so this hope… Time doesn’t have the final say on who we are, it’s God’s fidelity to us that has the final say on who we are.

Jim Finley:

So here’s the example that we used as the child in merry-go-round. We don’t understand human nature unless we understand why a child on the merry-go-round wave at its parents every time around and they always wave back. The insight is this. Every time the merry-go-round circles around where the child comes into view, that’s where they emerged in time and then we wave like this. But the very circularity with which they emerged in time is the circularity which they’re going to disappear in time. And so what’s in time is our appearance is in time.

But the point is the moment where we appeared in the world and time and our conception and our birth isn’t where we began. It’s just like the child when they swing around and they come into view, they didn’t come into existence the moment they came into view. If the child that they already unexplainably were is coming into view. So likewise when we circle around and we come around and we come into time is that God is exhaling us out of the eternal presence of God hidden with Christ and God before the origins of the universe. It’s the eternality of our ourself, of who God eternally knows us to be. And we’re being exhaled by God into time.

And we’re here for a very short time, really, basically to learn how to love. And then what happens in time when the moment of death in God’s good time, God inhales and we disappear as mysteriously as we came. But the circle completes itself in eternity. So what he’s suggesting is this, is that it’s really true that we’re still in time and manifested time in the circularity, but we can glimpse that birthless, deathless divinity of ourself is fleetingly shining out in time itself, transcending time. And in that certain moment then see we’re a momentary mystic.

And that’s the subtle point where as we listen to this… It’s so poetically subtle, but it’s so delicate we can tell he’s trying to help us put words to something that we can’t explain but our own heart as we listen to it, we know it’s true and it matters very much this way. And so this is Marcellian teachings helping us.

Turning to the Mystics will continue in a moment.

Kirsten Oates:

What’s been interesting for me having listened to your session on Marcel is to notice how often I use the word “hope.” I’d like to go back and distinguish hope in primary consciousness. And I’d also like to talk about it in relation to prayer. So Marcel talks about what he would call desire, and I guess it’s desire of the ego that we can use the word hope in a sense of desire. And it could be a desire as trivial as my team winning the game or a desire that my child will get well… As serious as I have a sick child and I’d like them to get well. He’s differentiating that type of hope based on the circumstance turning out one way or the other. So one, have I got that right? And then two, I’m really curious about how that applies to prayer. Because there’s a lot of people that pray for the child to get well

Jim Finley:

That’s true. Kenneth Gallagher makes a slight allusion to this, but Gregory Sadler who gave some lovely lectures on Marcel, he’s going to be a guest on the podcast. He completes in Marcel’s own passage on the ontological mystery, on the philosophy of existence. He says, “There seems to be a principle in being which is in connivance with us, that it cannot will, but what we will, provided that what we will is worth willing and we will it with all of our heart.”

And so it’s this way, this is the subtlety. Let’s say my child is sick, seriously ill. Yes, I really do will that my child will recover and God willing, hope the child does recover. My heart will break if my child dies. But what I’m searching for, and this is what the grieving process is all about, is that the deathless presence of my child will be intimately revealed to me as I walk in the memory of my child’s death, that my child doesn’t die because nobody dies.

My child’s appearance with me in time is gone and I’m going to be gone too soon enough. This is all temporary. But shining out through the temporal fleetingness of our ourself is the eternality of our ourself. It’s so in connivance with me provided that what I desire is worth desiring. I really desire that I might learn to experientially abide in the deathless beauty of myself and everything and I will it with all my heart. I will it with all my heart.

And so I think that’s the path talk of Marcel. Also, I can be in happiness state like I’m in a relationship with someone I love very much and we’re together and we are together. Everyone’s fine and I’m fine and that’s fine and we should be grateful for that. But also we can see shining out to these conditions conducive to happiness a certain depth of presence that transcends the conditions to happiness because these conditions, as happy as they are, are passing away. But hidden in the depth of these good times is the goodness that never passes away. And how can I, in the very midst of the goodness of good conditions, see within the goodness of good conditions where you’re passing away a kind of effulgence for love shining out that will never pass away this way? Yeah, it works both ways.

Kirsten Oates:

Yes. That kind of movement from primary to secondary consciousness that you-

Jim Finley:

That’s right. And you’re introducing this term for Marcel. So primary reflect consciousness is a subjective factual… It’s real. Secondary consciousness is the consciousness that sees the inadequacy of primary consciousness and it sees it in grace moments where the light shines through and the realization of a presence that transcends it. See, we see the inadequacy of primary in that we’ve been graced with the fleeting taste of this presence that transcends the objective and the factual. And so the secondary consciousness is then a meditative state that in freedom we choose to try to stabilize in it.

Kirsten Oates:

Another contrast Marcel makes, which I found really helpful also, was he contrasts hope in the problematic or in primary consciousness. He compares it to optimism and that this hope he’s talking about is not optimism. And I find that helpful because the optimistic person can often sound like they have more of an eternal hope. Like, “Of course, they’ll get better.” Or, “Even if they don’t get better, everything will be fine.” That kind of optimistic hope but still grounded in that primary consciousness and in spiritual circles that can be spiritual bypassing, if it’s not grounded in this sense of eternal hope.

Jim Finley:

That’s exactly right. Let’s say, first of all, there’s a certain benefit to being optimistic, but to think about where you’re an optimistic person is actually your optimism is a psychological defense against the inevitability of the tragic. And really it’s a kind of a denial. So when the tragedy does happen, you fall apart and that tragedy where it falls apart is a crisis. But if you let it, the crisis can take you to a deeper place. So yes, that’s a subtle point.

Kirsten Oates:

It reminds me too, where Marcel talks about hope as a risky business and he says that in ego consciousness or in primary consciousness, another defense can be to be pessimistic. Because if I don’t expect the good outcome, I can’t be disappointed.

Jim Finley:

That’s right. Yeah. He’s saying that we need to be very careful not to hope too much. He says so this is the spiritually unawakened person is cautioning us, like hope’s a risky business because if you start hoping, it was never going to happen. To protect yourself, don’t hope so much.

Kirsten Oates:

Yes.

Jim Finley:

But Marcel’s saying that really fails to take into account the depth that we’re now speaking out of. And so this is why he says when this person is dying and they know that they’re dying, if by human standards we know it’s inevitable that the fate’s already settled, the diagnosis is settled and you’re only going to live so many… It’s settled. So the person who then hopes in that simply refuses to take into account the outcome of the situation. Because the outcome of the situation is finite in time, where the person’s hope is the infinite eternal love of God shining through and transcending all possible outcomes.

And so the person simply dismisses the validity of the questioning of their hope because they kind of see all those concerns are actually finite in terms which is being transcended in the gift of the eternality, of the deathless presence of themselves. Although their body’s dying, there’s comes shining through the deathless presence of themselves that being unborn will never die and they’re living in the light of that.

Kirsten Oates:

I love the way he uses these real world examples and he’s taking us back to the hospital room and I considered in the last episode on fidelity myself as the person in the hospital room experiencing that scene. And so now I’m going to switch to be now the person in the bed. So we had these potential two events going on, the visitor experiencing God’s fidelity for the dying person and trying to live in alignment with that.

And then we have the dying person who might have an event of experiencing this hope which transcends time and death and so that they live in hope. I really like the way Marcel is so clear on what’s happening in this quote. I love this quote. “To the outward eye, the case is closed. It is merely a matter of waiting for time to accomplish in fact what is already achieved in principle.” And that’s just such a stark thing about death when you know someone’s going to die and their presence is still with you in time, but you have the deadline of it right in front of you and it’s such a stark moment.

Jim Finley:

Yes, you’re singling out something here that’s important, I think. See, I think that when somebody dies and the depth to which we miss them so, the pain of their physical absence is in direct proportion to the depth of the love. So this is what grieving is, really we have to go through. Otherwise, it’s another form of optimistic mystical talk, avoiding the tragic. I look around, the beloved’s gone for God’s sake and therefore I miss the familiarity of the patterns, the intimate patterns of the way we were together. And now I look around, the person’s gone. I have this example. I don’t know if I shared this before or not.

Years ago, I told Maureen, “I love lovebirds.” I just love lovebirds. So for my birthday she got a pair of little lovebirds. They’re like little jewels. They’re like little bright-colored finches. And she gave this in a big cage and I’m looking at it now, made out of bamboo and they had these little lovebirds in it. We live here at the ocean. In the summer, we always leave the door wide open. And one of the lovebirds squeezed out through the bamboo bar and flew out the door.

And the other lovebird froze. Because their life was circling around each other. So I let the other one go. It flew out the door too. So we have to know that feeling, the unbearable… Where we freeze. But then if we don’t panic… This is why if we don’t go through bereavement, it turns into depression. If we just go through the stages of bereavement, we freeze. At first, it’s unbearable.

But if we look very, very close, it isn’t that I would say to Maureen after she died, “I loved you so much.” I thought, “That’s not true. You’re dead and I still love you.” And not only that, I really believe that from a depth of love, I can’t understand, you’re infinitely in love with me. And so we started seeing the deathless presence of the beloved shining through and unexplainably one with us and the absence of the beloved. And I think this is very close to what you’re saying, where Marcel would talk about the importance.

And it was like T.S. Eliot talking about time and eternity in the war and the violence and the darkness of the war. And it’s out of that darkness and the acknowledgement of the darkness that the light that of which Marcel is speaking and he was speaking, Jesus is speaking, shines through it and carries us along. It doesn’t take the darkness away, but it unexplainably sustains and gives itself in the darkness because we see a light shines in the darkness and the darkness grasp it not. But even though the darkness, which is the unawakened part of ourself doesn’t grasp it, it’s still shining. And then there’s a moment it awakens us to itself. And he’s going to be saying he sees that as salvation.

Kirsten Oates:

Yes, yes. And I love the way we’re grounding it in such practical examples. So the person that’s left behind when the loved one dies and how we move back and forward between the needs of the ego, the needs of the healthy ego trying to be grounded in this infinite reality. And Marcel takes us also deeply inside the person dying who’s been told that it’s merely a matter of waiting for time to accomplish in fact what is already achieved in purpose. And he said his hope takes the form of an unwavering refusal to reckon on possibilities for anyone can tell him that his recovery is not contained among the possibilities. “Hope here is the active refusal to succumb to despair, to acquiesce to the tabulability of being.”

Jim Finley:

A lot of psychotherapy we’re seeing is being with someone who keeps inviting you to pause and listen to the feeling level to what you just said. Because we’re always skimming over the depth of what we’re looking for. So Marcel keeps slowing us down and slowing us down. So we’re always invited to pause. “How’s this resonate with me? Where am I at with respect to all of this?” And it’s kind of like this, almost. I think another way of saying it is this. It’s saying that I’ve been graced… Word that comes to me is incandescence, something as molten white-hot shines. It’s so unexplainably incandescent that it makes everything that might or might not be I see as ultimately illusory and unreal to me. I’ve been carried over by God into the deathless presence of God presencing itself as my deathless presence in a luminosity that I cannot explain.

And so quite frankly, thanks for your concern, but they’re not relevant to me. And the fact that I may be dead in an hour is not my concern. Although I might no longer be present in time and space in an hour, the eternal presence of me eternally shines bright. And so even though I’m not yet dead, I’ve already crossed over into kind of an eternity beyond time, even though I’m still in time. This is what makes the person and this is why we’re dying as a mystic.

And so Marcel is saying, “Why wait until the 11th hour to live that way?” Because I say we’re all melting like candles, our own death’s already in the mail. So why not see… The very talk we’re having right now, the people listening to this talk, the moment in which they’re listening to us have this conversation is itself passing away. And the moment in which you and I are having it is passing away. But shining out through this talk that’s passing away and in the moment they’re listening to it, passing away is the luminosity that which never passes away. And I think that’s the touchstone that Marcel’s always… Like all the mystics is trying to help us sit with.

Kirsten Oates:

Jim, you read from Marcel about disponibility. It says, “Disponibility is the presumption of hope.” Could you help me unpack that a little bit?

Jim Finley:

Yeah. Disponibility is a French word. It’s not an English word and it means translated as availability.

Kirsten Oates:

Availability.

Jim Finley:

And so a way of looking at it is this hope is the availability, experiential availability of God’s infinite availability to me and giving itself to me is the reality of me. And that’s the availability.

Kirsten Oates:

On page 86, it says that, “The conditions which underlie hope make despair possible. The death of hope leads to despair, not the reign of good common sense.”

Jim Finley:

See because he said despair is only possible within the context of a world formed by what’s possible. So if they say, “I think your chances of surviving the diagnosis are very good,” we go “Phew. I think I’ll be okay.” And let’s say I do get better, but I get better only so I can die later. See. When you think about it. That’s the thing about heaven, not only the dead need apply. So the question then is, but how can I, though I’m still in time… How can I die to the tyranny of time? And this is why he says it’s really a salvation. How can I, in the midst of time, die to the tyranny of time by experientially not breaking faith with my awakened heart and the shining forth of the deathless eternality of myself that never dies and learn to live by that and share it with others day by day?

Kirsten Oates:

That’s such an interesting thing to note, to say that this true hope makes despair possible, the conditions which underlie hope makes despair possible. Turns you on your head a little bit.

Jim Finley:

Yeah, yeah. Let me put it another way. And this at the psychological level, this might be so true. If I get a terminal diagnosis and I experientially think that I’m nothing but my bodily reality and time being able to wake up the next morning and I’ll still be here and that very unthinkable thought that the sun will come up the next morning and I won’t be there to be it, I’ll be gone. That makes despair possible. Especially if the doctors are telling me, “Trust me, you’re not going to be here.”

And that’s why only intabulability, only by tabulating the possibility, which is this contingent hope, but it’s always contingent upon whether we had our fingers crossed. That’s what makes despair possible. But in this hope, despair is not possible. It’s a peace. It’s not dependent on the outcome of the situation because it’s the peace of God in which everything unexplainably depends. And we’re crossing over into this. And this is why he says… I like this too, where he says, “Therefore it’s very much grounded in patience.”

Because we need to be very patient with ourself because this is so subtle, like a gentle rain, we let it kind of walk with it until it soaks in. And also that it’s grounded in humility. And humility is the rains fall from our hands. I cannot explain this. And I don’t need to, but my heart knows that it’s true. The humility is trust and love. It’s trust because the outcome of the situation that I’m in, regardless of its outcome, is unexplainably trustworthy. Because it’s the presence of God presencing itself and shining through the situation regardless of what the situation might be, even if you’re hanging on the cross. And therefore it’s the same as trust. It’s trustworthy. And then also it’s the same as love which he’s going to be looking at next.

Kirsten Oates:

He says, “To hope is not to thrust oneself forward, but to retire absolutely in favor of an absolute. Hope has no weapons. It knows no technique. It could know none since techniques avail only in the world of having, but that world has no room for hope, only for success or failure.”

Jim Finley:

You know what this reminds me of? In psychotherapy with trauma, but I think spiritual direction, you can kind of tell when the person is coming to a very vulnerable place. There’s a kind of a trust in the alliance with you. There’s a kind of risk waiting to share and they don’t know what they’re going to say. But the quality of what they say has this feel to it. It’s presence. It’s like a depth of presence shining out through the very vulnerability that they’re risking with you.

Kirsten Oates:

What’s hopeful for me in all of this is this line here where he says, “Hope is essentially an appeal to a creative power with which the soul feels herself to be in connivance.”

Jim Finley:

That’s right.

Kirsten Oates:

So it’s innate in me.

Jim Finley:

That’s right. And that’s what we were saying earlier, Marcel himself, when you look in his own writings, The Existence of Philosophy, “It’s in connivance with me, provided that what I hope for is worth hoping for.” And namely it’s love or fulfillment or eternity. “And also that I will it with all my heart.”

So I would put it this way, another way, let’s say that what Marcel is talking about is embodied in our hope, in these reflections, sharing. Like what moves me? What moves you and I to dialogue like this? It is that there’s a principle in reality itself. They can’t will what we will and willing that these talks will be helpful. And also hoping it’ll be helpful because hoping that it’ll be helpful is worth hoping for because we sure hope it’s helpful.

And that’s how it’s in connivance with us. And that’s how it’s always in the present. There’s kind of a subtle way in the midst of the unresolved task at hand if it has the ring of this sincerity about it. Somehow we’re being carried along by this hope… Not for hope, for what I hope might happen in the future, but rather it’s living in a hope that I might realize within myself there’s nothing to hope for because nothing’s missing.

Kirsten Oates:

Yes.

Jim Finley:

It’s unfolding in the very arc of my sincere effort. It shines out that I’ve been ever more sensitive to that and share that with people.

Kirsten Oates:

That’s comforting too because even if I find myself on my deathbed and I can’t get past the circumstances and freely orient to this hope… The hope, it doesn’t exist in time and it will carry me forward through my death and I’ll land there no matter what.

Jim Finley:

That’s exactly right. You mentioned this in earlier talk too with Merton where he talks about the moment of our death and he said, “When the hour of your death comes…” It’s already on its way, your death, all the listeners, we’re all going to die. It’s already coming.

He said, “When the hour of your death finally comes, you can get all the people in the room with you that you want. They can all get up in bed with you if you want, but you’re dying alone. And you’re that alone right now. And you’ll never find the intimacy you’re looking for by avoiding that aloneness. Whereas in that aloneness, we come upon this. Never less alone than when alone.”

The infinity or aloneness turns into solitude and solitude then turns into… Hope then is the actualization of that. It’s already upon me and it’s carrying me along unexplainably. “Don’t ask me to explain it. I can’t and I don’t need to. But pardon me, I don’t speak English. I’m kind of beyond…” So it’s almost like the mystics, he’s putting words to something that’s like right at the edge of what words can’t say and he just stays there. And the pedagogies, we just stay with them. The accumulative effect of it starts quietly raining in on us. You know what I mean? Like a certain quietness.

Kirsten Oates:

And it always flips things around because even the way you are talking there about the aloneness, we die alone, and that it’s in that solitary communion with God that we find ourselves, but then that opens up on our connectedness and communion with all things. So it just continually keeps flipping us around. Each flip being a deepening cycle in a way. The winding path.

Jim Finley:

That’s exactly right. See that we’re all alone but we’re all alone together.

Kirsten Oates:

Yes.

Jim Finley:

That our aloneness is woven into the aloneness of everyone. This woven into the aloneness of God, who alone is God giving its aloneness to us… It’s like that. It goes on and on and on. So yeah, there you have it.

Kirsten Oates:

Yes. Well, I love that there’s an audience of people that love to hear us talk about death and dying and the diagnosis where it’s factually true that you will die.

Jim Finley:

Isn’t that true? And by the way… Well, this is related to it this way. When the loved one dies, it’s sad. It’d be flippant to high five and, “Don’t worry, you’re just dying. There’s nothing to it. I’ve got to go have lunch.” It’s not like that at all. But at the same time, he’s saying this, “We’re all going to die.” But what he’s really trying to say and that is there’s a sadness in it of the loss and there’s fear in it when it’s our death. But it’s not just sad and it’s not just scary. And we’re trying to acknowledge the fear, but see something shining through the fear that transcends it. That’s the hope that there’s nothing to hope for because nothing’s missing. That’s the eternality of ourselves shining out beyond time in the midst of time.

Kirsten Oates:

There’s something that’s happening in time that is very meaningful for a lot of people. And I wonder, Jim, if you might say a little prayer for Pope Francis who as of today we have news that he’s in the hospital and very, very sick. And so we don’t know the factual prognosis, but I wonder how we’d pray in this way from what we’ve learned today for Pope Francis.

Jim Finley:

That’d be very good. Richard Rohr had a big… He went to see Pope Francis and we have this thing coming up with the Vatican. We were planning to be there with Pope Francis. And apparently it’s not going to… My sense is this. Here’s an example I use. Merton says… In the Breviary, they would talk about different saints on feast days of saints.

And so Thomas Merton says, “Yes.” He said, “Today in the Breviary, we read about a pope who was dying. And when he was dying, he got out of bed and removed his pontifical vestments and died on the floor, which is only right, but one can’t get over the fact he was wearing Pontifical vestments on in bed.” He said, “My brothers and sisters, do we wear our mitres even to bed pontificating with our finger raised?” He said, “God help all of us.” Really. So I think if anything, the death of the Pope bears witness to the deathless nature of all of us. That’s the gift of a happy death this way.

Kirsten Oates:

And we pray that he’s in that experience in his dying days.

Jim Finley:

That’s right. And that’s why we say too that he’s moving… He’s at that moment where we’re all going to… Where’s he’s moving from this lived experience of God’s oneness with us, veiled in the powers of the soul, like in our mind and our insights and our memories about the path and our desires and intentions, veiled, efficacious unto holiness. And he’s crossing into unveiled infinite destiny and glory.

So what Marcel is saying, that somehow there’s a mystical awakening where even though we’re still here, there can be an unveiled communal oneness, shining out in veiled ways because it’s obscure. And all these mystic teachers, including Marcel, they have this quality of subtlety, of delicacy. And we’re always calibrating our heart to find enough scale where we can tune into that subtlety and learn to live by it.

Kirsten Oates:

Amen. And thank you for today, Jim.

Jim Finley:

Yes, thank you.

Kirsten Oates:

Wonderful. And thank you to Corey and Dorothy and Vanessa who are supporting us in the background. I look forward to our next dialogue.

Jim Finley:

Me too.

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 podcasts@cac.org or send us a voicemail. All of this information can be found in the show notes. We’ll see you again soon.