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 10 of Turning to the Mystics where we’ve been turning to T.S Eliot and his poetry in Four Quartets. And in today’s session, we’ll be hearing from our listeners who’ve sent in some incredible questions. And because we had so many that we wanted to address, we’ve split this episode into two parts. So today we’ll be part one and I’m here with Jim to get started with some listener questions. Welcome, Jim.

Jim Finley:

Glad to be here and go through this such rich, beautiful reflection.

Kirsten Oates:

Yes. As per every season, we got some amazing questions.

Jim Finley:

Great question. Beautiful

Kirsten Oates:

Heartfelt responses to this season. Yeah. Excellent. Well, we’ve got a number of questions to get through, so let’s dive in. The first question is from Brian. “Thank you so much for revealing the subtle beauty of T.S Eliot’s poetry to us. In the first stanza of Burnt Norton, the poem contains the line ‘And the lotus rose quietly, quietly.’ You then mention the story of the Buddha and slowly chanting slowly, slowly blooms the rose within with Father Thomas hand. This brought to mind one of Thomas Merton’s conferences on William Faulkner’s Sound and the Fury. In his talk, Merton defines the biblical concept of time as a ripening or fullness. According to Merton, our experience of time should be living in anticipation and expectation of God’s fullness. Merton uses the example of Mary giving birth to Jesus. And in my own life, I think of the weeks leading up to marriage with my wife. Can you please talk a bit more about what our attitude should be towards linear time and how experiencing time as fullness or ripening might free us from what you describe as our claustrophobic one-dimensional view of time?”

Jim Finley:

Yeah. That’s a good question. And of course it’s right at the heart of the poem because in these insights into the relationship of eternity and time, kind of meditation on time. Here would be one way that helps me to see this. I want to use it to Jesus as the Christ, but also as a Jewish mystic. We would often talk about the coming of the kingdom of God. Sometimes he would speak of us the coming of the kingdom as the fullness of time. It would be God’s ultimate victory of love over suffering and death. In other passages, he says we should prepare for the coming of the kingdom by living lives of love and lives of mercy in our heart. The third sense is a sense in which the coming of the kingdom is an event in consciousness. There’s like an awakening in consciousness of the eternal presence of God presencing itself as the presence of the present moment.

Jim Finley:

And so it is very mysterious because in one sense it’s unfolding, it’s anticipatory, but in some sense the fullness that we’re anticipating is already completely and mysteriously present in the unfolding itself. Increasing ambivalence between means and ends. The end is infinite, but as you follow along the path toward the end you discover the fullness of the end welling up beneath your feet on the way to the end. And so you see that paradoxical interplay between time and eternity this way throughout the whole poem really.

Kirsten Oates:

Yeah. Yeah. Beautiful. It does help, even what you’ve described there about leaning into the fullness of time in the present moment is one of the ways we escape that claustrophobic sense of time.

Jim Finley:

That’s right. Another way it helps me to see it too is that see what we’re talking about, we’re talking about living in incremental realizations of infinite generosity, is it the generosity the infinite is infinite. That is a fullness of time as now because nothing’s missing in it. The infinity of God’s completely poured out as the infinity of the mystery of now. What’s incremental is the extent to which we’re aware of that. So we’re living increasing incremental realizations of the infinity of the immediacy of God is life itself. And that’s another way of putting words to the paradox.

Kirsten Oates:

It’s interesting the idea of this person’s marriage because the love between the two is present in the anticipation of the fullness of the marriage. It’s kind of like you’re saying that incremental.

Jim Finley:

That’s true. We were doing the marital nuptial mystics, Teresa and John, where they saw marriage really as a sacrament of this because in marital love, each of them as they go through their life together in time, they experience the eternality of love, but also in their love in time each one of them is going to die. But in love they see in each other that in them that’s too beautiful to die. So marital love is also a rich context for this.

Kirsten Oates:

Okay, the next question is from Jane. “Is it that if we are faithful to our meditation practice, like centering prayer for example, that this helps us to cultivate the sensitivity so we are able to notice more of those special moments of falling into eternity that are given for example in nature like under the great Barber tree? I would like to ask if Jim would be able to give an example of how he might approach lectio with Burnt Norton and the connections to nature, the smoke fall for example. How might we relate these moments that we experience in our day-to-day and honor the depth of them with more connection to the deeper meaning of what they are showing? Or is that not the point? Is it more that we’re just letting them go? I would be grateful to hear if Jim can show us how he might approach this connection to nature in his lectio.”

Jim Finley:

This is my sense of it is throughout the poem, each of the four poems has these moments of awakening. And so he says to be conscious is not to be in time. And he gives little examples like under the Great Barber’s it starts to rain or in the draughty church at smokefall. So from time to time the poem helps us to be aware of our own moments of quickening. Some of them intense, often very delicate, but there’s a kind of hiatus in sequential time and a kind of resting in a fullness that can’t be measured by the clock, and we momentarily taste it. Secondly, we say, well, I want to be more habitually established in what I momentarily experienced because it isn’t as if something more was given to me in these moments, but I fleetingly tasted the abyss-like divinity of every moment of my life including this one right now. So what is the path along which I can be more habitually established in the eternality of now because I can’t make these fleeting moments happen.

Jim Finley:

So we say, well then this is meditation practice. The meditation practice is the stance that offers the least resistance to being overtaken by what we cannot attain. And this is why when we meditate with heartfelt sincerity, it’s the path of least resistance to the welling up of the blessedness of sitting there in the presence of God. And just the sincerity of it and the intimacy of it. And then all the times that we do sit and we feel nothing, we also know that that’s its own mystery. That God’s infinitely present in the nothingness itself and it’s our poverty in which we’re infinitely loved by God and so on. The next step then is this. The contemplative lectio divina, like these mystics, we turn into the mystics, all these mystics. The thing is is that God grants to some people the ability to put words to unexplainable holiness and the divinity of our life. These are these mystic teachers. So when we read them, the act of reading it is itself a way to pray.

Jim Finley:

Because it slows us way down and drops us into the depths of divinity. So it’s almost like T.S. Eliot’s helping us find words that express the intimations of our own heart this way. So I think that’s the relationship. There are these moments. There’s fidelity to the daily practice where it becomes ever more habitually pervasive throughout the day. And then there’s the reading of the poetry or all the lectio, which itself is a way to pray because it drops us down into how richly evocative. So it isn’t just the poem that’s holy, but the moment that we’re sitting there reading the poem grateful for his beauty is itself God, it’s us. And so some ways it helped me to see that.

Kirsten Oates:

That’s really helpful, Jim. And this idea of letting go that she asks about. The idea, the practice like you told in The Cloud of Unknowing, it’s in the practice you’re letting go of anything that might get in the way of this experience that’s the open stance. But in the midst of the experience, there’s no practice of letting go. You’re overtaken in that moment.

Jim Finley:

Yes, because that’s in the question also, here’s my sense of this. So a saying when we’re doing The Cloud of Unknowing with centering prayer, we could use the same sense here. As we sit with the way of a pilgrim, the Jesus prayer. So as we sit in this stance with our heart grounded in this word, thoughts rise and fall out of the edges of our mind. We do our best not to think about the thoughts that arise out of the edges of our mind, and therefore whatever thought arises, we keep letting it go because it’s finite. We’re passing beyond the limitations of time into the infinity of God that we seek. There’s another way about letting go that’s helpful too. Sometimes we’re quickened in really extraordinary ways and sometimes in prayer, but it’s real important that we let go of those because we can get attached to the momentary aura because that momentary passing aura is a self finite. But what is the aura of is eternity. So we’re always letting go of moments that we’ve been blessed trying to recreate them again. We’re always just trying to stay in the flow of the divinity of the moment as it is and let that become more and more stabilized or a bit more atmospheric.

Kirsten Oates:

Yeah, that’s helpful. Because that can be confusing, can’t it? That sense of things. And then in the ultimate, when there’s those quickening moments when you’re overtaken by God, the ego can’t do anything it’s just a recipient, isn’t it? So there’s nothing to do except accept the moment.

Jim Finley:

Yeah. So it’s like these moments, these grace-divinizing quickenings. I’ll take all I can get, it’s great. But here’s the thing, it’s to know that the moment where the quickening is actually happening and the moment of endless ordinariness are identical because it isn’t really the degree to which we realize the infinity of now. We learn to habitually abide in the infinity of the rise and fall of our fluctuating abilities to live in that. And so if that makes sense in a way, it’s a kind of a stabilizing marina. I still have it hanging in the cupboard. We can’t fight the waves, but we can learn how to surf so we can ride the waves of the rise and the fall. Which are the wavering fluctuations of the unwavering infinity that’s ribbon through the rise and fall of our days.

Kirsten Oates:

Next question is from Saskia. “This season started just a few days after the passing away of my mother. She died very unexpectedly and this was like a doorway to a new phase in my life. Time present and time passed, the sorrow and the peace, the good memories and the painful ones, the atmosphere and the changing light in my childhood home, precious things, dear people, past and present. Eliot helped me see that all these things are woven together and form the precious fabric of my life. This makes me grateful. Besides the weaving, there is another word close to my heart, unraveling. I’m spending a lot more time with my sisters again because we have to clean out our childhood home. Although we have good intentions, we easily fall back into old patterns of misunderstanding and hurt. I try to navigate wisely, all things considered what is the most loving thing I can do? But still it is a confrontation with my powerlessness to be the person I would like to be. Painful as it is, at the same time it is an invitation not to brace myself but to lean into the sweetness beneath. To be just who God knows me to be. I wondered how the word weaving and the unraveling touch each other.”

Jim Finley:

That’s very good. This reminds a lot of psychotherapy too, axial moments in prayer and life. So I’d like to reflect on that. So let’s say for her, say the moment of her mother’s death, unexpected. It was an unraveling. You’re just unraveled. Sometimes we can be so afraid of losing a relationship and then when it starts to slip away, this is the fear of the great unraveling. But there’s another way to look at it too. The other way to look at it is the weaving. As I weave together my ability to habitually abide in my day-by-day experiences of myself, I have customary patterns that I kind of count on. And so I’m kind of weaving the texture of my days and the predictability of the patterns that I live by. And I fear the unravelings that happen.

Jim Finley:

And the unravelings are the inability to live on my own terms. Either through immense loss or through ecstasy, I’m unraveled. The next thing is this, it’s touching what she says about her siblings. So you go through the house, the dead mother’s house is very poignant. And you’re so aware, sensitive yourself how mysterious this is because your mother’s deathless presence is present there amongst you. And yet how sad it is that the siblings, you keep slip back into old patterns of pettiness or belong. And so there’s a kind of touching sadness about it. We’re just human beings. We’re just human beings. So we can be grateful for the light that we have been given to walk with this pattern of unraveling and weaving, and at the same time being grateful to the degree which we can become aware of that paradox because also the way in which we’re being unraveled is the weaving of a deeper texture of existence. See, that’s of God, which is sovereign. And to know that that God’s infinitely in love with your siblings who might not be graced with that sensitivity, because God’s infinitely in love with all of us.

Jim Finley:

And so we need to hold our boundaries, be true to ourselves, accept them where they are, accept ourself where we are. It’s a very touching question really. It’s the kind of question the poem invites us to appreciate in our own life. The poem keeps pointing to moments like this.

Kirsten Oates:

Yes. Yeah. That’s so helpful, Jim. I love that idea of the weaving and the unraveling and the way they work together. It reminds me of, I think in neuroscience they point to the fact that some of the pain in grieving is the unraveling of neural pathways where we’ve lined up our minds to the interactions with people in our lives. And when the person’s no longer there, it causes our brain pain because those pathways are no longer being stimulated or lined up in the way they once were.

Jim Finley:

There’s a lot of research on this. Bonnie Badenoch’s compassionate therapy with the brain and mind on the brains’ physiology of consciousness. And a couple insights, but this is relevant really. They have this technology now where they can wire up your head and they can see your brain activity lit up. And what we find is that when we’re traumatized is that the mind kind of closes in around the trauma, like closes in around it. And so the whole practice of mindfulness meditation, and mindfulness meditation is simply being aware of what’s happening without trying to change anything. So you’ll notice as you sit there, if it’s pleasant, you’ll notice you want to hold onto it. Don’t hold onto it. If it’s unpleasant, you want to push it away. Don’t push it away, be even-minded. And when you practice mindfulness, what they discover is more and more the brain lights up to contextualize the pain.

Jim Finley:

And the more it’s contextualized, the more it’s relativized, and it gives you the physiology of a broader context in which to work on things in this limbic system of the brain. So the frontal cortex is logic and thought. The primitive brain, the back of the spine, fight or flight and heart rate. But the limbic system are millions of neural pathways between the two. And trauma is stored there. So what we’re trying to do is find therapeutic practices that address that physiological dimension of this. And then a final thought is this. I was hearing a series once, it was a lecture series of Dan Siegel and some other therapists, and she was talking about mindfulness practice. And she says, “We should never forget that all the strong clinical evidence of mindfulness practice on anxiety and addiction and all of that, we should never forget that that practice comes from an ancient practice of infinite liberation, of the mystical awakening.” See the Buddha and yoga and Jesus prayer. So what would it mean to be a contemplative clinician, a contemplatively grounded clinician who’s aware where those two realms touch each other or they meet each other in all of us really? And in a way the poem’s about that too, in terms of time and eternity. And death and liberation, for the tyranny of death and death and so on. So yeah.

Kirsten Oates:

Yes. And I feel like this beautiful question and experience that Saskia shared with us has those layers. You can feel all those layers, the psychological, the neurological, the spiritual all layered together.

Jim Finley:

And by the way too, another point about this I think is a lot of therapy consists of teasing all this out and being able to appreciate life’s stories at this level so we can internalize them as an enriched way to live our life. So anyway, it’s a lovely story. Beautiful. Turning to the Mystics will continue in a moment.

Kirsten Oates:

The next question is from MD. “In dialogue one, Jim talks about what if our beginning was not when we were born but when we appeared out of the eternal depths into time, and then we’ll disappear back to eternity. This is a new concept to me, and I wondered where does hell fit into this picture if the way I live my life did not merit eternity with God?”

Jim Finley:

All these questions are so good because they could go a whole talk on each one, what they imply. I want to just share a few thoughts about hell. It says in the scriptures that when Jesus died, it says He descended into hell. Interesting thing. Malcolm Guite, he was a priest, he gave a homily. He goes why was he in hell for three days? It says because he was looking for Judas to deliver him from hell. And also this icon that Richard Rohr likes so much the harrowing of hell. And he was bringing out Adam and Eve, like all of humanity, bringing everybody out. So there’s that. There’s another way of looking at it. Letus Losboros [inaudible 00:20:46] the last things. He says, “Imagine you’ve hurt somebody that you love very much and they love you and you did something that really hurt them. And you go to them and you say how deeply sorry you are that you did that and they tell you, you did hurt me but I forgive you, but you can’t yet forgive yourself. That’s hell.”

Jim Finley:

So what burns in hell is God’s love that you can’t accept. And Dan Walshwin said in the monastery, “Hell’s a condition that will exist as long as God tolerates it.” Because sometimes we’re delivered from a that we ourselves are powerless to free ourselves from, which is grace. An interesting thing about the church too, it’s never named anybody as being there. It’s never named anyone as being in hell. And if you end up in hell, you might have the whole place to yourself. A lot of room to move around. Particularly challenging case.

Kirsten Oates:

Yeah. Yeah. Beautiful. That concept, Jim, doesn’t take away from your sense of us the way we come out of the eternal depths into time and disappear back into eternity.

Jim Finley:

That’s right. Later on one of the mystics, what I want to do is I want to do Dante, the Divine comedy, and I also want to do Lord of the Rings. What you’ll find in both of them is a strange mixture of darkness and light and heaven and hell. You know what I mean? Like the poetics of the interior, how God’s present in our life.

Kirsten Oates:

Our next question is from Beth. “I’m enjoying these reflections so much. When I first studied Eliot at university in my 20s, I certainly didn’t appreciate its depth at that time. I’m now 73 and what Eliot is writing about in John of the Cross and many of the other mystics, I’m sensing understanding getting more intensely recently. But then I hesitate and question whether I am correct. It reminds me of your comment, Jim, about telling Thomas Merton you felt like you were in a specific room in Teresa’s interior castle. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Thankful for my meditation practice, many years of practicing letting go. Do we only get completely comfortable when the curtain falls or can I enjoy some being right now? Or is that still ego satisfaction to some extent?” And then there’s a scream, ah.

Jim Finley:

Yeah, it’s very good. Here’s some of the things that helped me to see this. Let’s say we’ve come to a place in our life where we’re qualitatively more sensitive to this inner clarity on the divinity of what it is to be and all of that. And we can look back at a time it wasn’t so clear to us. So we’re on an unfolding journey of awakening. But then we ask ourselves, we start to question our awakening. See, am I as awake as much clarity as I imagine that I’m in? Am I still in realms of deception? See, that’s what the person’s asking this way, I think. And here’s what helps me to see it. Yes, you still are in realms of deception because you’re a human being and as long as you’re on this earth there’s these layers. That’s true. But just as in the past you were not as aware as you are now. As it unfolds into the future, you’re going to be even clearer than you are now.

Jim Finley:

It goes on and on and on. But there’s another layer to this to my mind too. Is that yes, I may be deceived because I’m finite, so I might still be confused and I’m not aware of the way that I’m confused, but I say to God, yes, I’m aware of my confused. But I say to God, but you’re never confused about who I am as your beloved. And I can learn to live in the clarity of how God sees me as the beloved. Jesus is parable about finding a pearl of great price in a field and the field we find it in is our life. And the precious pearl is the invincible sovereignty of the divinity of ourself in our unresolved matters. So those are some ways that helped me to see this.

Kirsten Oates:

That’s lovely. And I feel like that divinity certainly shines through in Beth’s question. Lovely. Okay. Our next question is from Andrew. “I have a question that attaches to the idea of quickenings. Can that quickening manifest as anger? Can the initial quickening, the thing that gets one started on the road of change, a kind of inciting incident as they call it in the books on fiction writing, take the shape of anger. When for instance, a penny drops and you realize that you’ve been massively abused by someone or a group in a way that until now you’ve never allowed yourself to register properly or feel? Can it be that it’s God in one who is, as it were saying, enough, I’ve had enough of this abusive situation and the way you’ve tried to endure it rather than responsibly pushing back against the abuse. And then the challenge of that quickening is to respond creatively to the abusive situation rather than blunderingly reacting to it and find a way to resolve it if at all possible, at least to one’s own satisfaction.

Kirsten Oates:

I’m talking about myself here of course. And as I start slowly and rather uncertainly to respond to my anger as how I’ve been abused by a certain group of people, it feels like a quickening, a coming to life. Stuff that has been suppressed because I suppose I was too frightened to upset the apple cart and risk chaos and horrible psychological reprisals. This stuff has been there all along, but suppressed and numb. Now as I try to engage positively with it, drawing on resources such as Christian meditation and contemplative practice, above all the Jesus prayer, it feels as if whole areas of my being are quickening, coming alive almost for the first time. But the initial quickening has come in the shape of something apparently negative, a fury as I realize just how vicious what I’ve suffered has been. And not at the hands of some blind, impersonal natural force such as disease, but out of the jealousy, rivalry, insecurity of specific fellow human beings. Well that’s a key part of the initial quickening.

Kirsten Oates:

I think the other absolute vital part in which your podcast has played a huge role has been a slow realizing that God loves me and sustains me. In the end, as you keep wonderfully repeating, I’m just an infinitely loved broken person. And of course, so are the people who’ve made my life such a hell. They too are infinitely loved broken people. Part of the power such people have over one, of course, is that they are very clever at making one feel either mad or bad, or both if everyone dares to question their behavior, a kind of gaslighting. Accepting the brokenness of us all, one self and them, helps one get past that. And from Four Quartets, ‘Our only health is the disease. If we obey the dying nurse whose constant care is not to please but to remind of our and Adam’s curse and that to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.'”

Jim Finley:

In order to respond in the way that it requires, I’d have to ask you more questions. But I just want to throw out some perspectives to consider that you’re touching on. One, I think it’s really true that sometimes especially there’s an abusive situation going on and we physically can’t, like a child abuse, for example, emotional abandonment or trauma, we can’t leave. And so what we do is we find a way to survive by repressing it or dissociating it off, external compliance to avoid being attacked or abandoned and all of that. And then after we go into adulthood, we get stuck in that. Then all of a sudden there’s like an awakening happens. And the awakening, it kind of comes out as the anger. And I like that definition of anger is healthy anger, anger is the God-given emotion that restores the boundary that was violated. I deserved much better. I deserved to be loved and respected and so on, and that was wrong.

Jim Finley:

And not only was it wrong that it happened, it kind of got inside of me and I’m walking wounded here. And so my anger then is a new level of freedom and this anger that we’re speaking of now, it’s not hate, it’s not violent, it’s not revenge, although it can be mingled with those because it’s primitive. What it’s really about, the anger is that it was wrong. The next thing. There is healing without forgiveness, but there’s no healing without anger. Because as long as you’re continually giving external passive compliance to being treated the way that’s abusive to you, you’re kind of in collusion with it. But once you get in touch with the anger, then in grounded in that healthy anger, unless you forgive, you’re not yet free. You’re not yet free, you’re still stuck. And that’s a process. There’s another piece of this too, I think.

Jim Finley:

Chris and I were working on the Enneagram together on discernment, like the eight on the Enneagram. There’s a kind of a personality strength really that’s very sensitive about being wronged. Not just for ourselves, but other people being wronged like the protector. And so the anger is really a force, it’s steps forward to proclaim it’s set the boundaries. And so then the issue, just as the person says right at the end, it is so true. There’s all of that. But there’s also noticing then that this love that we’re infinitely loved broken people. Not only am I an infinitely loved broken person, so they’re all infinitely loved and broken people. So in Christian terms, the whole mystery of the cross, father forgive them, they know not what they do. And that’s where you see the sovereignty of love that stands forth is the true sovereignty of what’s real, all too often traumatized and traumatizing world. So it’s a big question you’re asking. It’s where therapy touches spirituality.

Kirsten Oates:

Yeah. And it’s us just in such a beautiful, sincere, vulnerable way. I just so appreciate the question.

Jim Finley:

Yeah. I actually had one more little piece too, therapy. This thing about the love of God, there’s that in us that sees this, there’s that in us that’s touched by the love of the beauty of the poetry. And there’s that in us that doesn’t see it yet, we still get triggered or we get reactive. So we’re to be endlessly tenderhearted toward that that doesn’t see it yet, to be like Christ to ourself. To listen to the broken part and listen to its anger and to understand the anger and say, you’re right all that’s true. But there’s also dimensions of this because you’re kind of in a more childlike place you see, but there’s also contextual things that you don’t yet see. And so there’s that quiet kind of working with oneself, one kind of sifts it out interpersonally within oneself. It’s a big phase of this too, I think.

Kirsten Oates:

Yeah, yeah. Do you think too, Jim, when that emotion of anger, when you regain your God given anger and you allow it to experience it in your body, sometimes it’s helpful to move your body because you’re not used to holding that in your body and it has a force to it like wanting to be expressed? So going for a good walk and those sorts of things, lifting some weights or something, but it helps to get it moving through your body, doesn’t it?

Jim Finley:

It’s really good. It’s stored semantically in the body. You can feel the anger, like fear. And that’s the thing about deep meditation too. It goes into those places, it doesn’t conceptualize them. And you kind of sit and walk through all of this. But that’s really true to see where you hold it in the body and then what are things that release it like yoga or walking or an activity and you can kind of release and let it spend itself. It’s like a releasing of an energy. That can be another helpful dimension of this too.

Kirsten Oates:

Yeah, yeah. Well, we wish you well on that journey. Yeah. Andrew, it’s lovely for you to submit a question like that. This is a question from Wendy. “In dialogue two, East Coker, Jim says, Maureen used to say you cannot keep a contemplative waiting. And that’s why we say be still and know. Be still and in the stillness the divinity reveals itself to us interiorly. What did Maureen mean?”

Jim Finley:

Life involves waiting. For example, we’re waiting at the airport for the announcement it’s time to board the plane. We’re waiting for the buzzer to go off that the pasta is ready to cook. So there’s always this linear time like waiting, and that’s part of life is the waiting. You can’t keep a contemplative waiting in the sense in which, in the midst of the waiting the infinite love of God is manifesting itself and giving itself as a mystery of waiting itself. In a way there’s nothing to wait for because nothing’s missing. So you’re only waiting insofar as you realize there’s nothing to wait for because it’s already unexplainably here. And that’s why you can’t keep a contemplative waiting. It’s true. And they’re both true. So there’s that in us, the ego self that is waiting, like, give me a break. And then there’s this other part that sees it, and we’re always kind of… The poem helps us do this, it kind of keeps sifting it out so we can be more habitually stabilized and the eternality of God’s presence in the waiting itself. And also, it’s an echo how infinitely patient God is at waiting for us. Thank God. We’d all be in trouble if God wasn’t patiently waiting for us.

Kirsten Oates:

I love, it’s a little bit of contemplative humor.

Jim Finley:

It is.

Kirsten Oates:

It reminds me of being at the supermarket waiting in line. That’s one of the places I don’t enjoy waiting.

Jim Finley:

Yeah, yeah, exactly. The DMV center, there’s long lines at the DMV.

Kirsten Oates:

Yeah. Now there’s a spot-

Jim Finley:

Line up and wait, and wait. And I was watching this one man, he was talking with the person as they were moving along and kind of laughing and talking. And when he got right up to where it’s his turn next, he got at the end of the line and started talking to somebody else. His ministry was being with people waiting in line at the DMV to know that they weren’t alone while they waited. And I thought, that’s an interesting take on things.

Kirsten Oates:

That’s so great. Yeah. That’s a place where you can wait for a long time. Well, on that note, we’ve come to the end of part one of our listener questions. Jim, thank you so much. What a wonderful session, so many deep insights. And thanks again to all our listeners and especially the ones that sent in questions. We love getting your questions, and as you can see, they just really add so much to the podcast. So thanks for today and we look forward to part two. See you then. Thank you for listening to this episode of Turning to the Mystics, a podcast created by the Center for Action and Contemplation. We’re planning to do episodes that answer your questions, so if you have a question please email us at [email protected] or send us a voicemail. All of this information can be found in the show notes. We’ll see you again soon.