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 TS Eliot and his poetry in Four Quartets. Today is part two of our listener questions. I’m here with Jim and we have a lot of questions to get through, so let’s dive in. The first question is from Brian. “In the first stanza of The Dry Salvages, TS Eliot begins by describing the river, sullen and tamed, intractable, patient to some degree. When you read out the line, the river is within us in session three, I could not help but think of my anger as the strong brown God.”

“I am someone who struggles with anger. And similar to a river, I can see the ways in which it causes destruction and devastation to the people around me, usually the people that I love the most. When things are going my way and I have some semblance of control over my life, my anger is for forgotten, but never goes away. It is simply waiting, watching and waiting. When I start to lose control is when my anger rises and starts to come to life. Do you have any guidance from your years as practicing clinical psychology on how I might learn to deal with my anger?”

Jim Finley:

Yes. This is similar to the previous thing about anger, but you’re adding a new nuance to it here I think too. First of all, here’s my thought. I’m going to speak as a therapist. See, it’s one thing to be quick to anger. It’s another to have poor impulse control where it comes out. Just beneath the anger is the pain, and just beneath the pain is the powerlessness. And so really it’s a therapeutic issue of impulse control over the anger. What’s that about? Where are the resources within yourself that’s qualitatively richer than what you’re angry about? It’s like all of a sudden, in a twinkling of an eye, that’s what anger’s like by the way. In anger of life. It’s like God’s not real. You’re not real, nothing’s real, there’s only how few…

And the thing about it is, it makes you momentarily feel empowered, like this Incredible Hulk. But really when you think about it, because of poor impulse control, it’s actually a fragility. Not just hurts them, it hurts you too. So I would encourage you, we all have things to work on, but I would encourage you based on, it’s up to you where you are and what’s possible, just to get help with that. Because there’s a certain way of, there’s important to honor the anger, but there’s a certain part in you that it isn’t as if I’m angry on a scale of one to 10, at a three. This is irritating. Where you hit a tripwire and you go instantly to 10 plus. And that’s what you really ought to modulate, the anger that’s proportionate to the stimulus, to put it into a context, to sort all that out, what that’s about.

And a lot of times, not always, but again just beneath the anger is the pain, is the bereavement of something. That’s why often after people will express anger in therapy, sometimes tears will come, because the tears are underneath the anger this way. And the tears are more real, and beneath the tears is feeling powerless. So how are you unexplainably empowered by God who’s infinitely in love with you and your powerlessness, and how could you strengthen that as a base to work on this? There’s the things to possibly consider that might apply. I don’t know because I don’t know you. I’d have to talk with you further, but those are some thoughts that come to mind.

Kirsten Oates:

Yeah, it reminds me, Jim, how you were saying when we’re traumatized, one of the responses is that we can go numb and somaticize the anger and not let it out. But the opposite can happen too I guess, is that if you’re a traumatized person, you could be very reactive as a way of protecting yourself.

Jim Finley:

Yeah, this is ritualistic reenactment. So the person say, anger this way, because I was angry I lived. And even though we’ve long since outgrown it, versus, because I am angry, I still live. And you’re stuck in a time warp of things that aren’t long, you’ve outgrown it, but to that primitive place when it gets triggered. Likewise, the opposite is true. Another response to give external compliance to avoid being attacked or abandoned. You passively go along with it. You go along with it. And it made sense when you were a child this way because you knew the price you’d have to pay if you challenged it. But you’d get stuck there and you find yourself giving external compliance to avoid being attacked or abandoned.

Really, there’s survival strategies formed in trauma and abandonment. So how to understand that with insight, with compassion and with truthfulness. We all have growing edges and that’s how we go deeper, and how is God present in our sincerity of working through these things? And I would put something else too, lastly, is we should always work on these things that hurt ourself in others, we should. And we need to be very real and sincere about that. But grounded in an inner peace is not dependent on our ability to get beyond it because we might die in the midst of the unresolved because infinitely in love with us. And that’s another contribution I think the spirituality makes to that process.

Kirsten Oates:

So helpful. Lovely. Yeah, and Brian’s obviously very insightful about when he gets triggered so well on his way. Yeah.

Jim Finley:

That’s very good. He’s very aware, and not only is he aware, but he’s able to share it with us.

Kirsten Oates:

Yeah.

Jim Finley:

See, those are the strengths that are present in the dilemma itself, and the sincerity with which he will find his way through all of this. It’s very good actually.

Kirsten Oates:

Yeah, we wish you well for sure. This is a question from Wendy. My question is about the end of the second part of Little Gidding. Jim says, “The day was breaking in the disfigured street. Disfigured because now it looks so different in the light of this. He left me with a kind of valediction, like a blessing and faded on the blowing of the horn, like gone, but we’re left in the aura of how we were transformed in the presence of the master. This reminds me of Jacob wrestling with the angel. The angel departs as day is breaking, but he leaves Jacob with a limp and with a blessing. And Jacob realises, he has had an encounter with God.” Jim, do you have any thoughts about this in light of the poem?

Jim Finley:

Yes, I do have some thoughts about this in light of the poem. It’s very good. So there’s this compound ghost that leads him to the… And really he’s tying in all the mystics that he quotes throughout the poem. This is Christian and Jesus, all these… A compound. The mystically awakened master, and he leaves him with a valediction. So Jacob wrestles with the angel and he comes away limping. Two thoughts. I come away limping because I limp in my powerlessness to habitually abide in what was given to me when the angel wrestled with me. It was when it was actually happening. It was celestial. Do I mean it was like a struggle, like a divine intimacy in the struggle, and it left me limping and my unawareness. But because I’m aware of my unawareness, my limping graces me.

There’s a saying in Buddhism, is that the master limps. Another way of looking at it this way is, the master limps, but the master’s not handicapped by the limping because the master knows it’s just limping, why be handicapped by it? Why are we handicapped by our limp, and you have your limping. I have mine. We have the thorn in the flesh. We all have… God says, “Leave it there.” That’s where you learn to depend on my mercy, which is at the heart of the poem. Why does our limping embarrass us? We think of it as the authority to name who we are, especially if other people can see our limping. For example, poor impulse control with anger. Thomas Merton once said, “Whenever we are discouraged about a fall,” Like we fall short of what we know we’re called to be, and we get discouraged by it.

He said, “We should always reflect on discouragement because it reveals our secret agenda. A holy me.” See? How you, or you, or you could do something like this, I get it, but me do this. So every time the brokenness is revealed, it’s the crust of the wave of my ongoing work on myself, because I’m the moral imperative, I should work on it this way. But even more, see, do I put my trust in the love that’s infinitely in love with me in the midst of my inability to get past it. Or do I put my trust in whether or not I want to be able to get past it before the buzzer goes off and I die? That’s at the heart of this poem too, is where’s the trust lie in this?

Kirsten Oates:

Well, it seems the way the people are asking the questions, the trust lies in that deeper place.

Jim Finley:

It does. Yes, exactly. It’s touching. Yeah, it is.

Kirsten Oates:

Yeah, really. The next question is from Cheryl and she asks, “Why should Buddhists and their Buddha be included in a discussion on infinity in God, when Buddhists do not even believe that God or Gods are capable of such a thing, and have their own bizarre doctrine about some sort of karma rebirths over and over again, but they perform all of this themselves somehow, and do not believe therefore have no faith that Gods or God are capable of doing this even for themselves or for it? Which is what they sometimes call the God of the Christians. I also have another related question, and it is about referring to teachers as masters. How can people who refer to Jesus and God as it, be tolerated when they themselves want or expect people to honor their leader or teacher by referring to him her as master?”

Jim Finley:

Yeah, good question. That’s one way of looking at it. The way when people are taught to look at it that way. The word became flesh and dwelt among us, the truth of God and Jesus and so on. And then you have these religions like Buddhism and Hindu that are referred to in the poem of the Lord Krishna and the river and the Buddha. Here’s the way I was taught by Merton, and I think that’s how TS Eliot sees it, and you can consider this. You don’t have to see it this way. This is the way I learned it from Thomas Merton. That we’re all persons created by God in the image and likeness of God. That we’re all worth, all the God is worth in our nothingness without God, with a beloved. That’s what it means to be a person. Next we’re given a nature that’s capable of seeing that and accepting it in love.

And the mystery of the fall is the nature’s fallen. The nature’s fallen. And so we’ve fallen out of this divinity of ourself and our nothingness without God by trying to be like God without God, is a mystery of the fall. And so in the way we’re trapped by that. So what religion is about, see salvation, saved from what? Saved from that. How can I be saved from that? And so what we have then is the universality of this, and so we’re saved by it in a specifically historical cultural context in which the salvaging act occurs. So for us in the Christian dispensation of this is Jesus. It’s Jesus, the Lord Jesus, I’m a Christian. It’s the Lord Jesus. And in mystical Catholicism, which we’re doing here at TSL, this is mystical Christianity, the side. And he was a Christian, he was a devout Christian. And Judaism is given as Torah, and the prophet, they don’t believe in the Messiah.

It’s the chosen people and the Passover, and they live it this way. And it’s given to them in the Jewish dispensation of divinity, of realizing that. And there’s Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah, the unsolved, the uncreated. And Hinduism, it’s the Yogi, it’s the dispensation and the yoga Sutra. Namaste. I am that. I am all that God is, in my nothingness without God. Namaste, this way. And the Yogi is the person who’s habitually stabilized in that. That’s why to be in the presence of the Yogi is to be in the presence of God because they’ve died with their ego. That’s why Richard Rohr says, “This is why when the realized Yogi dies, the ashram is empty until the next realized Yogi appears.” See the next person who’s deathless and is God’s manifested presence. And helping you to see the same is true of you. And the Buddha when he turned the wheel of the Dharma, then free all sentient beings from suffering.

It’s true. It’s not theistic that there’s like a God that creates, but it’s the divinity of the immediacy of the phenomenal world itself as boundaryless, Buddha nature. If you’re interested in this approach, Thomas Merton has two books on this, writes deeply Christian way. One is Zen and the Birds of Appetite and Mystics and Zen Masters. Those are his two works on Buddhism. That’s where he died. He went to meet at the Holiness, the Dalai Lama. The Thich Nhat Hanh came from Vietnam to meet with him. He has such a deep sense. DT Suzuki, the Zen scholar, Merton wrote him a letter. It’s in the front of Zen and the Birds of Appetite. And he says to Suzuki, he says, “When I read your Zen stories about enlightenment of a person’s awakened, something leaps off the page of me and says, this is true.”

And I’d like to know if I as a Christian could talk with you as a Buddhist about our common ground. Christianity is not Buddhism. Buddhism isn’t Christianity, but the truth of each is in holiness. It’s in the holiness of the liberated person. I also have a audio video set called Four Noble Truths in the Buddha, in the heart of the Gospel. This way because I’ve been so affected by this myself and these lineages. This isn’t for everybody. There’s no need for it, but I find it enriching. I find it helpful. So it’s not bizarre. It only seems bizarre and so far we don’t understand it. It’s profound, actually. We have so much to learn from each other. And the last question there… Oh, about being a master.

Yeah, they use the word master in that it’s just way, let’s say TS Eliot as a poet was a master. He was a master, but he didn’t walk around saying, “A little more respect, please, I’m a master. Please genuflect when the room.” He’s masterful in his fidelity to what’s transformed him. This what’s ironic about the master, I’ll put it in Christian terms, or Bhakti yoga terms also. How can I learn to die of love at the hands of love until nothing’s left to me but love? And that’s the master. And that’s who these mystics are, the Christian dispensation of God, the Buddhist dispensation of God, the Hindu dispensation of God. So that’s the way I was taught to see it. Not everyone sees it that way, but I find it helpful.

Kirsten Oates:

Yeah. Thank you for sharing that, Jim. Yeah, from the sounds of what you’re saying too, the master would never demand to be called master. It would be other people.

Jim Finley:

No, it would be silly to him. You can call him master because he is the master, but the master of what? The master. There’s no one here but God. And same is true of you. See, it’s the divinity of the immediacy of everything intimately realized. You want to sit together in silence? I’ll ring the bell and we’ll sit and I’ll guide you along. That’s what all these mystics are about. When you really look at them, they’re trying to help us discern. Intimate, mysterious language applies to us, that’s so beautiful about these questions. See, they’re so heartfelt because it accesses us. It’s the intimate immediacy of the unexplainable, like shining out from our heart. And all the world religions carry that this way, I think. And also every religion, including Christianity, has idiots in it too. A lot of Catholics are, you can lose your faith in church, so that’s what it’s like.

Kirsten Oates:

Thank you, Jim. And the question from Joe on the afterlife. “Jim repeats frequently, we don’t die, nobody dies. My rational mind struggles with this life after death idea. The key to eternal life feels to me to be in the eternal present. So the idea of after is hard to reconcile. Appreciate I might be reaching the limits of what my brain can get itself around, but feel that life and seeking meaning on earth is still worthwhile, even if it stops at the end.”

Jim Finley:

This is, here’s how I see it…it’s a good question bout life and death. Maureen and I lived here for 30 years, and when we were together for 30 years, it was amazing. And in house hospice, she died right here in the living room, her ashes are right on the table over there. So here’s the point. We were together for 30 years, but after she died, she wasn’t here with me anymore. But after she died, she’s an eternal bliss in God because eternal. So the after applies to in time. It’s like me, I’m still alive, but I’m 81 years old, the edge of this thing here. And so I’m still alive. I get up every morning, go to bed every night. But the day’s going to come when they’ll say, you’ll be able to say about me, “After Jim Finley died…”

And you can say it because I’ll be dead. But don’t worry about it because you’re next. This is a temporary arrangement. So it’s after in the sense in which it’s the afterlife, meaning it’s the deathless life of infinite glory hidden with Christ and God forever. Because now it’s true now, but veiled. This is what the mystics are about. It’s veiled but real. But when we die, after we physically die, it’s unveiled forever. What the mystics are saying, sometimes even now it’s unveiled in a veiled way. It’s already true, which is the present moment. It’s the divinity of the present moment, but it’s already true in a veiled way that I can’t explain.

Kirsten Oates:

And so you would agree, Jim, that every moment here, the key to eternal life feels to me to be in the eternal present. And that is an important component of living is to be open to the eternal present. But it’s not the end of it all.

Jim Finley:

Yeah, there’s a book by Claude Tresmontant, on Study of Hebrew Thought. Inside is about what eternity is. See for God, the moment in which God said, “Let there be light.” And this present moment that we’re talking, for God, it’s the same moment. That’s eternity and we’re in it. The ego’s caught the centrifugal force of sequential time. We’re spinning out at the sequential time, but really in the deep down depths of ourself, the still point of the turning world, it’s the eternality of that which never passes away. That’s endlessly ribbon through all this endlessly passing away. And so we can’t explain it in day by day consciousness, but in deep meditative state, it’s clear. But it’s clear unexplainably, so we can’t explain it. Yeah.

Kirsten Oates:

Wonderful. Thank you.

Jim Finley:

Anything else I can’t answer?

Kirsten Oates:

Very good.

Jim Finley:

Turning to the Mystics. We’ll continue in a moment.

Kirsten Oates:

Okay. Our next question is from Sandra. “I would like to continue to reread and consider these poems. Did you do that with this body of work to arrive at your very helpful insights? Did you use the poems for Lectio?

Jim Finley:

I was first introduced to Four Quartets by Thomas Merton, the monastery at 18 years old, and I’ve been reading it ever since. And same with these other mystics, John of the Cross and Eckhart, you’ve been to my home here, Kirsten, in my library here, I have walls, floor to ceiling, bookshelves with the mystics of the world religions. You can open any one of them at random, open any page and read it out loud because everything they say counts. Likewise, what I think I’m writing or teaching, what I’m always doing is I’m reading the text and then I say, “What images or stories could I use to make this more accessible without watering it down?” And then I realized I can’t do that, so I have to wait until it’s given to me how to do that. And I write it out

Kirsten Oates:

Beautiful. I enjoyed very much, and Sandra won’t have heard this when she wrote the question, but pulling together those pieces from the poem to create the meditation. So I love just choosing phrases to meditate on that. And the ones that are really speaking to you at the time, you can just sit with the one phrase, notice how it shows up in all of life.

Jim Finley:

And by the way, I think when reading this kind of literature to personalize it, what helps you to do that? How would you say it or how would you draw a picture of it? Because it’s the one-liners that get to you, it’s the phrasing and how to phrase aphorisms this way. And then how would you, almost like doing inner dream work, how would you then take that little aphorism and tease it out? What comes to you to broaden the base of it, I think? And these questions are that way. They’re deeply personal questions. That’s exactly how they’re reading it, yeah.

Kirsten Oates:

Yeah, I love that. You’re trying to weave what brings you into that deepest state of consciousness into your everyday life then, aren’t you? And so what’s the weaving mechanism that helps you with that the most? And I’ve found saying only in time, is time conquered. I’ve been saying that every day. And you can then notice ways how it brings that thought into your daily life.

Jim Finley:

It captures it. Bernard McGinn, when he was the guest, we were doing Mick Teldon, Eckhart and it was a great thing.

Kirsten Oates:

Oh, yes. Yeah.

Jim Finley:

And I was listening to one of his talks on the internet, and he talks about the text, like scripture. He said, “So there’s the text in scripture, but also there’s the text that lives in your experience. If it stays on the page, it’s just words.” It’s almost like looking like a musical score. The fifth symphony. It’s just musical score until you play it. And so what really matters is the experience of the text living in us, is expressing our experience of God’s oneness with us. And that’s what it’s meant to do when you read it. It’s meant to awaken that living presence of God in us.

Kirsten Oates:

Yes. How does it apply to me and my life, and where do I experience it? Yeah, beautiful.

Jim Finley:

And how can I share it? What’s it asking out of me and how do I bear witness to it, as it’s given to me to do so, and so on?

Kirsten Oates:

Yeah. Yeah. And it’s so true what you said that these questions really highlight how this poem reached into people’s lives and brought out deeper experiences for them. It’s amazing.

Jim Finley:

You know what else I’ve learned too, is that when I used to teach high school seniors for years and also lecturing around a lot, the most gifted students aren’t the ones that necessarily know the answers to all the questions. They raise their hand, it’s the question that’s amazing. That’s the thing, I think.

Kirsten Oates:

Okay. So shame school doesn’t encourage that as much as having-

Jim Finley:

No, it doesn’t. No. No, they don’t. That has its own role to play. But it doesn’t take you all the way home.

Kirsten Oates:

Yeah. Okay. A question from Jennifer. “My question relates to the gift of tears. Recently in my practice, this gift has been pervasive and it leaves me feeling raw and vulnerable. This is not a problem as long as I have time to remain in the inner quiet state. But I’m finding it challenging to go about my daily life feeling so fragile. I want to be open to new possibilities, but find myself resisting. I like the idea of learning, growing and changing, but there are days that feel so impractical. Do you have guidance to share on how to get through the hard parts?”

Jim Finley:

Yeah. Good luck with that. The mystics, they talk about the gift of tears, and sometimes the tears are actually tears. And what the tears are really is being loved without foundations, like the body’s crying, the tears are actually the body’s praying tears. There’s also tears. They’re not physically tears, but you feel the fragility of the tearfulness. Richard Orr’s newest book on the prophets, the deep down tears of things. That the tears of God are hidden, the depths of our broken places. And so this is universally intimate how we experience all of this. I share a story that I was giving this retreat to a group of nuns. On the retreat one of the nuns raised her hand and she said, “A lot of sisters, they all know me for years and they know I’m not an emotional person, but for some reason when I listened to you talk, I want to cry,” she said.

And I said, “Well, you know what? When I’m talking I want to cry.” Because it’s right at the edge of the sweetness of what can’t be said. It’s things that deep down we already know, but we tend to forget. But then we’re reminded of it, that it never forgets us and we’re moved by it. Now the extent to which it’s physically tearful. You have to see what that’s about and work with that, and maybe it’s not an issue at all. You just accept it and this way. So I wouldn’t know unless I talked to you for a while. But spiritually speaking, I would put it that way, about tears.

Kirsten Oates:

Yeah. Wow. Beautiful. Such tender places we’re going today. Okay. Well, we’re coming to the end of our episode. We have just a couple of final questions, and a few people sent a comment about this one, Jim, it’s a small matter of a word in East Cocha. At the very end, the two books, one being the one on your podcast that I have on this poem both spell this word petrel, which is a seabird, and yet I’ve heard you use petrol being the stuff of ships. Through wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters of the petrol and the porpoise in my end is my beginning. Yeah. So the question is the word petrol?

Jim Finley:

Yes. Several people pointed this out.

Kirsten Oates:

Yes. Yeah.

Jim Finley:

Here, this is my sense of it. When I read Four Quartets over the years, I’ve gone to the dictionary a lot. Namely for his adjectives because he’s so erudite. I mean, he’s so learned. He just expands your vocabulary. Here in America, I thought of petroleum, I don’t know the bird petrel. So when I saw it, I didn’t notice the spelling as a bird, so I appreciate the people pointing that out. It just so happens another insight that I had. It just so happens that my misreading about petroleum and oil, it works.

Kirsten Oates:

It works.

Jim Finley:

It works because it has to do with the war and the razor wire and the wars and the battle, the space between the wars. But it just so happens that’s not the poetic metaphor that he had in mind when he used it. It’s a mishap. It works in other contexts, and that’s why it’s always good to be corrected like this, like footnotes, to not be unwittingly incorrect. And as a final thought this way too, it’s good to be as correct as we can. It’s important. But we could be completely correct at that level and miss the whole poem. So here in Turning to the Mystics podcast, we’re giving an emphasis to the transformative stirrings of the divinity of life in a very sublime, delicate language this way.

But it’s good to be as clear as we can. It got me thinking, really. I live at the ocean here. And so there’s seagulls around and pelicans going by a formation and pigeons and crows. And pigeons built a nest on my little porch behind my flower pot, little baby pigeons are there. And so it’s so good to be aware of nature. So that’s how he’s tying it in. Because don’t forget, there’s the time, the sequential time, but there’s the primordial time of the change of the seasons. And then hidden in primordial time is the eternality of God, embodied in primordial time and transcending it. So it’s an important point, really. But anyway, I’m grateful. Now I know petrel.

Kirsten Oates:

Yeah. Isn’t that fun? The way our listeners care so much. I love that. And we got photos of petrels and-

Jim Finley:

Yeah, we do.

Kirsten Oates:

… thanks to petrels.

Jim Finley:

We’ll never make that mistake again.

Kirsten Oates:

Thank you everyone who sent those in. One last question from Diane. “It’s been said and argued that TS Eliot was anti-Semitic. I find it so hard to believe from the poetry itself, and if it were true, it would make me very sad, given that he lived through the atrocities of World War II. He does speak of regrets. Can that be one of them? I would be grateful if you could speak to this.”

Jim Finley:

Yeah. Yes, it’s true. When you read his life, the anti-Semitism. Some people claim toward the end of his life, he moved beyond it. Some don’t know how much he did, but here’s a real important point, really. The tragic extent of anti-Semitic sentiments within the Christian tradition, Mikthel de Megbert. We were doing Mikthel earlier, and she’s saying all this beautiful stuff. Then she says, “And then Satan, who lives in all Jews hearts, and so is privacy, may his blood be upon us and upon our children.” So you see this anti-Semitic. The church has come a long way in outgrowing this, apologizing for it. Because theologically Jesus is the Christ. So whatever it means to be God, whenever it means to be us, is interwoven into a singularity of who we are as the beloved. But another way of looking at it, Jesus was a Jewish mystic, and a lot of his saints from the cross, he’s quoting the Psalms.

He was a devout practicing Jew. So the church has come a long way in acknowledging this and working towards it. And there’s a lot of Jewish-Christian dialogue going on. When I was at the monastery, Abraham Joshua Heschel came the Jewish mystic philosopher to visit Merton. And I was deeply touched by Martin Buber, I am thou that thou is the one who fills the entire horizon of your being. But it’s true. It’s just a sad truth about Christianity, is working towards it. And there’s another way to say it too. Well, we don’t see, Martin Heidegger says, “It’s very difficult to see our assumptive horizons. It’s very hard to consciously see what we’re assuming, and there’s societal prejudice, and we don’t see it because it’s atmospherically woven into the assumptions of our very society.”

And so if you’re not a Christian, you’re a pagan. Or if you’re a Muslim, if you’re not a Muslim, you’re an infidel. This has to do with sexual orientation. It has to do with physical appearance. So it’s easy to see it when we can see it, when it’s woven into our very assumptions, it’s harder to see. And I think TS Eliot’s like this, and so that we’re all broken and the brokenness that we see and we work on, and there’s the brokenness that we don’t see, and we don’t work on it because we don’t see it. But God sees all of it and guides us and encourages us to see more and more and more. While at the same time accepting us is infinitely loved in all that we don’t see. So it’s just to be good to be aware of that.

Kirsten Oates:

So Jim, it’s good to know that the church has tried its best to apologize for the way it promoted anti-Semitism. While we would never condone TS Eliot bringing those ideas into anything, we can also see he was a broken human being and we can value the depths he was able to bring us to.

Jim Finley:

Yeah, it’s a very good point. I’ll share how I see it. There’s evidence that Martin Heidegger, German Metaphysician, beautiful philosopher, that he supported Hitler, the Nazi, yeah. And some people say that he went beyond it. Some people say that he didn’t. But here’s the point. The fatal flaw doesn’t negate the gift. It’s a fatally, flawed, gifted person. And so we should acknowledge the fatal flaw and at the same time not overlook it. But at the same time, it doesn’t cancel out the light that shined out of the broken place.

Kirsten Oates:

Yeah. Richard has this great book, Richard Rohr, What Do We Do with Evil? Where he talks about the burden of sin and the weight of glory being collective, that it’s the collective consciousness that where sin hides and it’s in ways that you describe. I found that book so helpful, to help see that.

Jim Finley:

I was raised very Catholic enclave. I was just very Catholic. I remember once I taught in a Jesuit high school in the inner city, still very Catholic. And we visited the Methodist church across the street, and I thought it was evil because they were Methodist. I wrote, “Peter and up on this rock, I would build my church, and I’m in a place where heretics pray.” And I thought, “oh my gosh. I know… Seriously.” To be aware of this, and we’re all trying to outgrow it and help each other outgrow it. Everyone belongs. Richard’s saying.

Kirsten Oates:

Yeah. It reminds me of you were talking about God’s tears at the bottom of everything. These are the reasons why, isn’t it?

Jim Finley:

It’s true.

Kirsten Oates:

Well, to close, we thought we’d read a lovely poem that we got from Tim, inspired by the podcast. So I’ll just read it. I hope I do it justice, Tim, but I’ll just read it. And then did you want to comment before I read it, Jim?

Jim Finley:

No, just that it’s beautiful.

Kirsten Oates:

Okay. Coffee, sun, wicker chair, the clarion call of the red-tailed hawk. The words, the words, the words do not pour out of me. It must be human to want more than what is given. Look closer. Yet this too is the law of love, divorced from the land. I have only to cultivate the mysteries of the higher life. Dare I follow my animal feet to the place uncreated, where the soul has never been wounded, where the belly deprived eats itself. The mind deprived becomes a poem. The empty page trills like an unmarked grave on a sun-baked hill, upon which I regard the thoughtless sky. See my own face in a cloud or clouds.

Jim Finley:

Beautiful really, thanks for sharing that with us. You’re gifted. Yeah, it’s a gift.

Kirsten Oates:

Yeah. Yeah. And Jim, thank you for this tremendous season. We’ve had such great feedback. I know it felt a little risky to focus on a poet, but it seems to have gone really well. And the insights you’ve given us have just been life-changing. So thank you for risking it with us.

Jim Finley:

Thank you. It was a gift to share it, so thank you. It gifted me. Thank you too.

Kirsten Oates:

Yeah. And a big thanks always to Dorothy and Corey who support us in the background. We’ll see you next season.

Jim Finley:

Yes.

Kirsten Oates:

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