Jim Finley:

Greetings. I’m Jim Finley.

Kirsten Oates:

And I’m Kirsten Oates.

Jim Finley:

Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.

Kirsten Oates:

Welcome, everyone, to Season 12 of Turning to the Mystics. And I’m here with Jim and I’m excited to announce that we’ll be studying Practice of the Presence. And this is the work of Brother Lawrence. So the full title of the book we’re going to be using is Nicholas Herman, Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection Practice of the Presence, A Revolutionary Translation by Carmen Acevedo Butcher. And Carmen is a new faculty member at the CAC. So we’re very excited to be able to use this beautiful translation of Brother Lawrence’s teaching.

So Jim, I want to welcome you here to our first episode for Season 12.

Jim Finley:

Yes, I’m looking forward to this series. I like Brother Lawrence so much. Yes.

Kirsten Oates:

Yeah. Well, please tell us more about our new mystic.

Jim Finley:

Yes. Well, as always, we’ll start by sharing what we know of Brother Lawrence historically, who he was historically, to help us understand who he is spiritually. And I like to suggest, too, that there’s a lesson in this for all of us. Who we are historically, we’ll all be dead soon as we’re in time. So in time is who we are historically is going to be who we were historically. But when we die, there shines forth who we eternally are. But who we eternally are is even now who we eternally are in time, transcending time. And that’s really a way to poetically understand the mystical intuition of ourselves. So these are the autobiographical foundations of his awakening, which then helps us look at the autobiographical foundations of our own awakenings.

So Brother Lawrence was born in France in 1614 where he lived until his death in 1691. And at that time in France, the social order, there was the elite class at the very top, the very wealthy. It was in the middle … It would be analogous to middle class today and then the poor. And then the poor in his days were extremely poor and he was born into that. So he was born as a common laborer. So he was born into that, the hardships of poverty was his life. Adding to the challenge of his life, it was in the midst of the Thirty Years’ War. And the Thirty Years’ War was a complex war around a number of countries in Europe and France was involved in that, was part of that Thirty Years’ War. And so it added to the crisis of the age or the trials of the day. And another big factor of the Thirty Years’ War is increased famine for the Thirty Years’ War. So there was a lot of famine and people not getting enough to eat to stay alive and so on. So he had to deal with that.

At 18 years old in the midst of this, he has a spiritual awakening that changed his whole life, but it didn’t change the ongoing details of his life. But it radically altered or metamorphosized his experience of his day-by-day life. And he shares this story that when he was 18 years old, he’s looking at a tree. And in the tree, you get the sense that while looking at the tree, he becomes more present to himself in his awareness, his oneness with the presence of the tree. It’s like a contemplative moment. And in his heightened awareness of himself and the presence of the tree, the presence of God shined forth and accessed his heart. So in the looking at a tree, there’s this mystical awakening of the presence of God and the ordinariness of the tree.

And what’s interesting about this, too, is we go through the sessions looking at our awakenings, and also I think an interesting insight with him to get a feel for his spirit. You don’t get the feeling that there was rapture, like Teresa of Avila, for example. She’d go into ecstasy, Mechthild of Magdeburg and these different mystics. You get the feeling more that it wasn’t rapture, but it was the depth to which that quickening touched him and accessed him in a very delicate, subtle way that just stayed with him. And I think that’s true of us sometimes, too, when we look back at our own awakenings. Sometimes they are emotionally very intense, but often they’re not intense at all. It’s like a quiet luminosity goes very deep that we can’t explain. And this happened to him at 18 years old.

At 19 years old, a year later, he joins the military. And Carmen points out in her commentary, this historical study, we really don’t know why exactly. It could have been out of a patriotism of wanting to be part of that, but it could have been also just have something to eat. He could have been starving. And so he was in the military at 19. And there’s two things there that really was a hardship for him. One is the things that he witnessed there in battle. Later, he had PTSD from the trauma he was exposed to. And also, he received a very serious wound in battle in his leg from which he was discharged from the military. He couldn’t be in the military anymore, but he carried the wound in his leg for the rest of his life.

Another thing that’s true with us, I think, in insight is that there can be an illumination and that illumination continues to quietly disappear when there is pain. But sometimes that’s not what happens. Sometimes the internalized awakening shines and sustains us in the pain itself, like an intermingling, a pain and awakened liberation. After he left the military, discharged with the wound, what’s very interesting about him is he became a hermit. And he was in the hermit, he shows you how he was quickened in the presence of God with the tree, with just his own devotional sincerity. So just like the Desert Fathers, it’s almost like a light where when I was in the monastery, the cloistered monastic life. So there’s like a hidden life of seeking God and believing that fidelity to that hidden life of seeking God touches the whole world in ways you don’t understand.

And so he went to the solitary life, which shows you the interior seriousness for him of the presence of God and how to go deeper into that. But he couldn’t stay. He couldn’t do it because he kept getting flooded in his mind with images from the war and so on. So he left the hermitage. And there’s another lesson we’re going to see in him, which really what we like about him is his lessons are the lessons of our own life, that very often the things we sincerely venture into, whatever it is, and it doesn’t work whether it’s a spiritual process or a marriage or career, and it doesn’t work.

Sometimes the fact that it doesn’t work is like a providential turning that’s leading us along a path that we don’t understand yet this way. And so he leaves. And in the next stage of his life, he becomes a footman. And I didn’t know about this, and Carmen in her book, she explains it. So in the mansions of the elite, the footman was the butler’s assistant. So they had the butler and then you had the footman. And so he did menial task in the house elite as the assistant to the butler, but he said he didn’t do well at it because he kept breaking things. So it’s like a series of mishaps and failures and hardships in his life just plodding on.

Then at 28 years old, it was a major turn that was going to change his whole life, as he entered the Order of Discalced Carmelites. And remember, the Discalced Carmelites was the reform in Spain of St. John of the Cross and Teresa, a reform in the Carmelite order to return to prayer, poverty, and simplicity. And also, he entered as a lay brother. So the nuns, the Discalced Carmelites nuns are cloistered, but the Carmelite priests, like John of the Cross, it was a commitment to a contemplative, mystical sense of life, but also living out of it as ministry. But along with that, you also had lay brothers. And so the lay brothers weren’t clerics, they didn’t get ordained, but they took the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.

And so they led a life of service to God as a lay brother. So he becomes a laborer. He’s a laborer, he’s not educated. He has no formal education this way. And in the life as a lay brother, then he was immersed in a day-by-day life of silence, scripture, liturgy, prayer, service, which was a cultivating culture in which he could deepen the experience of God’s presence in his life this way in the monastery. And I think this is an important lesson for us, too, because I know during the six years I was in the monastery, it was a culture that was meant to nurture and protect and nurture this deepening presence.

For those of us living out here in the midst of the busy world, where 99% of us live, we have to create a contemplative culture in our heart. God is presence in the midst of a complicated world that God so loved he sent his only-begotten son. And that’s what these podcasts are about, really, that we’re talking about this cultivation of this contemplative culture in the world. And also an interesting thing in this is his baptismal name was Nicholas Herman. When you take your vows in an order as a priest or lay brother or nun, you’re given a new name.

So this is where he becomes Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection. And that’s how he comes down to us in history as Brother Lawrence. And in the monastery where he worked as a lay brother, he worked in the kitchen as a cook. And we’re going to see what’s at the heart of his teaching. This is what the whole thing moves on is that just as he was … Put it this way, there’s the presence of God, then there’s the presence of God being poured out in an ongoing creative self-donating act, presencing itself as the presence of ourself, the presence of others, the presence of all things that are nothingness without God. So that’s this transsubjective presence of God presencing itself and the presence of what is.

But what happens is when that divine ontology shines through into experience, see, that’s what happened with the tree, we experience the transsubjective divinity of the immediacy of ourself as an experience. Next, that experience comes like a flashpoint touch. But then what happens is a longing to abide there. And that’s the teachings of Brother Lawrence. The moments where we’re quickened are not moments where there’s something more is given because the infinity of God is infinitely given infinitely as each moment, but rather in these flashpoints, the curtain parts, and we momentarily experience the presence of God that is the reality of every moment of our life, including this moment. So then the question becomes, how can I be healed from what hinders me from realizing the infinite presence of God presencing itself in this and every moment of our life and that’s what he calls practicing the presence of God. See, we practice it.

So it’s the cultivation of a metamorphosis of opening our heart to an ever more underlying habitual state. And what’s interesting for him, it isn’t so much the focus on prayer. He does talk about prayer. We’d be looking at it. But he saw that just as in the presence of the tree, he was in the presence of God. In working in the pots and the pans, the pots and the pans were the presence of God. And he also sees this. He also sees that his longing to deepen the presence, that the presence of God is given to him as his longing.

So his very longing for the presence of God is the presence of God as longing and his longing as he’s present in the pots and pans in the kitchen of the holiness of the day by day this way. This is a big thing for Brother Lawrence. And this is what makes him so accessible to us because we’re in the midst of a day by day. And we’re in the midst of a longing. And the longing, I think, is what inspires us to want to listen to these reflections. The very fact we want to listen to it, it embodies our longing. And so how do we learn to become more habitually aware of the presence of God shining out everywhere in the ordinariness of the situation at hand? It’s another interesting thing that he shares through all the years that he was the cook, he didn’t like it.

He didn’t care for it, but he humbly did it. So how could we find the presence of God shining out and not liking it? That God just isn’t present in what we like, but also God’s unexplainably present in what we don’t like, the presence of God in every aspect of our life and the ordinariness of ourself. And what’s interesting, too, we’re going to see in Brother Lawrence very big is that he talks about how he practiced this presence of God, especially since entering the Carmel. He says he’s been doing this all of his life, just practicing this presence of God. He’s very poetic, beautiful. And then he adds just like, “By the way, I always have been practicing the presence of God, but I’ve been practicing it poorly.”

See, that’s so good. See, we get disheartened. We’re not doing it well enough. But what if practicing it poorly is poverty of spirit, which God is present in the very poverty of trying to be sincere with what we’re not able to live up to. And he’s constantly closing the circle and the intimacy or is already fully present just in where we are rather than some place we’re trying to get to. Brother Lawrence then carries this way through his whole life. He carried the wound all the way to his whole life and died. And so what we’re going to be looking at are his teachings. And to see this kind of a transparent simplicity of the presence of God, which shines so that as we listen, he’s mentoring us, that we can sense the transparent simplicity of God in the very act of listening, the very act of living our life. So that’s my sense of Brother Lawrence, why I think he’s so delightful, really. Yeah.

Kirsten Oates:

What a beautiful introduction. I love the little lessons along the way. Jim, I’m curious about a couple of things. One is just back in that age, spirituality was just more centralized. Would that be correct? So the culture was centered around different to today.

Jim Finley:

Well, I would say this, we’re right at the cusp of the beginning of the Enlightenment period. But really, basically the ethos of the culture was a religious collective understanding of the sacredness of life itself. And this is why it made sense to have monasteries and hermits around and religious communities living the consecrated life and service to the world because that’s how they saw their faith. And so, for us, for example, we don’t live in a culture like that. Our culture is much more of a secular culture and that’s why we’re bringing the presence of God, that God is completely present in the midst of the secular culture, because we’re God’s beloved living in the world that God so loves.

Kirsten Oates:

Yeah, because it’s interesting that at such a young age, he had such a deep spiritual experience, but he would have grown up in a culture that was much more reflective on religion and spirituality.

Jim Finley:

I think so, too. Another thing I think about being so young about the awakening is I think also in the talks, we’ll be looking at our own awakenings. See, how has it come to pass that we’ve become the person that’s capable of being sensitive to such things? How did this happen? And we look back … And sometimes the awakening started when we were children, like all moments. But it takes a while to keep growing into the far-reaching implications. We have to grow into what was given to us. So that’s true. He was young and he had to grow into it just like we do.

Kirsten Oates:

Also, this sense of his life was really hard and that the stark class system, he would have been seen a certain way within the culture a less than person.

Jim Finley:

Very much so. And there’s another lesson for us in our culture with the poor. Right now, for me, for example, I live here at the ocean. I feel privileged to live here, lived here for years with Maureen, looking out the window at the ocean, but it’s very expensive here. But going up the street are people going through the trash cans looking for bottles and cans to cash in so they can have something to eat today. So you always have this interface of the street people, of the poor. And sometimes what we’re looking to find is sometimes it’s the person going through the trash can or the poor could be a mystically awakened person. Sometimes people that aren’t poor at all at one level are extremely impoverished in the presence of other people through their very poverty are enriched with the presence of God, even though very often through their very poverty, it makes it even more challenging to be aware of God, but God’s in love with them and their inability to experience it. But it does bring … There is a social sensitivity to this, I think. Yeah.

Kirsten Oates:

Yeah. That God doesn’t differentiate the way we sadly do.

Jim Finley:

And there’s another big thing about Brother Lawrence, too, and all these mystics. It’s what he’s really doing. What we’re really doing when we listen to these awakened people is they’re inviting us to understand a deeper understanding what it means to understand. So we tend to think, to understand is to comprehend. I get it. And that’s important. But what if to understand is to be unexplainably awakened to what we can never explain. And that’s to understand. So like Thomas Merton says, when it comes to God, to understand is to know that we’re infinitely understood, and we’re seeing Brother Lawrence as he keeps moving toward this. We’re going to be looking at the 12th letter by seeing ourselves in God’s understanding of us experientially.

Kirsten Oates:

I’m also curious about this position within the monastery of being a lay brother. And Jim, when you first entered the monastery, were you accepted as a lay brother?

Jim Finley:

Yes. In the Cistercian order that I was in, the Trappists order as founded, it goes back to the 11th century, Bernard of Clairvaux, which is the reform of the Benedictine order in the fifth century. So when I entered, there were choir monks and lay brothers. The choir monks were priests there and they chanted the Psalms every day in Latin when I was there.

And the lay brothers, we were a brown habit. And so their life was a life of seeking God in silence, prayer, and study, like the study of the scriptures, the traditions, and so on. The lay brothers was to seek to live a life of in silence and prayer seeking God in service of the community in manual labor. So I entered as a lay brother. Later, it’s interesting they changed that and they just made everybody monks because, really, the monastic life was a lay movement of a God-seeking person. And so the clergy are there for the celebration of the sacraments, like for mass and liturgy. I can relate to that as a lay brother because I was lay brother, and then I got changed over into the choir, and then they merged the two anyway. So anyway, he was a lay brother. He would be the porter answering the door and stirring the soup and mopping the floor. Yeah.

Kirsten Oates:

And the lay brothers, they didn’t study as much, but he seemed very deeply steeped in Teresa of Avila’s teaching. So there was some study.

Jim Finley:

That’s very good in this sense. He was very simple. He wasn’t academic at all this way. It isn’t that. But what it was, he was deeply steeped in Teresa and John of the Cross. We’re going to be looking at one of the later sessions on passages in Teresa and John that echo Brother Lawrence. We’re also going to be looking at how he very closely echoes Meister Eckhart, which is the mystical life in the midst of the world, the path of detachment. But here’s the thing about Brother Lawrence, I think. When he read Teresa and John, he wasn’t reading it for the theology of it, but he read it in a way where he was struck by the beauty of what they were saying because it was the beauty of God, which he himself experientially knew.

And so they were helping him put words to or bear witness to what he himself was seeking in his own life. That’s what we’re doing in these sessions. They’re not academic at all because the mystic teachers didn’t intend it to be. There is a theology of it, and some of them knew that theology, some didn’t. But what we’re talking about is it’s in our heart, the way of a pilgrim, like in the sincerity of devotional love of God and our longing for God, which is an echo God’s longing for us experientially realized.

Turning to the Mystics will continue in a moment.

Kirsten Oates:

One of the things I love about Brother Lawrence in Practice of the Presence is its simplicity. So when I think of his teachers like Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, there’s a lot of complexity to their teaching, which is wonderful in its own way, but this just hits a very different note. And I love that it’s unique and simple, but draws from those deep wells and complex, nuanced teaching that Teresa and John of the Cross offered.

Jim Finley:

Yes, I think that’s so true. I can see where there’s a contribution that Brother Lawrence makes in this simplicity, which is an infinite simplicity of presence, because what John and Teresa and Eckhart and the other mystics do, they make explicit the nuanced layerings of aspects of the journey that we all go through. And they’re real. So it can be very helpful to read that. So, for example, Teresa of Avila choose just one example. She’ll say, “Sometimes when we’re sitting in quiet meditation and prayer,” she said, “We can enter into a state of absorption.” Absorption is a semi-voluntary quiet fascination. She said, “It’s not divine union, but it’s the condition in which union occurs.” That’s a lovely insight. And so John of the Cross says the same thing. It’s just the richness of layered insights, but it’s just refreshing, too, to go back to the distilled simplicity of presence and staying there.

Kirsten Oates:

Yes, they’re very complementary.

Jim Finley:

Yeah.

Kirsten Oates:

That’s what I like about it because Teresa and John of the Cross give you a real sense of development that even when you’re touched and have these quickening moments, there’s a lot of development and different phases. Yeah.

Jim Finley:

That’s true. That’s Teresa and John’s own way of being simple. And this … For just one example, at the end of the interior castle in the Seventh Mansion, which is this mystical marriage state that she was in, this is how she ends the book. She says, “For a person who’s come to this state, there’s only one question that’s relevant. How can I be helpful?” And it swings around to simplicity. And John of the Cross has passages like that, too. So you’re right, they’re complementary to each other.

Kirsten Oates:

Really complementary.

Jim Finley:

Yeah.

Kirsten Oates:

Yeah. Because it’s almost like Brother Lawrence’s practice is how can I be helpful and how can I have a practice that helps me be helpful?

Jim Finley:

Yeah. Years ago, I used to go to this retreat house in Kansas, Concordia, Kansas out in the farmland. I was giving a contemplative retreat. And I would go into the kitchen where I would get coffee and I would talk to the cook. And I asked the cook who’s doing the meals for the retreat house. If she was able to listen in here at the talks, she said, “No.” She said, “I don’t listen to talks like that at all because I’m cooking.” And years later, I went back and there was a picture of a woman who was given an award for food distribution to the poor, and it was that cook. You know what I mean? So her being the cook was the simplicity of service. I was touched by that.

Kirsten Oates:

That’s beautiful. Very reminiscent of the sense you get of Brother Lawrence. Yeah.

Jim Finley:

And Brother Lawrence was a cook.

Kirsten Oates:

Yeah. Who cooked with all his heart.

Jim Finley:

He cooked with all of his heart. Exactly.

Kirsten Oates:

Yeah.

Jim Finley:

He did. Yeah.

Kirsten Oates:

Yes, it’s amazing to remember that Brother Lawrence was just a lay brother and a cook. He was never asked to be a teacher. He was never asked to write his teaching down like Teresa of Avila was, but he had such a profound impact on people that we’re reading his words today.

Jim Finley:

But there’s something else you’re saying, too, I think, is important. Remember, one of the mystics that we talked about was Mechthild of Magdeburg, one of the Beguine women. And the Beguines led a very simple life in the world and a lot of them were women of deep prayer. So when she wrote her journals, she was writing on her diary like this where she says that she asked God, “What do you want of me?” And God says, “I want you to let me rest weightlessly in your soul.” That’s beautiful. And so someone reads it and they go, “My God, this is beautiful.” And they copy it. Here’s Brother Lawrence and we’re still talking about it now …

Kirsten Oates:

Yeah.

Jim Finley:

… because it’s timelessly beautiful. And that’s just something about the timeless beauty of our own life lived at this level of sincerity, and vulnerability, and gratitude.

Kirsten Oates:

So after Brother Lawrence died, Joseph of Beaufort took on a project of pulling as much of his teaching together that he could find to share with others. And he found the teaching in letters he’d written in journal entries. And then Joseph himself had written notes after their conversations. He put this all together into a book. And then Carmen took that original book and also included other pieces that were relevant, things like the eulogy that Joseph of Beaufort gave at Brother Lawrence’s funeral. So the book is beautiful. It has all these little touches of Brother Lawrence’s sharing. There’s spiritual maxims, which are sayings of Brother Lawrence that they found in his journals. There are the letters, there are notes from the conversations. So it’s just a lovely gathering together of ways that Brother Lawrence had touched people. But what’s amazing about it is that Brother Lawrence never intended to create the book and he never saw it come together in his lifetime. So I wonder what he’d think about it.

Jim Finley:

Yeah. I think if he saw it, he’d be surprised and pleased. I’ll be damned, wow. I think I’ll read it myself. So I think you’re right. It’s the gathering up of something. But I also think with all these mystics to these mystic teachers they were sharing, they wanted to let God speak through them of how those that listened to it might be awakened to the pass on the contagious energy, but he himself would never have. So people gather … And we’re so grateful they gather it up and hand it on. I mean, here we are.

Kirsten Oates:

Yeah. Yeah. What’s interesting to me about that is you’ve so often talked throughout the seasons about everyone can have these mystical experiences, and some people have the charism of becoming a teacher, but there’s many, many people out in the world living a mystic life, and they just share it differently. And so what you see is that he has the impact that a mystic has on people’s lives. So I think it’s a wonderful encouragement for those of us who aren’t called to be teachers to know that God’s presence shining through our lives in whatever the act is that we’re drawn to does have an impact, that God’s presence impacts the world, and we can trust in that.

Jim Finley:

Yeah, I think that’s really important. There was a Israeli Jew who did a collection of essays interviewing spiritual teachers, and he interviewed me, and they were great questions. The question was, he says, “Who’s your teacher? And what did your teacher teach? And what do you experience is happening when you’re teaching? And how does it feel to see that people see you as a teacher?” So people see me as a teacher, I’m doing it now, but I didn’t plan to be a teacher. So I think some people are given not just the awakening, but they’re also given the charism of communicating the awakening. But the vast majority of these interiorly awakened people aren’t called to be teachers because it’s anonymous.

It doesn’t draw attention to itself. I think we can tell, I get this feeling this way, that when we’re such a person, we can see the signs of it, and that they tend to be a deeply present person, like a very present person. And there’s this quiet inner clarity about them and a self-acceptance. There’s certain qualities, but they’re just living the divinity of the ordinariness of life, which is how the vast majority are asked to live it. Here’s another thing, I think, also. Sometimes when we’re very young in the presence of a spiritually awakened person or awakened, then later in our life, God uses that as the ways that we serve. Do I mean it like ripens …

Kirsten Oates:

Yes.

Jim Finley:

… into an unexpected kind of space?

Kirsten Oates:

Well, in a way, you meeting Thomas Merton and then your first book being a sharing of what you learned from Thomas Merton, yeah, is an example of that.

Jim Finley:

Yeah.

Kirsten Oates:

In Carmen’s book, Practice of the Presence, there’s a eulogy by Joseph of Beaufort, and you get a real sense of his connection and admiration. So it also shows the beauty of spiritual friendship, how deep that is.

Jim Finley:

There’s another thing about it, too, I think, in the beauty of that eulogy is that this is what I mean, who the teacher was historically, the teacher’s dead. But in a priest giving the eulogy, you can tell Brother Lawrence isn’t dead to him. And he’s aware of the eternality of Brother Lawrence. And that’s why when we read it, the beauty of the eulogy is the beauty of our own deathless nature as the beloved that way. Yeah.

Kirsten Oates:

Yes, it is clear that he was very touched and committed to getting his work out.

Jim Finley:

And you know what that reminds me of, too? The maxim, these spiritual sayings, we’ll be looking at them in session, is that they weren’t found until later after he died. They were discovered later. And what it reminds me of later, as we keep going through the seasons, I’m going to be, we did T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets. The poet is a mystic. We’re going to do Emily Dickinson. So it’s interesting, during her life, she lived this completely anonymous life. It was not until after her death, they found these hundreds and hundreds of poems that she wrote. So it’s interesting how sometimes after a person dies, they discover something.

Kirsten Oates:

Yes.

Jim Finley:

It adds to the richness of the legacy.

Kirsten Oates:

Yes. So they captured from his journals things he’d written. And then Joseph had also written down his notes from their sessions together.

Jim Finley:

John the Cross does this, too, with maxims, saying like distilled essences. How would I distill it out in a poetic succinctness? John of the cross, he does that also. Yeah.

Kirsten Oates:

Yeah. When did you first come across Brother Lawrence?

Jim Finley:

Well, like all these mystics that we’re sharing, I was first introduced to Brother Lawrence when I was in the monastery because Thomas Merton, in his talks to us, would quote from these passages, from these classical texts, the mystics that we’ve been studying this way. And Brother Lawrence was one of those mystics that he touched on. And so in the monastic library, I got my volume of Brother Lawrence, an older incomplete translation, it’s not the one that has the maxims in it, and just loved him right away for reasons we said, for how transparently simple and directly experiential he is. And so he’s always been one of these guides for me. So it’s delightful to be able to share it here with the listeners. Yeah.

Kirsten Oates:

So you continued to turn to him beyond the monastery. He’s one of your go-to kind of-

Jim Finley:

Yeah, all these mystics. In my library throughout the years, I keep going back. An interesting thing about these mystics, you could open any page and read the paragraph out loud and everything they say is it. And you also get the feeling there’s a certain book that you’ll never finish because it’s endless. Do I mean it’s timeless? And they’re treasures. And so that’s what’s so beautiful about passing this on, these treasures to the listeners that they can walk with this richness, inner richness, in their own life. Yeah. It’s a gift.

Kirsten Oates:

One thing I wanted to point out that’s interesting about Carmen’s translation, she knew how grounded in the Trinitarian idea that Brother Lawrence was very grounded in the idea of Trinity. And so when she refers to God in the book, she uses the word they, referring to God as this Trinitarian dimension. And … So that’s quite unique. I’ve never read a book … I’ve heard God referred to as he, sometimes as she, sometimes as God, but this translation uses they, so it’s quite provocative when you’re first reading it and getting used to that.

Jim Finley:

We’ll be exploring this in one of the sessions. This is key. They like Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the persons of the Trinity, like Raimon Panikkar, the Trinity is Christ’s mind because he says sometimes he spoke of God as Abba, Father, and sometimes he who sees me sees the Father, and I’m going to send the spirit. But here’s the person, each way of saying it is incomplete without gathering up the other ways of saying it. So, for example, you can’t count the persons of the … They’re not three persons in the Trinity. There’s not three of them. They’re transsubjective presences because God is one.

And what’s really profound, and we’re going to see this in Brother Lawrence, it isn’t just that they’re transsubjective presences, which the Father is eternally expressing and contemplating himself in the word, but also the transsubjective presences in the God the Father is eternally contemplating us in the word, is who we are hidden with Christ and God before the origins of the universe. So in one of the letters, Brother Lawrence is going to say, “I placed myself in their mind that as I placed myself in the mind of who I was before the origins of the universe.” So we’re talking about that. It just raises the mystery of that.

Kirsten Oates:

Yeah. Yes. And what I hear you saying, Jim, is that none of these words are really adequate if you use they, if you use he, if you use she, if you use God.

Jim Finley:

I like in the Greek Orthodox tradition, too, they’re very big, an antimony, is that what happens really is that in the Trinity, the mind reaches an impasse and you can’t go on. But in the impasse, if you stay there, you drop down into a deeper level of a unit of realization of the unexplainable. Because as soon as we try to explain it, it’s like being deeply in love with someone and trying to explain to another person about who the beloved is to you that would do justice to who you know them to be in your love for them. You can’t say it. And so this is what we’re always trying to do. We’re always trying to move away from talking about it into the words that bear witness to the unexplainable immediacy of it, knowing there’s no it to it. It’s not objectifiable. It’s this this presence. Yeah, which is Brother Lawrence.

Kirsten Oates:

We can’t capture it in an objective word.

Jim Finley:

No, we … No, no. No, no. We can’t capture it. But what we realized is we were just delighted that it’s captured us. You know what I mean? It’s taken hold in our heart. We’re so grateful that it caught hold like that.

Kirsten Oates:

Well, I found it quite refreshing to have this different word in place because especially with the patriarchy of the church, the historical patriarchy of the church, that the word he can be a bit challenging for many of us. And so, yeah, it was just very refreshing and provocative. And it made me think, “What word would I … If they doesn’t completely capture it for me or he doesn’t, is there a word that I’d pop in there that would really resonate for me?” So I enjoyed that in the reading.

Jim Finley:

Me, too. I would touch on this, too, in the session we’ll be looking at this, is that, see, there’s no neuter personal pronoun in English. There’s feminine or masculine. There’s no neuter. And it’s not it either because God’s not a force like gravity. So we’re forced into this language of personal pronoun, he, she. So God is neither male nor female because categories don’t apply to God.

Kirsten Oates:

Right.

Jim Finley:

And yet God is the infinity of the masculine and the feminine because God eternally contemplates and is the origin of the feminine. But the problem is due to the patriarchal nature of society itself, it got into this patriarchal male-dominated thing. Today, we’re in the spirit of moving towards a more androgynous language, a more androgynous understanding of this.

Kirsten Oates:

But not to say that God is a gender category that we’re looking for.

Jim Finley:

That’s the point.

Kirsten Oates:

I think that’s what we want to make clear. Yeah.

Jim Finley:

Because it’s uncategorizable, it’s the infinity that is the reality of every category.

Kirsten Oates:

Every category.

Jim Finley:

But it’s not reducible to any category. And in a way, what Brother Lawrence is saying, “And that’s us.” We’re not reducible to our categories.

Kirsten Oates:

Yes. And if we had to write that every time we were going to try and use the word God, it’d be hard to read the text.

Jim Finley:

It’d be extremely hard. There was a footnote in red at the bottom every time we said it. The book would be three times as long and ponderous. It’s true.

Kirsten Oates:

Yeah. Yeah. I do just want to add that this book by Carmen is very accessible. I think it’s probably one of the most accessible books we’ve done across the seasons and I really enjoyed learning more about Brother Lawrence’s life. Carmen weaves that in beautifully throughout the book.

Jim Finley:

I think also another big thing about it, you see, right now, I couldn’t speak this way and you couldn’t speak this way with me. It weren’t for the fact that you and I are both present. We’re not distracted. We’re not off somewhere else. What’s interesting is we’re present. And where Brother Lawrence is saying, “Yes, we are present,” true, but the infinite presence of God is presencing itself as the simplicity of our presence and a nothingness without God. And so he’s so stunningly simple. The way I put it, too, is he plays a violin with one string on it, which is presence, but it ends up being the whole orchestra because presence itself is an all-inclusive thing that contains and transcends all the categories that are being present. And he just stays there. And that helps us to stay there. And that’s why I say, too, that this mystical path is not trying to find our way to some ultimate goal we might reach, but how learning from God not to do violence with the fragility of our waiting because God’s the infinity of the waiting itself. Brother Lawrence always stays there.

Kirsten Oates:

Yeah.

Jim Finley:

So it’s quite beautiful, really.

Kirsten Oates:

I think the book reads like little meditations that can guide you into presence.

Jim Finley:

There’s another interesting about him, which just also about us. It’s presence, but he’s not saying the same thing over and over. It’s endlessly nuanced, that is, every sentence like it says in the gospels. I honestly believe that all the books in the world couldn’t contain everything that Jesus said. So it’s like that. And that’s us. We’re endlessly nuanced and he carries us along this way. So that’s lovely.

Kirsten Oates:

Yes, because he’s always speaking from his heart in the presence, as you say. He’s not like reciting something he learned once and just repeats it over and over. You can tell that every time he’s asked to share something or is writing a letter to someone, he’s speaking just what’s flowing from his heart in that moment.

Jim Finley:

Right. It’s true.

Kirsten Oates:

We’re very excited to be launching Season 12. And this season will follow our regular format with Jim’s reflections, our dialogues, a coaching session, and our very favorite, the listener questions. And then we’re very excited that Carmen Acevedo Butcher will be joining us for a discussion where we can learn more from her about Brother Lawrence and his wonderful teaching.

Jim Finley:

I also think that as we heard so often, I think all the listeners benefit from our dialogue with each other. So it’s in our exchange with each other as another layer of passing on this teaching.

Kirsten Oates:

Yes. Well, I appreciate that. I appreciate you saying that, Jim. Thank you so much. So before we close, I just want to let everyone know, if you are interested in getting the book, there will be a link in the show notes to this episode. So make it easy for you. And welcome to Season 12. We’re so excited and look forward to next time.

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