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Greetings. I'm Jim Finley.

And I'm Kirsten Oates.

Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.

Welcome, everyone, to season 11 of Turning to the Mystics, where we've been turning to the philosopher Gabriel Marcel. In this episode, I'm going to dialogue with Jim about his fourth session on love.

Welcome, Jim. Yes, thank you. Love's a good note to

end on with Marcel. Yes. Yes, I'm looking forward to the dialogue. And just to give the page

and book reference, you read from the philosophy of Gabriel Marcel by Kenneth Gallagher, and you read from

chapter 5, Roman numeral 3, which starts on page 86 and goes through to page 90, the section on

love.

The end of the chapter, right?

So before we dive deep into love, I found it it helpful each time we look at these path elements,

Fidelity, hope and love, to ground us back in the vision element, just as the reference point,

because the path is helping to concretize what we experience in the vision aspects.

So Jim, just using Marcel's words,

Marcel's really helping us to recognize that we tend to spend the majority of our time focused on the problematic. Our thoughts, our consciousness is aligned to this realm of the problematic

and Marcel's inviting us to recognize that alongside that realm is always present the realm of

mystery and he's helping us see ways we might be more open to and might recognize when this realm of mystery breaks through

into our consciousness. And would you say also, Jim, he's saying that our life is kind of without

meaning and trends towards despair without this realm of mystery being concretized in our lives.

Yes, I think it is good to start this way to kind of reinstate ourselves in this vision.

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