Dialogue 4: The Perfect Life

Turning to the Mystics with James Finley

Center for Action and Contemplation

Spirituality, Religion & Spirituality, Christianity

4.8 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 2 May 2022

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This is the fourth and final dialogue that focuses on the mystical text, The Cloud of Unknowing. In this episode, Jim and Kirsten discuss Session 3 where Jim talks about the fourth and final phase in The Cloud of Unknowing, the perfect life. Resources: Turning to the Mystics is a podcast by the Center for Action and Contemplation. To learn more about Jim, visit jamesfinley.org  For the transcript for this podcast can be found here. The book being used for this season can be found here. Connect with us: We also produce other podcasts you might enjoy. To learn more about them and our other offerings, visit cac.org This podcast is made possible, thanks to the generosity of our donors. If you would love to support the ongoing work of the Center for Action and Contemplation and the continued work of our podcasts, you can donate at cac.org/podcastsupport Thank you!

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to a podcast by the Center for Action and Contemplation
0:04.1	to learn more, visit caac.org.
0:08.3	Greetings. I'm Jim Finley.
0:11.0	And I'm Kirsten Oates.
0:12.9	Welcome to Turning to the Mistakes.
0:22.9	Welcome everyone. We're in season five of Turning to the Mistakes
0:28.1	and we're turning to the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing.
0:33.1	And I'm here with Jim and I've got some questions for you, Jim, about your talk last time.
0:40.2	I wanted to start with something you said during the talk last time, which was you said that
0:48.0	God's always meeting you where you are. I find that quite comforting, but I just
0:54.3	wondered if you'd unpack that a little bit in relation to what you're teaching about The Cloud.
0:59.2	First of all, in the spiritual worldview of the Christian faith and concert really with the
1:07.2	spiritual worldview of all the world religions, but for our way in the Christian tradition,
1:11.2	Judeo-Christian tradition, is that God's with us first in the ongoing self-donating act of God
1:22.7	in creation, like the lethar be light, like the bee stones and trees and so on.
1:28.4	So what we have then is a self-donating act where the presence of God is presencing itself
1:36.8	in and as the presence of ourselves and everything, and it's nothing as without God.
1:44.0	So in the ontology or the very being of things, we see that the world is God's body
1:52.2	and that it's modding forth the love that's uttering it into being. So there's that.
1:57.5	Next, there then raises the question, as persons, where we created as persons,
2:03.2	there were endowed with the capacity, not just with reason, science and all that and culture,
2:09.9	really, but were also endowed with the capacity to awaken to that.
	...

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