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Greetings. I'm Jim Finley. Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.

Greetings, everyone. Welcome to our time here together.

Welcome to Turning for Guidance to the Teachings of the Christian Mystic, Julian of Norwich.

In this session, I'm inviting you to join me in Exploring Chapter 5 of the Long Text,

in which she guides us or helps us to cultivate an experiential understanding of God's presence in our lives.

I think the significance of this for us is so clear to me, though, when I was living in the monastery,

that every detail of daily life in the monastery, the silence, the chanting of the Psalms, the simple vegetarian diet,

the long periods that aside for prayer, were all intended to foster a spiritual world view,

or an underlying experiential understanding of God's oneness with us in each detail of each passing moment of our life.

But for us living out here in a fast-moving, secular world, we have to cultivate this.

We have to cultivate a contemplative culture in our heart, an underlying habitual sense of God's presence

in the intimate details of daily living and to experience the sense of inner peace or the inner clarity that this brings into our lives.

And so what Julian does here is throughout the whole book, really, here in Chapter 5,

she bears witness to how in her years of solitude and prayer and the anchor hold there at the little cell there at the church of Norwich,

she took reflecting on the mystical awakening that was granted to her at the edge of death when she had the showings of the mystery of Christ crucified,

revealing God's loving familiarity with us.

And as she kept reflecting on it over the years, she would often speak of what she calls spiritual sight or a spiritual understanding

that is a certain kind of inner clarity, the pervasive oneness of God's presence with us and her breath and her heart beaten,

which she calls a familiar love, a bitterly familiar love.

And so it is in this sense that she begins this chapter.

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