St. John of the Cross: Session 1

Turning to the Mystics with James Finley

Center for Action and Contemplation

Spirituality, Religion & Spirituality, Christianity

4.8 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 15 March 2021

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This is the first session that focuses on the mystic, St. John of the Cross. In the tenor of the ancient practice of Lectio Divina, James Finley begins with a passage from St. John's The Ascent of Mount Carmel, and reflects on the qualitative essence of the spirit of this text, and finishes with a meditative practice. 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 to this podcast, you can find it 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 to learn more
0:05.0	visit caac.org.
0:08.0	Greetings. I'm Jim Finley. Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.
0:15.0	Greetings to everyone and welcome to our time here together at Turning for Spiritual
0:31.0	Guidance to the Christian Mystics in John of the Crocs.
0:37.0	Based on, well, some of the insights that was shared in the previous introductory reflections
0:44.0	in this session, I'd like to move directly into, you can remind yourself on what
0:53.0	St. John of the Cross means by the Dark Knight. This is the kind of visual metaphor for
1:00.0	transformative experience that begins in the loss of the felt sense of God sustaining presence
1:11.0	in our life. The sense of nurturance, the sense of reassurance, the sense of insight,
1:24.0	aspirations and consolations that have come to us through our faith sustaining us day by day
1:31.0	throughout our life and in prayer. Mysteriously begins to fade away and to be replaced
1:39.0	with a sense of an absence, the absence of the felt sense of God, a sense of
1:47.0	a rigidity. In his first book, in the collected works, he sent him out Carmel in book
2:03.0	2, chapter 13, he gives three signs by which we discern in prayer that were being led
2:15.0	into this dark night. A night in which this deprivation of our customary ways of experiencing God
2:25.0	opens out upon and draws us into an infinitely richer, more luminous and ultimately boundaryless way
2:33.0	of experiencing God. That, as he says in the prologue, is the way in which we begin to follow,
2:43.0	find our way to the perfect union with God that is possible in this life through love.
2:49.0	And so the night then leads us into this light of this perfect union through love.
2:55.0	And he gives us three signs by which we can discern. This is starting to happen to us in prayer.
3:04.0	The first two signs are the signs of the deprivation. And he gives an explanatory note on each.
	...

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