“Feel the impact of your finitude, not as your ego having failed, but just the sense that you are the veil that hides the paradise you seek.” Cynthia Bourgeault
The Divine Instrument
“This wonderful, wonderful metaphor in number 27 [from Forty Questions of the Soul], which I think is one of the most beautiful ways of looking at being in the will of God, not as a passive victimization, but as an active growth. … If you can see the divine as the life principle working within your finitude, and that the will of God is like this thing that presses into the sap and allows you to grow and to bear fruit, then you get a much more cooperative, attitude with the way things are.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Boehme for Beginners, disc2 track7.
“How could God touch a snowflake? How could the divine fire hold a snowflake? And if you keep this image, it will give you some sense of the delicacy of Jacob Boehme’s phrase ‘the wonders,’ and how the human and the divine work together and how finitude isn’t just an embarrassing straitjacket we wear for a while till we die, but is an instrument through which the divine can touch in ways that infinitude can’t touch. Infinitude has a hard time touching without swallowing what it touches, without consuming what it touches.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Boehme for Beginners, disc2 track9.
“Finitude is in a funny way food for infinitude. That seems impossible but that’s the core of the covenant and it’s that covenant in which you find your dignity and in which you also find your accountability because that’s your job. Your job is to go out into the wonders with your left eye and play, play with all the joy of your being and bring that back to your right eye who during the time of this finite life is the watchman, the watchwoman, the sentry at the post of eternity.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Boehme for Beginners, disc2 track9.
Love Under Tension
“The more you put love under tension, under the constriction of form, the more luminescent and tender it glows. That love within the boundaries of complete finitude, which is the most impossible tensioning of the opposites you can imagine, has a quality to it that breaks your heart. Take Jesus on the cross.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2014 Jacob Boehme, 22:20 6b.Sunam.TeachingGWS14.
“There needs to be a space. And [Raimon Panikkar] talks about Jesus being mediator for standing in that space and allowing both finitude and infinitude to make love together in the human heart. And this being the core mystery that the Trinity enshrines, because in each human heart, that reunion of timeless and time, of infinite and finite, is the gift being given back. So that’s where Pannakar is going. It allows the space that’s needed for love to become fully real. It holds down that place.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Divine Exchange, 4:07 disc7 track8.
“I call it eucharistic love. Love in the midst of finitude. Love broken apart by the jagged dimensions of finitude and yet shining brightly.” Cynthia Bourgeault, In the Wake of St Brendan, disc1 track13.
Our Sacred Contribution
“I would say categorically that our own finitude, the fact that we are, for us, corporeality is corporeality. Even though our Imaginal being, our second body, extends far beyond it. Still, this is real. And the reality of duality, the reality of finitude, the reality of loss, death, diminishment, are all part of what we contribute to filter, temper, redirect, and return the gift we’re given. Which is changed and sweetened by our presence and our finitude. So never doubt what it is that you bring. Here and now, right where you are. To the whole cosmic economy.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Imaginal Wisdom School 8-2020, 18:03 0818 IWS TuesdayPM Q & A.
“A saint is simply one who’s managed to stabilize a World 24 presence in this world and thus is in a position to be of cosmic service and to render the world and speak to the world and on behalf of the world in and through conscience. So we’re all there. We all have that yearning and it becomes so important to see it early, to understand it and to consciously weave the warp of your finitude and the weft of your infinitude into a single tapestry which connects the realms.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Imaginal Wisdom School 8-2020, 36:43 0818 IWS TuesdayPM Q & A.
“Real remorse, not guilt. But remorse when you look … and you feel the impact of your finitude, not as your ego having failed, but just the sense that you are the veil that hides the paradise you seek. And this deep remorse for harms done, for inner injuries. At those moments, you begin to touch real feelingness. Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Kanuga 2015, 10:28 Day 4.2b Morning Teaching Part 2 of 3.
Form of Infinitude
“Death comes as part and parcel of finitude. And if death were the end, that would be, you know, tragic. But finitude is simply a form of infinitude. And, they’re not opposites. They’re polarity. And so we get to ride the whole thing and we discover how death swallows up life, but how life swallows up death as well.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Mystery of Death 2021, 38:44 03 Wednesday Morning Session.
“This is the fundamental conception of Good in the Gospels. Every form of knowledge, every form of truth, must find and unite with its proper Good to become living. Every truth has its own particular Good and Man is the point where they can meet and unite. Good and truth must unite to produce fruit.” Maurice Nicoll, The Mark, p80.
The Stained Glass Window
“To get a stained glass window, what has to start first is that white light has to get all broken up into bits and pieces of color contained in glass. And then they all get put in a tray in tiny little bits and pieces. And the stained glass artist comes with this idea of, you know, I’m going to make a Theotokos window. “Well, what colors do I want for Mary? And you take the little reds, these little blues, these little whites, the little yellows on the stars, these little bits and pieces, puts them all on this two-dimensional surface, lead to hold them all in, fuse together, and you’ve created a thing, which is making a picture out of bits and pieces of finitude. Themselves derived from the white light, but they’re bits and pieces of finitude. And there it is. It’s a pretty window. And then the light hits it. The radiance pours through that piece of artifice. Through that finite form. And both the story and the source of the story, the representation, is lit up and illuminated and revealed as one. Welcome to the western path of instancy. So for me, Integral consciousness is basically what happens when the structure has become strong enough, sturdy enough, and pure enough that the original light can burst through it and reveal in that bursting through what the heart of God is really all about.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Stonington 2021, 1:19:00 19 – Thursday Morning Teaching- Cynthia.
Logion 29
Yeshua says…
If flesh came into existence for the sake of spirit,
it is a wonder,
but if spirit exists for the sake of flesh,
it is a wonder of wonders.
I am truly astonished
at how such richness
came to dwell in such poverty.
Page numbers for Maurice Nicoll’s The Mark refer to Thomas Nelson & Sons, New York, 1954
Quotations from the Gospel of Thomas are from Lynn C Bauman, Ward J Bauman, Cynthia Bourgeault, The Luminous Gospels (Praxis 2008)
Read the Impression introducing the Gospel of Thomas.
0 Comments