A Coaching Session on Thérèse of Lisieux

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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James Finley (0:08)

Greetings. I'm Jim Finley.

Kirsten Oates (0:11)

And I'm Kirsten Oates.

James Finley (0:13)

Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.

Kirsten Oates (0:23)

Welcome, everyone, to Season 13 of Turning to the Mystics, where we've been turning to St. Thérèse of Lisieux and her story of a soul. And I'm here with Jim for our coaching session. Welcome, Jim.

James Finley (0:37)

So, in love with her and the beauty of her teaching, so I'm looking forward to this, to share this with the listeners, yeah.

Kirsten Oates (0:45)

Yes, and these coaching sessions are a regular part of our podcast, and it's where I come to you, you're my spiritual director, and I'm coming to you with questions about how I might apply things from the Mystic to my own life. So we're going to have a dialogue about that today. And so, just to open, Jim, I'd love to hear from you just kind of a high-level framing of what Thérèse is sharing with us in her Story of a Soul.

James Finley (1:14)

What she's sharing with us in the Story of a Soul is the sincere intimacy of the interiority of our own heart, and the interiority of our own heart is a very deep sense that the infinite love of God incarnate in Jesus is one with her in her limitations, not waiting for her to get beyond them, because this infinite love is one with her in the limitations. And she has such a kind of a consistency of living in the light of that, in a way that doesn't depend on whether she's able to feel it or not.

And therefore, it invites us to know that God's one with us, infinitely in love with us as the beloved in the very midst of our limitations, whether we feel it or not. And I think that's what's so consoling about her and reassuring for all of us.

Kirsten Oates (2:05)

Well, with that wonderful start, I have some questions for you, Jim. You ready?

What I love about all these mystics is what they offer us is not a prescription, just kind of prompts. And so it's really a wonderful opportunity to get to dialogue with you about how to think about and apply some of these prompts, these themes, in my own life. So I invite the listeners to hopefully join in thinking about how they apply these directly to their own life in a non-prescriptive way.

James Finley (2:40)

Yes, I like, you know, Bernard Mardigan, he said, belief in God is a lot more like falling in love than it is proving something. Where we're really at is how do we get to that place of sincere vulnerability, where we're moved by this, where we long for this, we're having challenges, like how do we find our way through this? Because that's where Thérèse takes us to and she keeps us there. Beauty of her teaching for us, I think.

Kirsten Oates (3:05)

Wonderful, so I wanted to begin by talking to you about this theme of the wisdom of children and how Thérèse took the verse from scripture about unless you become like a child and she really applied that to her own faith journey. So she had some great insights around that.

James Finley (3:27)

Yes, so she's meditating, like prayerfully meditating on that.

She kind of starts out with children in infancy and she said, so what we're to do as an adult with God's grace is to cultivate the qualities of a child as an adult and she starts out with a state of surrender and she said, surrender is a small infant sound asleep in his father's arms, so it's a child completely vulnerable and yet no need not to be vulnerable because it's so profoundly protected by this love. And so she's trying to help us find that place in us that is like that. There's a place in us that the infinite love of God is sustaining us unexplainably forever in our simplicity, and what we're finding our way with God's grace is finding our way to be ever more consistently grounded in the day by day.

Kirsten Oates (4:24)

When I think about applying this to my own life, there's a sense of trying to discover how to just be in the presence of God, instead of like striving to do a good contemplative practice or striving to improve something about myself or asking for help with something. Are there moments when I can just be?

James Finley (4:49)

What we're doing is, how can I learn to just be? Is it learning to just be something I can learn so I can just be?