Dialogue 1: The Little Flower

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're turning to St. Thérèse of Lisieux. And I'm here with Jim to discuss his first session. Welcome, Jim.

James Finley (0:35)

I want to say right at the very beginning, that here in Marina del Rey, while we're recording this, it's raining. And I'm on the top floor, this place I live on the beach here, and water draining off the roof and dropping down into the rain gutter. If you hear something in the background, it's rain.

Kirsten Oates (0:52)

It's the sound of rain.

James Finley (0:54)

It's the sound of rain, which is-

Kirsten Oates (0:55)

Well, we have heard from some listeners that your voice is so soothing that it puts them to sleep. So add in the rain noise, people are just going to be-

James Finley (1:03)

Oh, there'll be sound asleep, yeah. Anyway, I wanted to share that.

Kirsten Oates (1:09)

Yeah, thanks for letting us know, Jim. Well, I wanted to start right with the big insight that came through in this session that you did, Teresa's big insight, because this insight really then guides her whole life and everything she writes in this book. So let's start there. And I'm going to read from Story of a Soul, and it's page 14 We're using the version by John Clarke. It's a second paragraph where she writes, Jesus deigned to teach me this mystery. He set before me the book of nature. I understood how all the flowers he has created are beautiful, how the splendor of the rose and the whiteness of the lily do not take away the perfume of the little violet, or the delightful simplicity of the daisy. I understood that if all flowers wanted to be roses, nature would lose her springtime beauty, and the fields would no longer be decked out with little wild flowers. And so it is in the world of souls, Jesus' garden. He willed to create great souls comparable to lilies and roses, but he has created smaller ones, and these must be content to be daisies or violets, destined to give joy to God's glances when he looks down at his feet. Perfection consists in doing his will, in being what he wills us to be.

And this is why she's often called The Little Flower, this big insight she had.

James Finley (2:49)

That's right.

Kirsten Oates (2:50)

And it comes out of a context where she'd grown up kind of longing or desiring to do great things for God, to be a saint, to be someone heroic for God. And then she's out in nature and she has this big lesson come through.

James Finley (3:10)

She even starts out beginning on the preceding paragraph, wondering how God raises up certain great people. She was just saying Paul, she was just saying Augustine and so on. And then she says that she herself wanted to be great, to be like a great saint. It has this idea of Jesus personally guiding her, or inspiring her as something we can cultivate within ourself. And he set before me the Book of Nature, which is sometimes referred to as the first Bible, this creation. And she says that in creation, she sees in flowers, there is the rose and the orchid and the lily and so on. But there's also the simplicity of the daisy and this delicate smell of the violet. And so if all flowers were roses, of all flowers, nature would lose the complexity of its beauty of the little flower.

But then she radicalizes it and she radicalizes it and realizing that this kind of the kind of mystical insight she had that runs through all the mystics. The infinite love of God is true as being infinitely poured out and presencing itself as the rose, as the lily. But the infinite presence of God is infinitely pressing the infinity itself as the daisy. In other words, the infinite love of God is not compartmentalized in any way. It's an infinite totality that's totally given. So the image would be, if you're holding a grain of sand in your hand, and you compare that little grain of sand to a mountain, clearly the grain of sand is much smaller than the mountain. But the mystery is, it's just as the infinite presence of God is presencing itself as the immensity of the mountain, the whole infinite presence of God is infinitely presencing itself as the grain of sand in your hand. And so it changes the whole idea of little, that no matter how little we are, the littleness incarnates the infinite presence of God, incarnate in littleness. And that's what she sees in herself. And so she changed her whole idea, and this will go through the whole book. She wants to be a saint, not by attaining something. She wants to be a saint by being someone surrendered over to the infinite love of God that's infinitely in love with her in her littleness. That's why it's sometimes called the little way of St. Thérèse, and she's the little flower. And that's like an insight for us.