Dialogue 2: The Child Jesus

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

You're listening to a podcast by the Center for Action and Contemplation. To learn more, visit cac.org.

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 dialogue about his second talk. Welcome, Jim.

James Finley (0:36)

Yes, thank you so much. Looking forward to the second session with her insights. So lovely.

Kirsten Oates (0:42)

Yes, I loved the talk. Beautiful. I'm gonna just give us a little bit of context to set up this dialogue. So in the first session, you talked about why Thérèse was called the little flower. And it was because of an insight she was given in nature about God giving life to all the diverse flowers in creation. And that God didn't preference one flower over another. Or were given the infinity of God in their nothingness without God. And she had these dreams of being kind of an heroic saint for God. So this was a big insight for her. And then it guided the rest of her life in terms of her spiritual life. She discovered that God's infinite love was infused into her ordinariness and that giving yourself over to God in your ordinariness is what God loves. So then in your second talk, you talked about another name she had, which was Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face.

And in the second talk, you talked about the first part of the name, the Child Jesus. Now this was a more official name for her. This was the name she was given when she joined the monastic life. Is that correct?

James Finley (1:57)

Yeah. It's the name that she chose.

Kirsten Oates (1:59)

She chose it.

James Finley (2:00)

In other words, the custom in her order was that when you began your novitiate, put on the monastic habit, you kept your baptismal name, but you could choose a devotional name. It represented how you personally experienced God's presence in your life, Jesus in your life. So both of those names she chose to reveal her own sense of how Jesus was present to her.

Kirsten Oates (2:23)

Beautiful. So she kind of made up the names of the Child Jesus?

James Finley (2:28)

Well, she didn't make them up. She found them in the Gospels. In other words, when she read the story of Bethlehem and Jesus in the manger, we see that the Word became flesh and developed among us, that Jesus was present in her life, and that Jesus became her own nature, her own human nature. So the infant, when Mary and Joseph were holding this newborn infant, is God, because God became an infant. And since God became an infant, a child, she prayerfully pondered that, how that could help her deepen her sense of God in her life. And then when we sit and listen to her, she helps us to see this mystery of childhood, as like the divinity of dimensions of the mystery of childhood. And so as adults, we can freely choose to cultivate certain dimensions of children as the foundations of spiritual maturity. So this is her insight. This is how she explores things.

Kirsten Oates (3:31)

How amazing that she chose that name with this deep, deep, deep spiritual meaning to it, about our own adult spiritual journey.

James Finley (3:40)

Yeah. She was so gifted. You know, Teresa of Avila, the Discalced Caramelites found with John of the Cross, they were both ecstatic mystics, like they had ecstasies. That happens. Some people have ecstasies. It can happen. She was not ecstatic mystic. But it's almost as if she was so deep in the divinity, the intimacy of ordinariness itself with such clarity. That's what makes her so extraordinary. And that's what makes her accessible to us, because we're ordinary. So how could we find God's oneness with us and the ordinariness of ourselves? That's our affinity with her. I think why she touches us so.

Kirsten Oates (4:19)

Jim, can you just give us a little bit of insight into what an ecstatic mystic is? What are you referring to there?

James Finley (4:26)

What ecstasy is, is that in prayer, and each mystic who is an ecstatic mystic, Julienne of Norwich also is an ecstatic mystic, different one, Bernard of Clairvaux, what happens as you sit in prayer, the sense of God's presence or the sense of the infinite presence of God presencing itself in and as the mystery of your presence becomes so delicate and refined, you lose yourself in your own reflective consciousness. Because reflective consciousness is finite, illumined by faith, it has such a boundaryless quality, you disappear from yourself and reflective consciousness in a state of ecstatic communion of non-distinction with the infinite love of God. So, with Teresa of Avila, for example, the Scalx Carmelite, so when the ecstatic moment is over and it passes, she says, you don't know if anything happened because you weren't there, it was just God. She said, but you do know because there's three signs. And of course, Thérèse would have been very familiar with these, but she experienced it in the ordinariness, not in ecstasy. She said, the first sign you know something happened, you only want to do God's will, that's your commitment. The second sign is that you know you were in God and God was in you in a way you can't explain. It's like an unexplainable certitude, which is a kind of a foreshadowing of eternal life of heaven. And then she also says the third sign, you become like a butterfly with tattered wings, in this sense, everywhere you land, this is not the beloved, this is not the beloved, this is not the beloved, because it's finite, it's infinitely less than the infinity of the beloved that transformed you experientially into the divinity of this. But then she says, but it's in seeing the nothingness of the thing, infinitely less than the infinite love of God, that in its nothingness, it is the love of God. It's the very divinity of the concreteness of everything.