Thérèse of Lisieux: Session 1

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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James Finley (0:08)

Greetings. I'm Jim Finley. Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.

Greetings, everyone. And welcome to our time together, turning for trustworthy guidance to the teachings of St. Thérèse, the little flower. But when Thérèse was still a young nun in the monastery, the prioress came to her and told her under obedience that she wanted Thérèse to write the story of a soul. And she said that in the story of the soul, she wanted Thérèse to share how she, going back to her experience as a little girl, began to experience God's presence in her life. And how the deepening sense of God's presence moved her to enter the monastery, the cloistered monastery, when she was 15 years old. Thérèse did that. So here we have the story of a soul. And so this is how she begins. This is in the third edition of the story of the soul. Translated by John Clarke. It says, page 13, January 1895 It is to you, dear mother, to you who are doubly my mother, that I come to confide the story of my soul. I'd like to start there. It's interesting how she begins by responding to the Prioress in such affectionate terms, calling her dear mother. And that she's, you're my dear mother twice over. And she's speaking in such a loving way because the Prioress, who told her to write the story of a soul, was her older sister who entered the Carmelite Monastery before Thérèse. And when Thérèse was very young and their mother died, her older sister took Thérèse on, kind of took a watchful eye over her. So she's like her mother twice over. So her mother is her mother who died, and now the Prius is her mother. And in a way she's threefold, because now she's mother of Prius, she's reverend mother prior. So what you have then, I think, in the teachings of Thérèse right away, is, and she starts to write about this a lot in the Story of a Soul, is that the family, they were blessed in how much they all loved each other. They all cherished and just loved each other so much. And it's in their love for each other, now that she's able to write in such a personal, affectionate way to her sister, about the disclosing of the story of her soul. And I think for us, in taking her on as our guide, she helps us to be aware of who is it in our life that when we look back, they cherished us, they loved us. And who are the people that loved us and do love us, and the people that we loved and do love, that add to the interior richness of who we are, the inner richness of our life. She starts there. She invites us to be sensitive to that dimension of ourselves. She then goes on to say, the day you asked me to do this, it seemed to me that I would distract my heart too much concentration on myself. As I reflect on this, she was really concerned in starting to do this, that she would be distracted by focusing on herself. So the question is, distracted from what? She goes on to say, and this runs through the story of a soul, that she would be distracted from realizing that it's in the love that they had for each other growing up as a family, that she experienced the love of God, that she thought the love of God was incarnate. In their love for each other. And she also sensed that it's in the love of God incarnate in their love for each other, that she's found in Jesus, that the love that God had for her in Jesus personally. And she was called to deepen, not just her love for the presence of God in her family, but she was called to give herself in love to the God who in love was giving the infinity of God to her. And so it was this love bond that was really at the heart of her contemplative vocation as a nun. So that's what she was worth, that she would be distracted from. That if I think too much on myself, I'll be distracted from the love bond of God's infinite, being infinitely in love with me, inviting me to give myself in love to the love that's in love with me. And she said that this was a concern for her. And I think what we see in it is the delicacy of her sincerity of fidelity to love. And again, I think there's another lesson, like the intimacy of her teachings for us about the love of God. And where are we at in terms of our own sensitivity to God's love for us and our love for God? And where are we at in being perhaps distracted by that? Since we don't live in cloistered commons, it's probably distracted a lot. But when we listen to her and we sit in her presence, she guides us into this sensitivity, which I think is a devotional sincerity that moves us to listen to this. It's a gift in our life. She then goes on to say, but since then Jesus made me feel that in obeying simply, I would be pleasing him. I'd like to reflect on this for a minute. It isn't just that she had this psychological insight, but rather she saw that God was personally guiding her to simply obey. St. Paul, in the Epistle to the Romans, writes, the Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know what to pray for as we ought. But the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. And so there's a sense that the indwelling presence of God within us and love for us is personally inspiring us. And personally moving us, because the Spirit moves us with inaudible groanings, but the groanings give rise to insight. But it's the arising of the groanings of the Spirit that give rise to our insight. And so we should realize that the intimations that come to us, the insights that come to us, are actually the actual presence of God in kind of loving, ongoing communion with us, inspiring and moving us to what prompts our heart to love. And so we might say, too, with us, why are we listening to these reflections? Just out of curiosity? Probably not. Is it that we're moved to listen to these reflections, to be present at these reflections? Because the Spirit within us is moving us to listen to these reflections. Because in these reflections, the Spirit of God is personally drawing us to be more aware of God being in love with us and drawing us in the intimacy and the sincerity with which we're doing this right now. This indwelling sense, like this ongoing inspirational sense that is actually the presence of God moving and inspiring us, is very subtle. It's very, very subtle. She also saw that the subtlety of this love and then moving her to explore all of this simply obeying was also present to her, the love of God present to her in her suffering. And she reflects in the story of a soul when her mother died, is the suffering to the love. It's the depth of the love that is the depth of the suffering when the beloved dies. Likewise, when the four older sisters of Thérèse all left home and went to the convent, and because she was so tender and they loved them so much and loved her so much, the fact that she was all alone was another suffering. But she also sensed that the love of God was present in the suffering of the loss of their presence that moved her to be more deeply aware of, and one with God sustaining her and her aloneness, which also then moved and led her to join the convent. So you can imagine what a love fest it was when she walked through the gate and they were all hugging each other because they doted on her at home, now they got all doted on her in the monastery. This way it goes around, comes around. So I think another lesson that I would see in Thérèse is she's so transparently sincere, and she's so disarming about the intimacy of love and how God moves in our hearts with love to love and be loved by each other, and to be loved and be loved by God, and this is really the essence of her teaching. And as we listen to her, she lures us into the sensitivity within ourselves, this love teaching. And therefore we're kind of open to being attentive to what moves our heart. There can be the experience sometimes where there's a friend who's suffering, struggling, and in your love for the friend, you say something, and the friend finds what you said to be extremely helpful, and you don't know how you knew how to say that. Thérèse would say that's God, that God moved your heart, to say what would touch their heart. And so she's helping us to be sensitive to this kind of the nearness of God, and also I think to heighten our attentiveness. There's another moment of this for all of us, and she writes about this too in the story of a soul, and later on even more, is that sometimes we're not aware of any light at all. St. John of the Cross, who she just read and absorbed, with the Carmelite teacher also, on the dark night of the soul, is the loss of the light. And she writes about it, that has its own lessons, how not to do violence to the fragility of our waiting. Because in the fragility of the waiting is where we learn to depend on God, who perhaps in withholding the insight is inviting us to a place where something starts to come through at a deeper level, and that wouldn't come through had the insight come sooner. I think very often, I say this to as a therapist too, very often we struggle with things where there's a long duration of living without closure and trying to get past the hurting place. But we realize that in that process, we learned things. And we learned we were being unexplainably sustained in ways that transcend answers. And they transcend closure and go beyond, like the mysteriousness of love and the rhythms of light and darkness in our heart. She very much embodies that. Notice something, we're only in the third sentence. It's going to be a long haul. And it's a long haul because she slows everything way down. A lot of psychotherapy is sitting with someone who keeps inviting you to listen at the feeling level to what you just said. We're constantly walking right past what we're looking for. As a young woman, she's an amazing woman. She's 23 Just an amazing woman to have such succinct clarity that comes out of transparent sincerity. And she's helping us find that in us. Not to walk right past into the complexities of things, into the underlying intimate sincerity that illumines and gives the meaning to the complexity. Because life is complex. The day you asked me to do this, it seemed to me that it would distract my heart by too much concentration on myself. But since then, Jesus has made me feel that obeying simply, I would be pleasing him. I'd like to talk about obeying simply. What I see in it is that we're in the middle of a situation. She's a young woman in a cloistered convent who the Prioress is telling her to write what she's writing, along with everything else is going on in her day. So you're in the middle of your situation, I'm in the middle of my situation. So to obey simply is to be aware of the providential presence of God in the concreteness of the unfolding of our situation. We're living in a pattern. It's sort of like right now I'm sitting here in my living room and I'm sharing this. And when this is done, I have to pack my suitcase because I have to go on a trip tomorrow. And then I have to do the dishes and cook dinner and talk to my daughter. And how can I learn to obey what love is asking out of me in the concreteness of my situation, like incarnate infinity intimately realized in the love nature of the situation at hand, like the holiness of it? And so if I just obey, that is if I just obey the situation this way, I will be pleased. Then she says, Besides, besides I'm going to be doing only one thing, I shall begin to sing what I must sing eternally in the mercies of the Lord. I'm doing right now what I'm going to be doing forever in heaven. I'll be singing in heaven by obeying God, by surrendering to the infinite love of God that has drew me into the presence of God. And so I'm just getting the head start on eternity by obeying God through love. And likewise with us, in the sincerity with which we're present to our teachings, we're just simply preparing for what we're going to be doing for all of eternity. Because our eternal destiny is to love and be loved by the infinite love of God. Because we're God's beloved. And it's concretized right now in the unfolding of our days. So far I've been following sentence by sentence the first paragraph. I'm now going to skip the next paragraph. And I'm going to go down to the beginning of the last paragraph on page 13, which begins, I wondered for a long time. And now we're going to walk through that paragraph. Also, I'd like to add this. Outside my window, I live here at the beach, and they're doing some construction work, three buildings down. But we're going to continue on, because this is the consummate of life in the midst of the real world. By the way, those workers are working to earn money to feed their family. And they've been trained to do a service as helping people. And so it's another modality, what we're doing, living the spiritual life. And this is obeying the situation. See, we're being obedient to the reality of the situation. And so she's wondering how God, then I wondered for a long time, how God raises up certain people. And she uses St. Paul and St. Augustine as examples. And the rest of us are just left in our ordinariness. Like, how is that? I wondered for a long time, why God has preferences, why all souls don't receive an equal amount of graces. I was surprised when I saw him shower his extraordinary favors on saints who had offended him. For example, St. Paul and St. Augustine. So you look and you see that God raises up certain people, St. Paul, St. Augustine, a great stature. And she's looking at herself, but she says, here I am in my ordinariness. And I think too, this is where the vast majority of us are. We're living in our ordinariness. But we look to people of great stature, St. Paul, St. Augustine. God raises up these people. And so how is it that God raises up these giants this way? And here I am in my ordinariness. Next paragraph, I'm gonna move down and jump down to the beginning of the next paragraph on page 14 Jesus deigned to teach me this mystery. So here we have Jesus again teaching her something. He said before me, the Book of Nature. I want to talk about this as an important point, really, actually, is that nature is the first Bible and that God creates all of nature. There's a lovely passage in St. John of the Cross where he's out walking in the mountains. And he says, at first, when we walk in the beauty of the mountains, he says, through possessiveness of heart, we say, this is amazing. I wonder if I could own some of this, like real estate. He says, you get a little bit deeper, and the effect being in the midst of nature has on us when we just get immersed in nature. He says, I realize that the beloved has passed this way in haste. You see traces of divine love in the contours of the mountains. And then he says, at the end, my beloved is the mountains. So here's a very deep insight she's seeing in St. John of the Cross. Is it in creation, in creation, the infinite presence of God is presencing itself as the presence of the world that it's created. In the beginning, God said, let there be light, let there be stones and trees. And God's the ongoing presence is presencing itself in the presence of the world. That the world is God's body. It is bodying forth the love that's uttering it into being. Carl Jung says, how can we claim that the years have taught us anything if we haven't learned to sit and listen to the secret that whispers in the brooks? So now, here we have Jesus teaching her a lesson. And the lesson he's inviting her to see is a lesson that runs through all of scripture. But also she sees it in St. John of the Cross and the Mystics. This answer, why does God raise up certain people, another in their ordinariness, and she sees it in the mystery that he turns to see it in nature. So it's almost like with God's grace, seeing the world through illumined eyes. Here's what she sees. I understood through the grace of God. That is, I interiorly saw, realized. All the flowers God 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 the flowers wanted to be roses, the nature would lose her springtime beauty and the fields would no longer be decked out with little wildflowers. She said, I'm a little flower growing in God's garden. That's why sometimes she's called St. Thérèse, the little flower. She sees herself as a little flower.