Thérèse of Lisieux: Session 3

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 Spiritual Teachings Found in St. Thérèse's Story of a Soul.

When Thérèse entered the monastery, she followed the custom of keeping her baptismal name, but taking two devotional names that would kind of embody her way of experiencing the presence of Jesus in her life. And we saw in our previous session, one name was Thérèse of the Child Jesus. The other devotional name she chose was Thérèse of the Holy Face. And by the Holy Face, she's referring to the Holy Face of Jesus.

And that's what we're going to be reflecting on here. What she saw in her devotional sincerity to the Holy Face, the Face of Jesus, by following her how it might help us in devotional sincerity to deepen our own experience of God's presence in our life. And I'd like to proceed with this in a kind of a poetic experiential way that will lead directly in kind of the intimate interiority of where her mind is and where she helps us go there to within ourselves. And I'd like to suggest first that the face of Jesus, really the context or the meaning of the face of Jesus is the presence of Jesus.

That's what she's really talking about. And I would like to start there on a reflection on the presence of God revealed to her in the presence of Jesus as the context for the face of Jesus. And I'd like to begin by exploring poetically with each other and then see how that leads to our understanding of relationship with God in the presence. When we love someone very much, father, mother, sister, brother, grandmother, grandfather, lover, spouse, brother, sister, whatever.

When we look at their face, we see the face that everybody sees.

But in our love for them, when we see their face, we really see in their face their soulful presence, for which we are immensely grateful is in our life. It is this soulful presence that we see in the face of the beloved as the context of understanding where Teresa is inviting us to go and our own understanding of God's presence in our life. There's an Irish singer that I like very much, Finbar Fury, and he has a song, Sweet Sixteen. It's about a young man being smitten by this girl that he sees on the village green. Finbar Fury says, when I saw the love light in your eyes, the world held none but joy from me.

So it's almost as if he just lights up inside. It's seeing the love light in her eyes, which is seeing the beauty of her soul as the beloved. And so then, we're looking then to look at this presence of our soul that shines out through our face. I'd like to get another image of this, where Thérèse is really trying to help us. It comes down to just not the face, but the voice. And I shared this image that when Maureen died, I was used to seeing images of her face. I have them here in the living room, I was used to that. But then in a drawer, I found a video tape of the day we got married, at Holy Spirit Retreat House. I even forgot that we did it. And when I heard her voice pronounce the wedding vows, I cried. Because the voice is the depth of her soul. So what we really mean by the face is that in the beauty of the presence of the beloved, that unravels us. But it unravels us in a way that we're so grateful for being rendered strangely whole and being unraveled by love. And this is where Thérèse is going here with us. And by the way, I want to say something, too, with love for each other. That when we see through love the presence of the soulful presence of the beloved shining out in their face, if they return the favor and they love us, they reveal us to ourselves. And that they see in our face, through their love for us, the depth and beauty of our own soul. That their love for us allows them to see in each unto each, then we reveal ourselves to each other in a kind of reciprocity. And this is providing then a kind of within ourselves kind of sacramental sensitivity to how she's leading up to how this is with Jesus and with God. A thinker that I mentioned before that I like so much, Jean-Luc Marion, teacher at the University of Chicago, Catholic theologian, in his book, Givenness and Revelation. He says, the face of the beloved is saturated phenomena, by that the face of the beloved is saturated with unobjectifiable, undefinable, unexplainable presence. So the face is saturated with the unexplainable, this way. It's our love for the person that is the saturated state of consciousness that allows us to see the saturated state of phenomena as a depth of presence.