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St. Therese and the side splitting laughter of the saints

St. Therese of Lisieux is one of the great witnesses to the joy God takes in his creatures.  She was consecrated and completely abandoned to his mercy.  Her faith was nourished on Christ’s humility.  Her heart explored beautiful depths of Christ’s sorrowful passion that few plummet this life.   But no one can deny that she also brimmed with jubilation, a joy which was always ready to break out into play.   At least, this can be deduced from the words of those who knew her as a nun:

She is a little innocent thing to whom one would give Holy Communion without previous confession, but whose head is filled with tricks to be played on anyone she pleases.   A mystic, a comediene, she is everything.  She can make you shed tears of devotion, and she can just as easily make you split your sides with laugher during recreation.” (Mother Marie de Gonzague, 1893, as cited by Bishop Guy Gaucher in The Passion of Therese of Lisieux, trans. Sr. Anne Marie Brennan, OCD, New York: Crossroads (1989, 1990), 239.)

We need more saints to both help us find those healing tears and, just as important, to make our sides split with laughter!   G.K. Chesterton once pondered whether, when Christ went into solitude, He was not keeping a secret that He dared not disclose to the world or even his closest followers.  I think this secret echoes in the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Belloc, as well as today’s Peter Kreeft and Eric Metaxas.   St. Therese helps us see that this is also whispered in the lives of the saints, even if many of them were more successful than her in being discrete about it.  All evidence suggests that she would plead guilty on this count.  She could only complain that her joy did not allow her to hide the mystery of mirth revealed in that knowing smile that even now breaks across the Holy Face.

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Witness to Hope when Beauty is Defaced

It was a sorrow to learn that my childhood parish was defaced by vandals last week.  Mission Santa Cruz was founded in the late 18th Century by the Franciscan Missionaries who first brought the Gospel of Christ to the native peoples of California. Since the beginning, the Mission, and the Holy Cross Parish which succeeded it, have had a difficult history with earthquakes, natural disaster and local politics. Yet, for me, from childhood until today, this parish church continues to tower over Santa Cruz, not just architecturally but also in its outreach to the poor, as a beacon of hope in the midst of chaos, a sign on earth pointing to heaven.

It is difficult not to associate the attacks on traditional marriage – both local and national – with the vandalism of Mission Santa Cruz and Holy Cross Parish in California. In both cases, there is an effort to deface something beautiful. In both cases, those who carried out the attacks whether with spray paint or with political rhetoric are to be more the pitied than scorned. In both cases, it is difficult to forgive or forget having family values and religious truths publically derided and despised. In both cases, the Holy Spirit prompts me to surrender to his action under which alone I can learn compassion and intercession. In both cases, the proper response is to pray for our enemies and those who hate us.

How can anyone be surprised by hatred against the Church and against the things of God for which she stands, things like traditional marriage and beauty? In the last one hundred years, more violence has been indiscriminately unleashed against specifically Christian populations than in any period of history. That these same forces of hatred for God should now be unleashed in this country and in the communities in which I live, this is no surprise.

St. Therese of Lisieux confronted this kind of malice over a hundred years ago. Only a few months after she had written her play on St. Joan of Arc, St. Therese learned of the supposed dramatic conversion of a certain “Diana Vaughan.” St. Therese did not know that it was part of an elaborate a hoax fabricated by Gabriel Antoine Jogand-Pagès which took in not only local priests and bishops, but even the pope.   Without realizing she was playing into a prank of scandalous scale, St. Therese sent a picture where she was dressed up as St. Joan of Arc to “Diana” to encourage her.

Jogand-Pagès who wrote under the pseudonym “Leo Taxil” feigned a conversion to Catholicism and had plotted over a period of years a media campaign to embarrass the Church, especially the clergy.  “Diana” was a completely fictitious character he had invented for this purpose.  In addition to a dramatic conversion, the fictional “Diana” claimed a special devotion to Joan of Arc.  When she sent in her picture, Therese had no idea that she had played into his plot.  

Therese’s picture was used as a backdrop by Jogand-Pagès when he exposed his prank to a packed audience of onlookers. This was an act of aggression against people of faith in general, but also a mockery of St. Therese’s whole way of life specifically. This public humiliation was delivered while St. Therese was dying of tuberculosis.

St. Therese’s actions at this point are impressive and point the way forward when cultural forces become mean-spirited towards people of faith. She had already abandoned herself into the hands of God. She looked on her life as an offering to his merciful love. Instead of anger or judgment, she turned to prayer and offered her sufferings for souls just like Jogand-Pagès.

Although there is no evidence that he ever converted, there were thousands of others like him who did. I am constantly amazed at the conversions to Christ of learn of those who were far from God but feel somehow St. Therese helped them find Him. This is because the power of God’s mercy is greater than human misery, and even our persecutors need a sign of hope. The witness to hope when beauty is defaced is found in the depths of prayer – and these times call us to pray like never before.

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The Beginning of Christian Prayer

Jesus’ last cry from the Cross is the beginning of Christian prayer. How can we ignore the connection between what St. Paul says is the Holy Spirit groaning in us and this wordless cry of the Word made flesh? The Holy Spirit, the very Soul of our souls, pours out Christ’s prayer in us, especially in those moments when the Lord seems furthest away, when the very meaning of life seems lost. Christ cries out in us in our broken poverty, suffering this with us so that even the most severely sick, those right at death’s door, can find Him. When the cry of our hearts is taken up by the cry of his heart – this is prayer. St. Therese of Lisieux explains that this is a cry of recognition and love, a cry that embraces not only joy but every trial, even the most crushing defeats. For in this cry of faith, Christ is recognized, his love known, his joy tasted, and the cup of his suffering shared. 

The prayer of those who believe in Jesus is not their own – by a wholly simple movement of love they participate in the deepest yearning of the Lord’s own heart.  That is why cultivating silence, self-possession and interior recollection are all so important.  Only faith guided by love can enter deep into the heart of the Lord – can find the heart of the Lord the depths of one’s own poverty.  And He discloses the most beautiful truths to those who persevere in seeking Him.  They come to rest in knowing Him and in knowing all things in Him.  But what strange rest – for those who taste it find themselves caught up in the superactivity of divine love!  This kind of rest constantly breaks forth in new acts of compassion and concern.  This rest bursts forth with Jesus’s thrill in the goodness of the Father.   This rest plunges into the very heart-ache of Christ for those who will not hear his voice.  Words fail.  This is why the great doctors of prayer describe it as a rain storm, a wild fire, a gentle breeze, blairing trumpets, delicate melodies, a loving light, fire in the night, eternity begun and still in progress.

For those who open their hearts to this kind of prayer, the movements of His heart are the gravitational force for their whole existence – in Christian prayer, the heart moves into the orbit of the One crucified by love.  Every time one dies to oneself, every small act of obedience to the Lords voice, joins us to the mystery of crucified love – the only place where human poverty and God’s mercy can embrace.  Because of the Cross, Christians can finally pray in a communion of real friendship with the living God. The disciple of Christ’s prayer discovers in this friendship he is totally understood and begins to understand, he is exceedingly loved and so begins to learn to love in return.

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The Vocation of St. Therese

I am gong to make you smile:  in my childhood I dreamed of fighting on battlefields.  When I was starting to learn the history of France, the story of Joan of Arc’s exploits delighted me.  I used to feel  the desire and the courage to imitate her.  It seemed to me that the Lord destined me too for great things.  I was not mistaken.  But instead of voices from Heaven calling me to combat, I heard in the depths of my soul a voice that was gentler and stronger still:  the voice of the Spouse of virgins was calling me to other exploits and more glorious conquests, and in the solitude of Carmel I understood my mission was not to crown a mortal king but to make the King of Heaven loved, to conquer for Him the kingdom of hearts.
Letter to Maurice Belliere, April 5, 1897, trans. Patrick Ahern

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The Mercies of God

I am in Bishop, CA giving a set of lectures on St. Paul, St. Therese and the Mercy of God. Tonight we will discuss the St. Therese. One important grace she recieved is called the Christmas grace. One Christmas after mass, she was very excited when the family returned home. She could not wait because of a family tradition – something like getting her stockings stuffed, only I think they used shoes. As she was headed upstairs, she heard her exhausted father sigh and say something along the lines of “I am glad this is the last year for this!”
Up until this moment of her life, Therese was very sensitive. Normally, a comment like this would have caused her to break down in tears. Didn’t her father care about her feelings? Didn’t he want to make her Christmas special? What he just said seemed so cold. But it was just at this moment she recieved a special grace. She felt the emotion to cry but she also felt the grace to make a decision. By Christ’s help she chose not to worry about her own Christmas, but to think of everyone else and make Christmas special for them. She chose to offer her feelings to Christ as a present, a gift, a little sacrifice. Rather than be ruled by her own sensitivity, she chose to be ruled by what Christ desired in that moment. So she re-entered the room with a great smile, hugged and kissed her father, and was a source of joy for the whole family. Later in her life, she would reflect how the spiritual life is all about responding to grace in these little moments. Rather than allowing any moment to be wasted on her own feelings, she saw every moment as an opportunity to offer her heart to Christ. She would call this strategy of living by love in each moment “the little way” or “the way of divine childhood.” It is a way of life whereby we live relying on the grace of Christ to provide us what we need in the little things that come up – so that we no longer live out of our own emotional neediness – but we live by love of God.

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Christ thirsts for our Love – an insight of St. Therese

There were two great contentemplative mystics from the 19th Century who continue to have an impact on the way the Church understands prayer and the spiriitual life. Therese of Lisieux and Elizabeth Catez were late 19th century contemporaries and Carmelites. They both plummeted the depths of prayer and reached the heights of sanctity. Their messages, while different, are complementary. This is due not only to their Carmelite spirituality, but also because Elisabeth was among the very first people to read Therese’s autobiography, Story of a Soul. Less than a year after the death of Therese, the Carmelites in Dijon shared this edited collection of texts with a local youth minister profoundly gifted with a life of prayer, thinking that it might encourage her own vocation. They could not have known that this work would blow wide open a new vision of prayer and spirituality for the future Elisabeth of the Trinity.

To shed light on what Elisabeth grasped in the writings of St. Therese, it is helpful to refer to a letter which in all likelihood Elisabeth never saw. Known as LT 196, Therese wrote to Sr. Marie of the Sacred Heart right around Sept. 13, 1896, trying to provide her with an explanation for her approach to the spiritual life. Therese helped form young women who came to the Carmelite Monastary in Lisieux – a small town west of Paris. To provide formation, she developed a body of teaching she called “The Little Way.”

Rather than drawing attention to great heroic acts of the faith performed in a way that others might notice, Therese proposed the ideal of spiritual childhood. In this ideal, all the emphasis was on trusting the loving goodness of God, the Father instead of one’s own accomplishments in religion and prayer. She considered this a new spiritual invention – not unlike the elevator. Instead of struggling up a stare case of trying to do things to please God, this “Little Way” focused on doing everything out of love for God. It provided a way of living the discipline Christian life through humble acts of love rooted in a prayerful awareness that the Lord was in control – the most important thing would be to trust in his merciful love. Therese of Lisieux went so far as to offer herself to God as an oblation to his merciful love – generously accepting all the graces God yearned to give but no one else would accept. She understood that by doing this, God would make her into an instrument of his love for others. The key insight to understanding her discipline of spiritual childhood, however, does not shed as much light on what someone is expected to do as a child of God as much as it illumines the intensity and extent of Christ’s love.

In this letter, Therese roots the ideal of being a little child as part of a response to Christ’s love for us. It is especially moving in its reference to the thirst with which Jesus suffers for our love. But leading up to this insight, Therese reflects on an ancient Christian truth and an image celebrated by John of the Cross. Namely, it is our love that makes us pleasing to the Lord and Saint John of the Cross describes this love as fire – an intense flame in this life and a blazing furnace in the next (LF 1, 16). Please forgive my poor translation of the text:

“I understand so well that only love can render us pleasing to God so that this love is the only good I strive for. Jesus is pleased to show me the only way which leads to this Divine Furnace, this road is the abandonment of a little child who sleeps without fear in the arms of the Father: ‘If anyone is little, let him come to me’ says the Holy Spirit through Solomon, and this same Spirit of Love has said that “mercy is granted to the small.”

The letter goes on to explain, “Offer to God sacrifices of praise and thanksgiving.” Behold everything which Jesus reclaims for us: there is no need for our works, but only our love … He thirsts for love. Ah, I feel it more than ever – Jesus is suffering thirst – he only meets ingratitude and indifference over and over among the disciples of the world. Among his own disciples he finds (This is so overwhelming!) so few hearts surrendering themselves to him without reserve, understanding the tenderness of his love.”

A Carmelite once explained to me that the Lord searches for us more than we search for him. This is so true. His heart yearns for to come to him without reserve, with complete trust. How can we be half-hearted when the Lord yearns for us so much? How can we be indifferent? Yet, not our great works, only our wholehearted love appeals to Christ.

It is this insight – or rather encounter with the thirsting heart of Christ – which Elisabeth of the Trinity came to share with Therese of the Child Jesus. To search for and accept this encounter seems to be the key to their teachings.

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Abandonment to Love and our Resurrection

A theme that runs through the great christian teachers of the spiritual life is abandonment to the love of God the Father. Our faith tells us that this is the supreme act of love Jesus offers on the Cross. Jesus also directs his disciples to make the same offering when he commands them take up their own cross and follow him. By following the Lord in this, we begin to experience the resurrection. Here I would like to explore this paradox – I ramble abit only because I do not have time to make it more concise – please forgive me.

At the end of the 19th Century and the beginning of the 20th Century, two Carmelite mystics have helped shape the way we understand this teaching in our era. Therese of Lisieux and Elisabeth of the Trinity help us understand how to begin to practice this total surrender to the love of God in daily life and prayer. Their lives witness to the fact that this act on our part is something that the Lord will invite us to make at the supreme moment of our lives, and at the same time, it is an act we practice every day. It is a desire of the Christian heart that needs to be fed and strengthened until it bears the fruit of a mature love.

The desire to completely surrender to God’s love is holy and all holy desires are produced by the Holy Spirit working within us. It is also true that already desiring something is to possess it to some degree. But in the beginning these holy desires are impeded by deep wounds in the heart – and the heart does not have the power to heal itself either from the harm others have caused it nor from the harm it has caused itself. Our hearts are not pure – at least, they do not start out that way. So eventhough we have holy desires, we might desire them with a mix of impure motives and without the courage such the Holy Spirit demands. Since this desire comes from the Holy Spirit, what can we do to help the Holy Spirit purify and strengthen it?

The first thing that strengthens a holy desire is to give it expression. Both Therese of Lisieux and Elisabeth of the Trinity are known for prayers centered around an act of complete surrender, total abandonment to the will of the Father. Therese wrote her “Act of Obedience to Merciful Love” in 1895 of which she also provides an explanation for in Manuscript B of her autobiography Story of a Soul. Elisabeth of the Trinity likewise authored a prayer Oh My God, Trinity whom I Adore in 1906. (Another similar prayer authored about the same time is Charles de Foucauld’s Act of Abandonment to God the Father or Into your Hands I Commend my Spirit.) When we begin to pray these prayers, we do not always feel like what we are actually doing with our lives correspond with the desires we are trying to express. But I do not think this is very important, at least not in the beginnning. The noble desire to completely surrender to God’s love is fragile in the beginning. Praying these prayers is like blowing on sparks to light a fire.

Closely associated with giving expression to our holy desires is the cultivation of a humble attitude. Elisabeth calls this simplicity – we must simply learn to rely on the Lord alone and not be distracted by anything that tries to draw us away from him. John of the Cross details a discipline of life in Ascent to Mt. Carmel, Book I, Chptr 13.

Key to his counsels is to practice only enjoying those things that are purely for the glory of God and renouncing the enjoyment of anything that does not give God glory. John of the Cross observes that Jesus acted in the same way and that we should imitate him because we love him. In truth, God is in all things, surrounds all things, sustains all things. Things of themselves never distract us from God when we enjoy them for His sake.

Our problem is that we tend to entertain ourselves for our own sake rather than for God’s. As long as we do this, we are living with disparate desires and to have desires at war with each other within the heart is very exhausting. This is why simplicity of heart is so important. The more simple the heart, the less the interior conflict, the greater our strength for the Lord. If we seek him in simplicity of heart, we will find him and have the strength to enjoy his presence.

God is also at work in us to strengthen and purify our desire to completely surrender to him. John of the Cross describes the dark contemplation where God seems absent in prayer as one of the most vital ways God is at work in us. When God seems absent in prayer it is like suffering from a spiritual poverty and a naked vulnerability twoards suffering. It is a very uncomfortable experience to endure. But when we persevere in being present to God when he does not seem present to us the Lord is able to transform our involuntary and unconscious motivations. Those who endure begin to experience an abiding peace in their spiritual life.

Before this dark night of prayer, we seek the Lord in a sort of anxious way – just like someone who in dating is trying too hard to find his spouse. Such anxiety does not instill confidence. But God looks passed this weakness because He always sees the love of which someone capable – and our love enchants Him. He yearns for the soul that begins to move towards Him and his desire is for that soul to thrive. Even when He seems to withdraw his presence for a little while, His purpose is always for a greater union, in this case one characterized not by anxiety, but by peace.

To be relatively free of mixed involuntary motives like anxiety is a great grace. To live a peaceful spiritual life of walking with the Lord is worth anything trial that one must endure. But the Lord is not satisfied with a peaceful desire. He wants a joyful desire. And to accomplish this, he must allow us to suffer even greater and more intense spiritual trials. These are never the punishment of an angry God but always the careful remedy of the Divine Physician. He yearns for us to be whole – which means to ceaselessly desire to love, peacefully and with joy.

Until now, our desire for abandonment into the merciful love of the Father has freed us from sin and from the involuntary inclinations to sin. Here our desire for abandonment has matured. But though we have matured in our holy desires, there are still deep abysses of the heart that rebel against the love of the Lord, that prevent us from abandoning ourselves completely. This is where John of the Cross explains there are still first movements of the soul. Original sin deeply wounded the first movements of our soul so that they are not disposed to God. This fundamental movement is such that only sheer grace can heal and restore it so that our souls become as innocent as those of Adam and Eve. Here, God begins to heal even that which causes our unconscious motivations. The very depths of our misery, the rejection of God that lives within us and is our hell, is embraced by the Lord. Free to offer God this misery, we discover his abiding joy – a love that is stronger than death, that can overcome even our deepest resistance to him.

Thus, insofar as our desire for abandonment disposes us to these experiences of the Dark Night, it helps to cause the night. As this same desire is purified through these difficult trials, a more perfect desire for abandoning ourselves into the hands of our merciful Father is also a fruit.
When the soul becomes perfect (in this life it is always a relative state of perfection), it is finally free to abandon itself in such wise that it becomes a complete and holy sacrifice of love to the Lord.

In the Oblation to Divine Mercy, Therese is celebrating this fruit. The heights of Christian mysticism do not culminate in being removed from messy humanity but being submerged in it with Christ. Nothing holds it back from completely trusting the Father and wholeheartedly doing everything for love of Him that his merciful love might be known. Such a soul fully realizes what it means to be an instrument of divine mercy for others. It is free to receive all the graces rejected by others and to become a conduit through which these gifts of love flow into the world, even into those places where the Lord is most absent.

This is what John of the Cross describes in Spiritual Canticle where he says that such souls become springs of living water for others. By desiring to be a spring for others, we already are to some extent. Yet it is of the very perfection of the Christian life to become a spring for others in a more perfect way – without anxiety, in peacefulness, and in joy. And today, so many thirst for peace and joy.

All of this is the experience of the great saints that everyone points to. But this path from glory to glory – from desire to peace to joy – is experienced as a smooth transition. It is lesser known that the mystics also testify to this more difficult and more human reality. All along the way, no matter how much we strive to edify others and love them as Christ has loved us, we know that this is not enough. We see what lies ahead, what the Lord really desires for us but it seems impossible. Elisabeth acknowleges in the face of such noble aspirations we become curiously aware of our weaknesses and deficiencies. For some this awareness is so great they are tempted to discouragement. She, however, turns to the Lord even more, begging him to achieve through her what she cannot possibly achieve by herself.

Elisabeth’s prayer is rooted in an insight from her older Sister in the Spirit, Therese. Therese in the midst of the same trial would think about the goodness of God in relation to her holy desires to give everything to him, to be completely surrendered to his love. She reckoned that God’s goodness and her desires must collide and she wanted to know how. Why would God fill her with such noble desires if He did not have a plan to realize them? Yes, God would realize her desires in his own time and by his own power.

She understood that her job was to trust him, to believe in love, to love unto the point of folly, just as He did not the Cross for those whom he loved. In this, a path was opened to her and she discovered a new way to draw her strength from the Lord. She would persevere in love, waiting for Him to lift her up. She called this kind of surrender, a surrendering to the Lord as his prey.

The image she used was that of a little bird yearning to fly to the sun without the wings to do so. How could God allow her, like that little bird, to suffer such great desires if he did not intend to satisfy them in another way? Christ would come like a great Eagle and lift her on high just like an Eagle might carry a small bird in its pinions. Her job was to wait on the Lord and to trust in his power. To him, would be all the glory for any good that she might do.

Her insight is rooted in a profound teaching on the Holy Spirit and the nature of Christian hope. The Holy Spirit lifts us up To surrender ourselves as his prey, to abandon ourselves to him as our Father – these are the same movements of heart produced by the Spirit of God that raise Jesus from the dead. God in his merciful love will raise us up to realize the perfection of these holy desires in us – the realization of the holy desires of our hearts, this is the beginning of our own resurrection.

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