Jim Finley:                    Greetings. I’m Jim Finley.

Kirsten Oates:               And I’m Kirsten Oates.

Jim Finley:                    Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.

Kirsten Oates:               Welcome everyone to season 13 of Turning to the Mystics, where we’ve been turning to St. Therese of Lisieux and her Story of a Soul. And I’m here with Jim for our coaching session. Welcome, Jim.

Jim Finley:                    I’m so in love with her and the beauty of her teaching, so I’m looking forward to this, to share this with the listeners. Yeah.

Kirsten Oates:               Yes. And these coaching sessions are a regular part of our podcast and it’s where I come to you, you’re my spiritual director, and I’m coming to you with questions about how I might apply things from the mystic to my own life. So we’re going to have a dialogue about that today. And so just to open, Jim, I’d love to hear from you just kind of a high level framing of what Therese is sharing with us in her Story of a Soul .

Jim Finley:                    What she’s sharing with us in the story of her soul is the sincere intimacy of the interiority of her own heart. And the interiority of her own heart is a very deep sense that the infinite love of God incarnate in Jesus is one with her in her limitations, not waiting for her to get beyond them, but God, this infinite love is one with her in the limitations. And she has such a kind of a consistency of living in the light of that in a way that doesn’t depend on whether she’s able to feel it or not. And therefore, it invites us to know that God’s one with us, infinitely in love with us as the beloved in the very midst of our limitations, whether we feel it or not. And I think that’s what’s so consoling about her and reassuring for all of us.

Kirsten Oates:               Well, with that wonderful start, I have some questions for you, Jim. You ready?

Jim Finley:                    Mm-hmm.

Kirsten Oates:               What I love about all these mystics is what they offer us is not a prescription, just kind of prompts. And so it’s really a wonderful opportunity to get to dialogue with you about how to think about and apply some of these prompts, these themes in my own life. So I invite the listeners to hopefully join in thinking about how they apply these directly to their own life in a non-prescriptive way.

Jim Finley:                    Yes. I like Bernard Lonergan. He said, “Belief in God is a lot more like falling in love than it is proving something.” Where we’re really at is how do we get to that place of sincere vulnerability where we’re moved by this, where we long for this, we’re having challenges like how do we find our way through this? Because that’s where Therese takes us to and she keeps us there. Beauty of her teaching for us, I think.

Kirsten Oates:               Wonderful. So I wanted to begin by talking to you about this theme of the wisdom of children and how Therese took the verse from scripture about unless you become like a child. And she really applied that to her own faith journey. So she had some great insights around that.

Jim Finley:                    Yeah. So she’s prayerfully meditating on that. She kind of starts out with children in infancy and she said, “So what we’re to do as an adult with God’s grace is to cultivate the qualities of a child as an adult.” And she starts out with a state of surrender and she says, “Surrender is a small infant sound asleep in his father’s arms.” So it’s a child completely vulnerable and yet no need not to be vulnerable because it’s so profoundly protected by this love. And so she’s trying to help us find that place in us that is like that. There’s a place in us that the infinite love of God is sustaining us unexplainably forever in our simplicity and where we’re finding our way with God’s grace is finding our way to be ever more consistently grounded in the day by day.

Kirsten Oates:               When I think about applying this to my own life, there’s a sense of trying to discover how to just be in the presence of God. Instead of striving to do a good contemplative practice or striving to improve something about myself or asking for help with something, are there moments when I can just be?

Jim Finley:                    What we’re doing is, how can I learn to just be as if learning to just be something I can learn so I can just be, so I don’t know how to be because if I could figure out how to be, I would achieve how to be. It’s a high five. I think I did it. So the first way, I think several things to consider for her, it’s true of Jesus and all the same, is accepting as we are in the present moment, is being in the presence of God because God’s infinitely in love with us just as we are in the present moment, God’s not waiting for us to overcome anything. And then we say, “Well, that’s a lovely thought that God’s already infinitely in love with me. I am in the presence of God and my present and ability to know how to do that, but I don’t know what to make of it.”

So then when she says what you do, of course you don’t and you don’t need to. It’s incomprehensibly clear in the sincerity of your heart. In other words, in Jesus, you belong completely to God because God in Jesus revealed that God has chosen to be completely belonging to you and you rest in that and you sit and ask for the grace to walk with that and breathe it and live by it. And the key to realizing it is love, that it’s in love that we learn this.

Kirsten Oates:               Do you think Jim, bringing images to mind help with that, like that beautiful image you offered us of the baby being held, bringing an image like that to mind, do you think that can help bring on this sense of how loved we are and how safe we are in God’s presence?

Jim Finley:                    Very much so. And I think she saw too, this is why Jesus taught in parables. See, because a parable is a story, so it’s an image and it’s an image of daily life. But if you sit prayerfully with the image of daily life, it reveals how God’s one with you in your life. So the power of a visual metaphor, like a child asleep, it conveys it immediately as an intuition. It’s already somehow sensed to be true without any need to understand it because you’re not trying to figure out how to do that because little infants aren’t in the father’s arms figuring out how to be in their father’s arms. They’re not figuring out anything. And so that’s why that image can be so kind of disarming to just let go of the perception that we need to figure anything out and rest in the unfigureoutable immensity of God’s being in love with us and our inability to figure it out and trust in that.

Kirsten Oates:               It’s reminding me of the beautiful icons you see of Mary holding Jesus, that even Jesus was vulnerable and held in love by his mother here on earth, but then in God’s presence always.

Jim Finley:                    Yeah. Maitre d’. That’s why the mother of God. So Jesus became the Self-Incarnate the infancy of ourself in the mother’s arms. And so we see in that image there’s the power of that image that it touches that in us.

Kirsten Oates:               Yeah, that’s really helpful. The other thing I find helpful is listening to your words and let them kind of float through me when you’re talking about me being God’s beloved just as I am. There’s something about listening to your voice say that in my ears that also helps me relax more into that kind of place.

Jim Finley:                    And I think this is true, Therese too. So when I’m preparing my talks, I read the story of the soul out loud to myself like I whisper it. So I’m like listening to her voice because there’s something in the cadence and rhythms of a voice that’s embodying what our heart knows is really true and the mind can’t grasp it and doesn’t need to. That’s really the pedagogy. I think that’s the teaching and the flow of it.

Kirsten Oates:               It is so powerful to read something out loud. I’m sure that’s why audiobooks are so popular. It makes a huge difference to how it impacts you.

Jim Finley:                    It’s really true. And I think when I was in the monastery chanting the Psalms over and over back and forth. So there’s something about the rhythmic voice of chanting, but I want to say something else too is true. Because she wrote with such radical transparency to read her as Lectio, the reading itself can take on that quality. Do you know what I mean? Where you’re underlining things and sitting with it and going back, because she’s intuitively dense by disarmingly simple thing and she just embodies that, how she talks.

Kirsten Oates:               It took me a little while to attune to her voice because at first it comes across as she was very young and she was writing about her childhood. So at first it came across as simplistic, but the more I read her, the deeper it went and the more I felt my own inner world kind of connecting to hers and that sense of my own self.

Jim Finley:                    I think the insight is, I saw this a lot in therapies, but also, but any intimate conversation. Notice the more we, in the presence of someone who loves us, try to put words what’s most intimate in our heart. Notice how disarmingly simple it is. Notice we’re not defining something because it’s not definable. We’re literally revealing the interiority of ourself in love, and that’s what she’s doing. So it looks simple at first, but it’s a kind of a divine simplicity. It’s not simplistic. The more you read her, you see how astute she is and refined she is in her intuitive clarity.

Kirsten Oates:               Building on this idea of the wisdom of children and this idea of cultivating the qualities of a child as an adult, which I love that phrase you gave us, she does have this idea of accepting when you do not understand. And we’ve already talked about that in this first section, but I love the example she gave of reading scripture and not understanding it, but then later maybe getting insights from that or after the fact, she might see how that scripture was setting her up to understand something or to learn something or to do something.

Jim Finley:                    Yeah. Kind of an immense thing really. She says that Jesus speaks to her and speaks to her in ways that are hidden. Hidden in the sense that when she’s reading something spiritual, sitting with the text, as she’s actually reading it, she can’t understand what it’s about. So then at the end, she sits empty-handed in the presence of God and the inability to understand it. And then in that waiting, the understanding comes as some unexplainable realization that grants itself. And I think that’s a very consoling and reassuring thing for us that we go on and on and on, not understanding, but then when we just quietly sit and wait empty-handed and not understanding, there’s a kind of an unexpected understanding, which is not explainable to anybody. It’s in our heart, tries to keep us at that intimate depth, so disarming.

Kirsten Oates:               This is very confirming of experiences in my life where I’ve gone through something really challenging and I couldn’t understand why it was happening or how to resolve it or what I was supposed to do and just felt in a real state of challenge and confusion. And often you don’t see the understanding or the unexpected lesson that comes from that until much, much later. And so I think that idea that she gives in applying it to my own life, I find kind of a sense of consolation around the way my life has played out in that way.

Jim Finley:                    In the next season of the podcast, we’re going to do Blessed John Ruusbroec, a Flemish mystic. And he has an insight which so pertains to this. He calls it prevenient grace. He says, so let’s say you’re in your present state of attentiveness to this and you look back at your own life, you realize you’re being granted intimations of this, but at the time you didn’t know what they were intimations of. And we go through life like the unfolding of the realizations of … And a lot of psychotherapy is this way too. You’re talking something through that happened and they’re very talking through in a state of attention that shines a deep light into what was actually being given that you couldn’t see at the time. And what I find so consoling is that we’re in the midst of things now we don’t understand and don’t need to.

It’s like a deeper way to understand what it means to understand. It doesn’t mean to comprehend. It means to realize the unfolding of things that in God’s good time gets clear and clear carrying us along into eternity really on through God forever.

Kirsten Oates:               And this brings us back to that first lesson of learning to accept, but accept as someone who knows they’re loved and held, even though it feels unsafe and confusing, there’s an underlying sense of being held and known and seen.

Jim Finley:                    And I think the insight there, and in the talk, we gave the example of a small child on a plane with his mother. Little children don’t try to accept that their parents love them. And so what we’re looking for are little moments that we become an act of acceptance, like we lean into it, listening a little closer to the beloved’s voice or listening to the silence in the middle of the night. There’s simple little moments where we fleetingly become an act of acceptance. And then how can we be more habitually established knowing that we’re carrying that inside of us, like to walk with it? Because as long as we’re trying to accept, we’re off to a good start. We should try to accept, but as long as we’re still trying, we’re not surrendered over and that God’s already infinitely accepting us and our inability to accept.

And there’s little fleeting moments this way. Sometimes there are painful moments actually in hindsight and a light flashes out and there’s like a granting. And to have faith in those moments that it’s not something more is given, but a fleeting tastes what every moment is. And she kind of stabilizes that in the habitual sensitivity, that surrendered state of belonging, that we belong to God because God freely chooses to belong to us just as we are.

Kirsten Oates:               I feel like my neph-son is really teaching me about this accepting without understanding he’s going through really significant health challenges, but yeah, he’s been able to surrender over the why me or the, this is too painful or I wish this wasn’t happening and be just a really solid kind of accepting the circumstances as they are and just moving through them.

Jim Finley:                    That’s right. I also have a granddaughter who’s seriously ill chronically and she inspires me. It’s so mysterious when a young person is faced with invasive things this way. And also, it helps us to see two of the moments that they don’t accept it in their fragility. It helps us know we’re participating in that. And so for the time being, we can be blessed that we’re not in the midst of it and know that our own ordeals, there’s more that lie ahead. I like that saying in Buddhism. It’s like walking through the flames and discovering that it’s raining in there. Yeah, there’s like an interior beauty of the sovereignty of God, says, “See, fear not. I’m with you always.” Not, “Don’t be afraid I’ll protect you from anything happening,” but no matter what happens, I’m one with you in it. And she’s encouraging us to rest in that.

Kirsten Oates:               This brings us to the final point about childlike acceptance, which is when we have adult responsibilities that we engage them with a kind of a sense of groundedness and maturity that she made that kind of switch from being a reactive kind of child to …

Jim Finley:                    She sees a certain holiness in these developmental stages of infancy, which is the surrender, the childhood then is an act of acceptance. And then in the story of them traveling to Jerusalem for Passover, and when they’re all coming back, they think Jesus is somewhere in the crowd. And when he’s not, they have to go back looking for him. And he’s in the temple teaching the rabbis. Mary says to him, “Why did you do this to us?” And he said, “Don’t you know I must be about my father’s business because what children do is they grow up.” And that’s that Christmas event in her life where she grew up as a little girl. So we’re all to grow up, but we’re to grow up in a way that we don’t lose the childlike groundedness of spiritual maturity and that’s what she bears witness to, I think.

Kirsten Oates:               And then Jim, as best we can, when we take on the adult responsibilities, we try and do it in a way that’s most loving. Is that what she’s guiding us towards?

Jim Finley:                    That’s right. In the midst of the present duty that I’m in, the question we’re in the midst of every situation, what in this moment is the most loving thing I can do right now for my body, for my mind, for my emotions, for this person, this animal, these houseplants, this community, these people that I’m about to sit with in this meeting? What would be the most loving way to be efficacious and helpful so that somehow the incarnate details of doing these things that love kind of is shining out in the depth to which I’m present to my responsibility? This is everything from doing emails, so wiping down the kitchen counter, whatever. What is the love that is unwaveringly ribbon through the wavering ways of our day and how can we ride the waves of that?

Kirsten Oates:               And that’s where we do use tools like self-reflection and those kinds of things. Yeah. So Therese herself was able to kind of witness this shift of reacting like a child crying and taking on the responsibility of being a loving presence to her father and her family.

Jim Finley:                    What’s so stunning about Therese is she’s so strikingly self-reflective that she doesn’t walk past anything. You get this feeling she sits quietly and sits with and puts words to what is reflectively given to her. And so she’s kind of modeling that for us.

Kirsten Oates:               Well, onto another theme that is in Story of a Soul , and this is around the flowers and this whole idea of nature as the first expression of God’s presence, the first Bible. And I just love that idea. Then for Therese out in nature, she was given this big insight about the flowers and where she may have thought there was a hierarchy in the flowers, the roses are the most beautiful and the wild flowers are the least. She realized that God loves all the flowers equally and that God is expressed equally through all the flowers. And so I found in that another invitation, we’ve had this from other mystics also, but to take more time out in nature, be more present to the plants I have in my house or the tree I have outside my window and how that is a way of finding that ground of acceptance and love and connection.

Jim Finley:                    I had this image this morning when I was interiorly sitting with this, when a small child brings in a dandelion from the yard and give to its mother and she goes, “Oh my God, thank you. Let’s get some water. Let’s put on it.” She’s not pretending. She’s not pretending because she’s so taken by the child bringing in the daisy. And that’s how God sees us. I mean, that’s the tonal quality of what she’s saying. And also another thing that we said too, I think is big for her, is not measurable. So if you’re holding a grain of sand in your hand and you’re looking up at a mountain, it’s true. The mountain is immensely more massive, but spiritually speaking, the infinite presence of God is presencing the infinity of itself as the grain of sand in your hand. It’s not proportioned out to observable measurement.

It’s an infinite generosity that’s infinitely given to the smallest, the daisy or the violet, and we can learn to appreciate that. And I think sometimes artists help us to see that in the art museum and so on, they mystically caught a glimpse of something and some simple thing and they help us to see it. That’s a big thing for her. Another thing I think is so good with her, she realizes, she’s, “Why does God choose certain people like St. Paul and St. Augustine?” And she said, “I’m not like that.” And she realizes it’s true that there are flowers that are big. And so she said, “I am my littleness like a flower in God’s garden.” I’m not like one of these great teachers. And here years later, wouldn’t she know here she’s one of these great teachers? Go figure.

Kirsten Oates:               But I do love that the way she did apply this insight about the flowers to her own life. And I think that’s hard for us to do the way our societies set up for you to say that the sand and the mountain both contain the infinite love of God and that I in my life might contain the same infinite love of God as the saint, as people who are held up in society. And so I love the way she encourages us to apply that to our own lives, that no matter how ordinary or limited we might see ourselves to be, that we are this full expression of God.

Jim Finley:                    We were talking earlier about you’re having someone you love very much is going through trying physical times and my granddaughters. It’s so interesting, I think, isn’t it really true that when we love somebody very much in their ordinariness, there are certain moments where the presence that shines out and touches our heart is measureless because they’re just themself, but the sideways glance, the tone and the voice, whatever. I like John of the cross to be held a prisoner by a hair that flutters on the neck of the beloved, like you’re enraptured by the boundaryless love that shines out in the littlest. And she so kind of permeates that. And she helps us to walk with that also, I think.

Kirsten Oates:               Yes. The insight there is to know that God’s not waiting for extraordinary achievements from us.

Jim Finley:                    That’s right. God’s not waiting for anything. God’s not waiting for anything and that God is already infinitely in love with us, poured out whole and complete. So there’s nothing to wait for. But God is inviting us and joining us as we wait to be ever more deeply aware of that and surrendered over to it in our heart, which is our life really, I think.

Kirsten Oates:               And she does encourage us to not just walk past the ordinaryness of things and so that in the ordinary acts to, as you’ve said many times, Jim, to see the divinity of the ordinary, she really applies that to herself, that every act she takes on, she’s reflective of surrendering that act to God.

Jim Finley:                    I want to paraphrase the Catholic writer, G.K. Chesterton. He says, “The mystically awakened person pauses to ponder what the average person walks past in haste because it raises the question, what’s ordinary?” Like if you’re lying awake at night and you’re breathing, you’re breathing so ordinary, but see how the night goes without it. See what I’m saying? And when you think about it, like the incomprehensible stature of the ordinary shining out, and that’s why we enter into a more interior meditative states infused with love. We sense the divinity of the ordinary, the standing up and sitting down.

Kirsten Oates:               That’s why I guess breath practices are so powerful because just being present to your own breath in its ordinariness, but wow, like you say, it’s ordinary and yet it gives us our very life.

Jim Finley:                    And another way of looking at it is this, before creation, before creation, there’s just God. So when God said, “Let there be light, let there be stones and trees and stars,” in this way, it means that all this ordinariness, not just as an initial moment, is being presently being poured out by God in a self-donating act. And so the world just as it is as God’s body and as bodying forth the love that uttering into being. And so a single flower, run your hand over the bark of a tree, the darkness of the night, we can be sensitized the incomprehensible stature of life itself that embodies the divinity that’s giving itself to us, as us.

Kirsten Oates:               But I like what you said, G. K. Chesterton, that it does take a little bit of pausing. It takes an attitudinal stance to take it in that way.

Jim Finley:                    And here’s something else about it. I think that we all have these little flashpoints. I think the gift for some people, and it’s the gift that all these mystics embody is the desire to abide there. Every so often there’s the taste. If in the taste, it isn’t something more is given, but a curtain parted, and I fleetingly taste the divinity of every moment. How can I be healed from what hinders me from being habitually established in the infinite love being poured out in my ordinariness? And that’s Therese. And that’s why when we read her, she keeps us there. All these mystics are like this. Everything they say is coming out of that. And that’s why we’re touched by it. And the very fact we’re touched by it bears witness that we already know it or otherwise we wouldn’t be touched by it. They help to stabilize us and this love and walk by it and share it with others day by day.

Kirsten Oates:               She takes that idea of doing small things with great love and she applies it to what she calls like small, hidden sacrifices. So ways that she does something, responds to someone with patience or offers kindness when no one notices, accepts inconveniences. So there’s a way she’s seeing that as a love sacrifice that God is present to and with her in those sacrifices in the ordinariness.

Jim Finley:                    This morning I was looking for my copy of a Story of a Soul and I couldn’t find it. So I could catch myself in the act of, “Where’s my damn copy of a Story of a Soul ?” Or I can do this. I can smile at myself and God being infinitely in love with me and not being able to remember where I left The Story of a Soul . These very simple shifts in consciousness. And I think when we love someone very much too, we can catch love teaching us how to do that. And so she’s always, how do we habitually calibrate our heart? And so instead of waiting for some big, huge thing to happen, how can we calibrate our heart to being more sensitive to what love is asking me to respond in the ordinariness of the moment that I’m in because God’s the infinity of that ordinariness, which is love. And she kind of embodies that for us.

Kirsten Oates:               I love that idea you said of love teaching us. And so I guess in that moment, Jim, where you were about to condemn yourself or berate yourself, you felt a flow of love maybe in the opposite direction.

Jim Finley:                    That’s exactly right. And I think another big thing with her, it’s interesting you see, in Jesus, the word became flesh and dwelt among us. It doesn’t say … And the word became humanity, but Jesus walked with the broken part of us that can’t figure out how to find the book that it found because Jesus is infinitely in love with that and that’s experiential salvation. So we’re always tumbling into God’s arms and the acceptance of our frailties as God takes us unexplainably to the infinity of ourself. I think she embodies that.

Kirsten Oates:               I love that vision of Jesus walking alongside us and then a reminder of Jesus as the invisible face of God. So whether you experience it as Jesus or the presence of God, it’s the same experience.

Jim Finley:                    And that’s why later, not only did she take the devotional name of the child Jesus, but the holy face, and she means the devotion of the holy face of Jesus. But for her, the insight is the more you gaze upon the face of Jesus, it becomes undistinguishable from your own face. Jesus has identified and is in love with you and your own face in Jesus’ face. So the Holy Face is the holy face that Jesus sees when Jesus, God sees your face because you’re the beloved.

Kirsten Oates:               Beautiful. Well, that does bring us onto the name she chose, Therese of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face. And we learned this season that unlike when you joined the monastery and were given a name, she got to choose her own name. She was so young when she chose it. So the name flowed from her childhood experiences and her experiences of love and of Jesus as a child. So we thought it might be fun to each choose a name like Therese did. And what would our name be if we were able to name ourselves? And Jim, I think you were going to go first.

Jim Finley:                    There’s this passage in Thomas Merton. It says, when God creates us, God hands us a stone and holding our hand. And on the stone is written our secret name that only God knows. And that’s my name.

Kirsten Oates:               I love that.

Jim Finley:                    Yeah. I would say that’s my name.

Kirsten Oates:               So you’d be James of the secret name?

Jim Finley:                    I would be James of the secret name, unexplainably revealed in the unfolding ways of my life and the life of every one of us, unexplainably.

Kirsten Oates:               Well, for me, this offered an opportunity to reflect on my childhood and what I might call myself. And I didn’t really grow up religious, so it was interesting to reflect on where were the most loving parts of my childhood and how can I now on reflection, experience those through the light of God’s presence. And two things came to mind. One was I’m the oldest of three and my brother was born seven years after me and my sister, eight years after me. And so when I was seven, I got a baby brother in the house and then a baby sister. And I remember just how much I loved my baby brother and sister. And when I got home from school, they’d be so excited to see me and I’d want to hold them and take them to my friend’s house and love them. I was so proud of them.

I just enjoyed them so much. And so I thought my name might be Kirsten of God’s children, joining God and loving all God’s children.

Jim Finley:                    Beautiful.

Kirsten Oates:               Yeah. So I’ve always had a close connection to little children. I always seem to be able to make them smile or laugh or really or settle them if they’re upset, which is interesting because I’ve never had my own children, but I think being so close to my brother and sister gave me some gifts around that.

Jim Finley:                    Therese is so good and encouraging us to trust our devotional sincerity and to walk with it and listen to it. It’s a gift from God.

Kirsten Oates:               The other one that came to mind for me was I grew up doing ballet, doing dancing. And I just absolutely loved being at the ballet school. My teacher lived up the street from me and I’d leave with her and I’d come home with her and I’d watch every class, do my own class, and I just loved it. So I thought another name for me might be Kirsten of God’s dancing, joining God and participating in the dance.

Jim Finley:                    That’s nice. Very nice. I thought of a couple more too, now that we’re thinking about it. But this in my memoir, I was first mystically awakened in the midst of intense trauma, first time when I was four years old. So it’s almost as if the sustaining presence of God is the one sustained by God in the midst of unresolved suffering. What she saw it in the cross when she approached her own death. Another big moment for me is when I was studying metaphysics at the monastery, 18 years old. And it’s the first time I discovered I had a mind that for some reason it was like the ability to put words to interiority. And also for the listeners, because I think it’s in those moments, the name comes. What are the moments and how would we walk with that name? Yeah.

Kirsten Oates:               Yeah. So please, if anyone feels inspired to play along, we’d love to hear the names you come up with in the little backstories that brought out the name. Reading that in your memoir, it was so knowing who you are now and how bright you are to the day you discovered your own mind when God helped you discover your own mind.

Jim Finley:                    Another thing that’s very important. Dan Walsh was in the metaphysics class. Whenever a gift is given to us, everything we have, we’ve been given and we’ve been given it to give it. So how are we invited to pass on and to share with others this givenness and the details of our day?

Kirsten Oates:               Dance parties with me.

Jim Finley:                    There you go.

Kirsten Oates:               Okay. Well, the last thing I wanted to focus on was this act of oblation to merciful love that Therese wrote. And she wrote it in secret. They only found it after she died. So she wrote it for herself and her sincere relationship with God. And just wanting to write down some things, kind of the sincerity of her own surrender in words. Jim, you looked up the word oblation. I think it meant offering to God. Was that right?

Jim Finley:                    It’s offering of oneself to God. In response to God offered to us, and I think an insight is this, is the fact that he didn’t find it short after she died. Is there certain things that aren’t for the telling? Notice that even The Story of a Soul is just she’s just sharing it with her sisters who asked her to write it, but even then there’s something she kept close. I think we should always trust that. And then after her death, it came out.

Kirsten Oates:               Yeah. So another invitation if someone felt inspired by Therese to write their own oblation. I was thinking I might write, I offer my hidden pain and frustrations as a place for God’s mercy.

Jim Finley:                    And I think I would say, if I had to look at it now, I’m 82 years old, Marina is dead and I’m here alone in this place Marina and I live for 30 years. The ocean’s right outside the window. My oblation, I’m offering myself in the unraveling ways of my fragility and how the divinity is shining out of it. I think that’s why these teachings mean so much to me too, because this is all the mystics are saying this. Jesus is saying this and there you are.

Kirsten Oates:               I think that’s why these teachings mean so much to all of us.

Jim Finley:                    Seriously.

Kirsten Oates:               Yeah. We

Jim Finley:                    Walk with it. Exactly.

Kirsten Oates:               Yes. Well, we’re coming to the end of our coaching session. Jim, thank you so much for a wonderful dialogue about the themes and ideas of Therese.

Jim Finley:                    Thanks for lovely questions that lead us to the deepening dialogue. Much appreciated. And we both appreciation for Dorothy and the background pulling the levers and producing this and making it accessible.

Kirsten Oates:               Yes. And for our listeners who are interested in applying things to their own lives. And I really hope this was helpful and I wish everyone well in their ongoing application, including myself.

Jim Finley:                    Yeah, really. And I would say this, and I think Kirsten would echo this. Without all of you listeners, Kirsten and I would be sitting all alone talking like this. So it’s your communal sincerity of listening that gives such rich meaning to the sharing of it. So it’s offered back to us in the sincerity of all of you. So this is how we grace each other.

Kirsten Oates:               Amen to that.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Turning to the Mystics, a podcast created by the Center for Action and Contemplation. We’re planning to do episodes that answer your questions. So if you have a question, please email us at [email protected] or send us a voicemail. All this information can be found in the show notes. We’ll see you again soon.