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 Saint Therese of Lisieux. And I’m here with Jim to discuss his third talk. Welcome, Jim.
Jim Finley: It’s been so rich walking through her teachings and guidance, and now this session moves towards her death and so on. It’s a lovely ending of her Story of a Soul. Yeah.
Kirsten Oates: I loved the third talk. I’m really looking forward to discussing it today. The overarching theme we’ve been exploring with Therese is her little way. And the little way is this idea that God loves us in our ordinariness, that we don’t have to do or achieve great things for God to love us. What we learn to do is to surrender to God’s love that’s already present with us and in and with all things.
Jim Finley: Yes. And for her and all the saints, the gospels, that surrender of ourself and our littleness is the truly great thing. Seriously. And then because when we surrender ourself in our littleness, it’s a response knowing that in Jesus, God is surrendered to us, that we belong to God. And in Jesus, God belongs to us. So she’s very big on the intimacy of the self-donating surrender each unto each as the path of holiness.
Kirsten Oates: There’s a reciprocity to the surrender.
Jim Finley: That is. This reciprocity is the experience of our very being. That is to say, we’re in a transsubjective communion with God as the beloved, our very being hidden with Christ in God forever. So what we’re talking about is when that washes over into our experience, and then we freely surrendered to that experience and then live by it, which is discipleship.
Kirsten Oates: The second and third session you did, you explored this idea of Saint Therese’s little way through the lens of her devotional name. So when she entered the Carmelite, she was able to choose her own devotional name. And Jim, you mentioned when you entered the monastery, the name was chosen for you. But for Therese, this came out of her own inner experienced desire, devotion, and the name she chose is Therese of the Child Jesus and of the Holy Face.
Jim Finley: That’s right. And for her, and this is a Catholic devotion, is a devotion to the holy face of Jesus. So that’s the holy face that she’s speaking of. And that’s what we’re exploring here.
Kirsten Oates: Wonderful. And that’s what we’re exploring today, this second part of her name, The Holy Face. Yes. And so you’re already offering this clarification that it’s Jesus’ face is what she’s referring to.
Jim Finley: And so what we’re doing here is see how she can help us by being sincerely receptive to her insights into the holy face. It can help us to deepen our own experience and response to God’s love for us in this oneness. And that’s the path we’re exploring.
Kirsten Oates: And also we’re exploring, through Theresa’s experience, the role that Jesus can play in someone’s path. And this name that refers to the child Jesus and the holy face of Jesus, you can see from the very beginning when she entered the Carmelites that she had this deep, deep devotion and connection to Jesus.
Jim Finley: I think it’s this way too, in terms of spiritual direction. I think what we’re to do is we’re to listen to what’s been given to us in our devotional sincerity. And the devotional sincerity is the way in which God is given to us. So it’s a kind of a gift and it varies and moves around. There’s more than one. They’re almost like poetic expressions of what our heart most resounds with. And then you seek to live by that in fidelity to what’s been given to you in your devotional sincerity.
Kirsten Oates: And then, Jim, you’ve also been saying that we can also listen in to someone else’s experience like Therese and that can resonate inside of us. So even if we don’t have our own personal devotion to Jesus, we can be drawn into this innate reciprocity that she experienced through Jesus, but this innate reciprocity is in all of us.
Jim Finley: That’s right. So for a long time, for example, I really didn’t relate this much in thinking of Jesus. I was very much about God, the Meister Eckhart, infinity, and much this way. But interesting, the last five or years or so, as I’ve gotten older, Jesus resonates more. And so we have to be true. So maybe for some people, Jesus isn’t their way. So you have to transpose it into how it is related to you and it carries over with the same effect in your life. Or to be open to the holy face and kind of be receptive to it as maybe something that’ll be a new phase in your journey with God, in your own devotional life. And just see what God has in mind and see where it takes you.
Kirsten Oates: Yes. And then let us know. Send us an email.
Jim Finley: Yes. Send us an email. I think-
Kirsten Oates: We’d love to hear-
Jim Finley: … just say wow with an exclamation point. You never know.
Kirsten Oates: You never know. Yeah. Jim, you referred to this scripture in Colossians, which I think then opens up Jesus in a way that is very surprising. So that in Colossians it says, “Jesus is the image of the invisible God.” And so now we have Jesus, we’ve got the form of Jesus that lived here on earth, but then we’ve also got shining through Jesus, the image of the invisible God.
Jim Finley: That’s right. And the image of the invisible God is the presence of God as that image. And this is 1 Colossians verse 15. But I’d like to read the next verse too, because it’s so germane, I think, to Therese. “He, Christ, is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him, all things were created in heaven and on Earth, visible and invisible, whether the thrones or dominations, rulers, or authorities. All things were created through him and for him.” This is all created through Christ. Christ is for us. And you get that reciprocity again, like the reciprocity of mutual self-donation as God’s oneness with us. Yes.
Kirsten Oates: And am I getting this to say that this is where Jesus is both human and divine. So he came to Earth and lived in a human nature, but then is also the Christ that was present from the beginning of all creation.
Jim Finley: Yeah. This is at the heart of the Christian understanding. See, God from God, true light from true light. So Jesus is God, the second person of the Trinity, the divine nature. And then in Jesus, God then takes on the human nature that was also in God created by… But Jesus takes it and merges so that God’s nature and our nature are one. It’s that oneness in Christ then reveals us to ourself because it means that if God and Jesus took on my nature, then I and my nature mold into God’s nature. And this is very much at the heart of Therese too, how one lives experientially in one’s heart and lives by that.
Kirsten Oates: This isn’t a kind of analyzable concept. This isn’t a, like you say, a proof text that you’re reading here, something we go out and prove. But it is something we can know with this kind of spiritual knowing.
Jim Finley: Yeah. The image that I explored in the reflection too, where I think our love for each other kind of echoes with this. So let’s say you’re with someone that you love very much. And when you look at their face, you see the same face everybody else sees. But in your love for the person, you see in their face the shining of their soulful presence that graces your life. And so the face, the image of the invisible God, the face is the face of the presence of the beloved.
And then likewise, when the beloved then returns the favor, it isn’t just that in your love for the beloved, you reveal the beloved to themselves and the preciousness of love. But when they turn it around and love you back, they reveal you to yourself as love. And our love for each other is kind of like a sacrament of what it is with Jesus. It’s a kind of a devotional felt sense of a oneness that cannot and does not need to be explained because it’s infinite and boundaryless and closer than our breath.
Kirsten Oates: Wonderful. So this is reminding me of the book Richard Rohr wrote on the Universal Christ where he said Christ was not Jesus’s last name, but another name for everything, and that Jesus was both the human form and the Christ.
Jim Finley: That’s right. Whatever it means to be God and whatever it means to be human in Christ is the realization of the unity of the oneness of both. And since all things are created through Christ, it’s the Christ nature of the ocean and the mountains and the darkness of the night, and the new name for everything. Yeah.
Kirsten Oates: Wonderful. Well, let’s turn to the poem you read because it unpacks this even further. And it’s on page 123 of Mary Frohlich’s book, Saint Therese of Lisieux.
Jim Finley: And she also cites there the collected poems of Therese that you can get. It’s in the front of the book. So if you want to read her other poetry, it’s all been written out if poetry speaks to you this way.
Kirsten Oates: It’s amazing. A lot of these mystics were also poets. They wrote poetry.
Jim Finley: And I think it’s because poetry is love language. It’s non-linear and non-explanatory. It doesn’t explain anything. But it gives voice to what can’t be explained and is lived. And I think that’s the reason you see that.
Kirsten Oates: So the name of the poem is My Heaven on Earth, and that also is one of the lines of the poem, but referring to Jesus as my heaven on Earth. Is that the reference there?
Jim Finley: That’s right. Another thing I think she’s doing too is echoing Saint Teresa of Avila. She says, “If heaven is where God lives, our Father who art in heaven, and the kingdom of heaven is within you, God’s within you, your soul is God’s heaven.” So this heaven in heaven is heaven on Earth, but it’s a heaven on Earth of the intimacy of myself, of you being identified with me in love. And so you get that oneness again in Theresa, this love language of oneness.
Kirsten Oates: And it’s really this place where this reciprocity between God and us touches us and we discover this heaven.
Jim Finley: Because the reciprocity, or the communion, is the unit of mystery that is at once God and ourself. Like Thomas Merton says, “When I say I and Jesus says I, it’s the same I.” That’s what we are ontologically in our very being. What we’re talking about is where that kind of floods over into our heart as faith experience, and then we learn to live by that. And this is what Therese is doing for us. All the mystics, really, at the heart of the Gospel.
Kirsten Oates: Well, let’s look at the first stanza of the poem. And it starts with, “Jesus, your ineffable image is that star that guides my steps.” So Jesus, your ineffable image is that star that guides my steps. I’m curious about this word ineffable. It’s a word we don’t hear or use very often.
Jim Finley: The word ineffable is delightfully unexplainable.
Kirsten Oates: Delightfully unexplainable?
Jim Finley: Unexplainable. Because it’s not explainable. That’s what’s so rapturous about it. See, it’s like a state of wonderment. It’s an image that’s ineffable and delightfully unexplainable is this image of this. And then she says in the second line of the first stanza that. “Your ineffable image is that star.” So you think of the star, it’s the ineffable image, and then, “The light that chimes from the star of that ineffable image guides the way I live my life.” It guides the way that she lives her day by day existence, illumined by the light of the ineffable image. It’s a lovely thing.
Kirsten Oates: It’s very poetic. Because obviously if it’s an effable, how does it guide? That’s the spiritual journey, isn’t it? Yeah.
Jim Finley: Something that’s occurred to me too is that I think we know we’re living a contemplative way of life, when the reason why we’re doing what we’re doing is the reason why we exist. Not in the ego sense, like the reason I exist is what I’m doing, I’m achieving this and doing this. But rather what I’m doing right now is the reason why I exist, which is love. If I’m wiping down the kitchen counters, the contemplative awareness of wiping down the kitchen counters, that’s why I exist because it’s love incarnate is me wiping down the kitchen counters. And that’s the constancy of the oneness of the day by day.
Kirsten Oates: She goes on to say, “You know your sweet face is for me heaven on Earth.” And I’m curious about, you’ve talked about this holy face is the holy face of Jesus, but this heaven on Earth is also the place where it touches the depth of our soul. And so I’m picturing that her devotional practice was in relationship to the face of Jesus, but because it unveiled this depth inside of her of this heaven on Earth.
Jim Finley: Yes. Because she was so immersed in Jesus, as found in the Scriptures. And so what we see is when Jesus was physically here on Earth walking, you get this strong sense. Disciples sense that in the presence of Jesus, they were in the presence of God. And it’s really mystically revealed in the transfiguration with a light, like a revelation of the light. They sensed that all the time.
So then after his death and the resurrection, and then in the descent of Pentecost, the descent of the Holy Spirit, that’s where we see the heaven on Earth is that the light of the resurrected Jesus is shining in us on our day by day life right now on this Earth. This is why Jesus says, “By this, you’ll know that you’re my disciples, that you love one another.” So our love for one another is the presence of Jesus. And he says, “What you do to these, the least of my brethren, you do to me.” So the presence of Jesus is woven into the presence of us. And that’s the union that Therese I think was so aware of, and she lived and helps us to live by it also.
Kirsten Oates: She says, “My love discovers the charms of your face adorned with tears. I smile through my own tears when I contemplate your sorrows.” And so there’s something about the way she connected to the suffering of Jesus and felt a oneness with that also.
Jim Finley: Yes, I think there’s two things here. She sees where the journey of Jesus on this Earth is headed, which is the cross. So she sees already, my love discovers the charms of your face adorned with tears. There’s this lovely poetic imagery of being charmed like stars, like the tears of Jesus are like stars that charm her. Because the love of Jesus, greater love than this has no one that he lays down his life for his friends. The suffering of Jesus is the mystery of love. And here she’s very close to Julian of Norwich on the mystery of love crucified.
And then I smile through my own tears, not just the present one that she’s going through. This is written about one year before she brought up the blood. And so it’s like a premonition, but it’s also a premonition of ours because we’re on our way to our own death now too. You know what I mean? Very, very soon now, none of us will be here. So death itself, I think is the gate of heaven. But the conditions in which we die can be horrendous and sometimes they are really. It’s woven into all of us. And we have to trust that God’s present in that and one with that in that. And I think she has it, those intimations are present here, something for us to sit with about ourselves.
Kirsten Oates: For her and for many of these mystics, they have a devotion to Christ crucified. This oneness with the suffering and this desire to participate in a way in the suffering as a devotional act to Jesus.
Jim Finley: You see this in Therese, also very strong in Saint John of the Cross, and she was immersed in John of the Cross too.
Kirsten Oates: And Julian of Norwich?
Jim Finley: And Julian of Norwich. And you also see it in Therese, and especially in the fifth mansion in the interior castle. Here’s the thing, it’s true there is death, which is we’re moving towards it breath by breath. There at the heart, they’re asking a deeper question is, how can I learn at the hands of love to die to everything less than love?
So when Jesus died on the cross, it says in the Scriptures that after he died, they pierced his heart with a lance, and blood and water flowed out, like at the birth of a child. Then there was no more Jesus left in Jesus. And Jesus says, “Come follow me.” Because there was no more Jesus left, which is containable. Through the death of Jesus, the light of the resurrection shines bright throughout the whole world. So it’s almost like a mysterious dying of love at the hands of love to be emptied to the point that there’s nothing but love, to the point that when biological death does come, in some very deep sense, nothing will happen. I mean, something will happen, you’ll be dead. But what I mean is we don’t die. She’s kind of in the depths of this right here for us about the life of Christ, the death of Christ, and the resurrection and our life, our suffering and our death and our resurrection, and she’s kind of walks with this.
Kirsten Oates: The second stanza, she says, in relationship to that, to the tears, “Oh, to console you, I want to live unknown on Earth.” So in thinking about the suffering that Jesus went through, she says, “To console you, I want to live unknown on Earth.” Here we see this little way, her desire to be ordinary and empty herself out to God. Is that what she means to live unknown, do you think?
Jim Finley: There’s several layers to this. First of all, you got to realize she was writing this as a cloistered nun. So she was hidden in the cloister. When I was in the Trappist monastery, it was cloistered. There was no ministry, no one came in. So it’s like the communal hiddenness to give witness to the hiddenness of God that permeates the whole world.
So there’s that hiddenness, but there’s a deeper kind of hiddenness. I think there’s the hiddenness to be unknown on Earth is I don’t desire on this Earth to let my worth be based on the sense in which other people recognize and acknowledge my worth. Rather, I chose to be unknown on Earth, hidden, namely I can’t be known comprehensively that can be figured out because I’m unknowable. You can’t get the ocean into a thimble, but you can drop the thimble into the ocean. And we’re that thimble.
To be known is to be comprehended, which is finite. But what if we’re incomprehensively realized? So it’s almost like the hidden life. And you see this in the cloud of unknowing. This is the apathetic hidden way. So the hidden way that can’t be finitely comprehended can be unexplainably realized, which is the holiness of Jesus. It’s a delicate, mysterious thing.
Kirsten Oates: And do you think that is connected to her little way, Jim?
Jim Finley: I think that is the little way.
Kirsten Oates: That is the little way, yes. Yeah.
Jim Finley: It’s so little. The boundaryless infinity of yourself is incarnate in the very littleness of myself. But the more I try to inflate myself and try to, how am I doing getting bigger and bigger and bigger, I’m less and less intimately one with the strangeness of how you’re one with me in my littleness. And I think this is something we can all sit with in prayer and just sit with that.
Kirsten Oates: And this next line is what makes it so hard. “Your beauty, which you know how to veil.” This mystery that you’re just describing is veiled. And I’m curious about, it’s almost that she’s giving an intention to the veiling of the beauty. Your beauty which you know how to veil. I’m curious about that line and why God would veil God’s beauty.
Jim Finley: And this is where I like to go, and as I did in the talk, this is on page 187 of the Story of a Soul about the hidden. Because not only does she want to be hidden, but also there’s the intimacy of being hidden from herself. I like to read the passage. So this is page 187, which is really the first page of my My Vocation is Love, the reflections that she wrote about insight she had on her retreat. And I think this is good guidance for us in our own Lectio Divina of how we listen to Scripture.
“Do not believe I’m swimming in consolations. Oh no. My consolations is to have none on Earth. And I think my none on Earth, it’s to have none of my own reflective consciousness and comprehend because it’d be finite. Without showing Himself,” capital H Jesus, “without showing Himself, without making His voice heard, Jesus teaches me in secret. This is not my means of books, for I do not understand what I am reading. Sometimes the word comes to console me, such as this one, which I received at the end of prayer after having remained in silence and aridity.
Here is the teacher whom I’m giving you. He will teach you everything that you must do. I want to make you read in the book of life wherein is contained the science of love.” The science of love. Yes, this word resounds sweetly in my ears of my soul. I’d like to reflect on this. She says she’s reading and as she’s reading along, she doesn’t get it. And then when she’s finished, she closes the book that she didn’t get. And when she sits there empty handed and when she didn’t comprehend, Jesus quietly descends into the intimacy of her heart and is revealed out of the hidden place.
But I would say also is revealed out of the hidden place hiddenly. It’s not a way that she can comprehend. But what’s lovely about this book, she shares it with us by writing this out. She’s laying bare the incomprehensibility of her soul. Help us lay bear the incomprehensibility of ours. It isn’t what we comprehend, but rather in sitting very quietly, sometime empty handed, maybe for a long time, there is this love that descends into the emptiness of us and a quiet light shines.
So Saint John of the Cross says, “The dark night of the soul is actually our finite eyes are blinded by an infinite light. And you’re overwhelmed by it and your inability to comprehend it.” Another image that I use is sometimes we imagine that God’s hidden back in a cave. And if we pray just right or read Therese of Lisieux, and we can coax God to come out here and give us a big hug. And sometimes God does.
But what if God says, “I’m not coming out. I want you to come in here.” So John of the Cross says, “To be one with the treasure that’s hidden, you yourself must become hidden. And so you’re unexplainably one with the oneness of God, you can’t explain and yet it shines in your heart.” This is very much, I think, at the heart of Therese, and how concretely it’s given to her and how practical she is about Lectio Divina. It’s that intimate. She’s always experientially grounded in the intimacy of this.
Kirsten Oates: Yes. I love the way you brought in that clear example to help us understand what she’s saying here in this poem. It makes me think about, Jim, that description that she offers doing Lectio, that she’s reading something, she doesn’t comprehend it. And in the quiet contemplation, she’s given something. It makes me think about the way, often in our life, we take lessons in hindsight, even something from many years ago that if we contemplate it now, we might see a lesson that we didn’t see back then or we might see God’s presence in a way we couldn’t see it back then or trust it back then.
Jim Finley: That’s really true. I’d like to reflect on that. It’s interesting, at 22, she was precocious. Or the extent to which at that age she had these senses as amazing. One of the mystics we’re going to be going through in the series is blessed John Roy’s book. And blessed John Roy’s book talks about prevenient grace. He said, “Prevenient grace is if you look back at our own life at the time where there were events, sometimes joyful, sometimes painful. And at the time, we didn’t appreciate the unfolding implications of what was happening. But now from the standpoint of the fullness we are, we see prevenient grace, where in hindsight, we can look back to appreciate and realize what was given, what it was actually given, but we weren’t yet able to realize what was given.”
And I also think in the big picture that our whole life on this Earth is prevenient grace of heaven. It shines forth, the celestial light shine…. And when we cross over into glory, see, there’ll be the fullness, what was given to us in every moment of our life, including this moment in which we’re sharing these reflections. It’s all eternal.
Kirsten Oates: This reminds me of your beautiful memoir, Jim. Did you find even more lessons as you wrote the memoir and reflected from this vantage point back on your life?
Jim Finley: I really did. I opened it sitting on the bed here as Maureen was dying, hospice. I start there. And I decided once it started at that level to write the whole book at that level. So I went all the way back to my childhood with the trauma, and then reading Merton and being in the monastery. And I could look back and see my life amazes me. I mean, it seems so amazing to me that I was providentially brought to this very point that we’re talking like this. I mean, go figure. A traumatized boy from Akron, Ohio. I mean, Jesus.
But I also think when I sit with people in spiritual direction, when you really look at your own life at this level, that’s always true. How has it come to pass that you’ve become the man or woman who’s capable of being sensitive to these things at the level you’re capable? And is it also true that it wasn’t always true for you? But is it also true that in the past that it wasn’t true, the seeds of being able to see were being planted in your soul? We’re on a path not of our own making, which is this love path that’s at the heart of Therese. Yeah.
Turning to the Mystics will continue in a moment.
Kirsten Oates: So just closing this with that section again, now we’ve put some more context around it. Your beauty which you know how to veil, so it’s veiled in these ways for all of us-
Jim Finley: That’s right.
Kirsten Oates: … discloses for me all its mystery. So when we get these revelations or these insights, it’s the full mystery, but we can still only comprehend what we can comprehend at the time. And then Therese says, “I would like to fly away to you.” Because when you feel that moment, you think I would love to fly away into that and live my whole life there.
Jim Finley: What I love about Therese is she’s so dense, intimately. No, she’s not like Saint John of the Cross and Theresa, they expound on that. And then you sit with what she just said, like the succinctness with which she saw. So I’d like you to read that again.
Kirsten Oates: “Your beauty, which you know how to veil, discloses for me all its mystery. I would like to fly away to you.”
Jim Finley: Okay, stop right there. Your beauty, which you know how to veil, discloses to me your mystery. And it’s what’s revealed to me, it’s what I can’t see because it’s veiled. But because it’s veiled and hidden, that’s what reveals to me. Incomprehensibly intimate and I live into that.
Kirsten Oates: Yeah. So your mystery’s revealed to me. It’s not like something concrete. Yeah.
Jim Finley: Yeah. What’s revealed to me is the incomprehensibility of who you are, which reveals the incomprehensibility of me because I’m your beloved. It’s not figure outable. Because if you could figure out, it would be finite. But notice the more deeply you’d love, the less figure outable you even try to pretend that it is. You let it wash over you. There is a language that embodies what you can’t figure out and it’s this language.
Kirsten Oates: And back to the passage you read, 187, this idea of the science of love. So you’re now just describing the science of love. And I thought, finally a science I can buy into. I wasn’t very excited about biology or chemistry or physics, but this science of love I’m kind of interested in.
Jim Finley: Yeah. I put this in the talk too, I think, that when I was studying medieval philosophy at the monastery, Thomas Aquinas following Aristotle. Aristotle explores cosmology, the nature of the physical world, philosophically understood. And then when he finishes that, he says, “Everything I’ve been saying so far is an orderly body of knowledge of everything in genus and species.”He said, “But I haven’t said anything yet about the reality of genus and species.”
So then he talks about the science of metaphysics. It’s an orderly body of knowledge at the being of everything that’s the depth dimension of genus and species this way. So she’s saying, there is this science of love. And the science of love is really then a kind of an interior orderly understanding of the incomprehensible intimacy of the love. If we’re listening to Therese, insofar as we’re moved by it, we’re moved by it in the sense of the science of love, but it’s not the science that’s reducible to a theology. It’s a science of what remains. John of the Cross says, “Have no light to guide you except the one that burns in your heart.”
Now, there is a theology, St. Paul and so on. But when you really read it, it’s the theology of this. But Therese doesn’t go there. She doesn’t go into theological things. She just stays close to the vest. She just plays it intimate. That’s what makes her so accessible to us.
Kirsten Oates: And that science of love, she’s quoting Saint Margaret Mary, the quote is, “I want to make you read in the book of life wherein is contained the science of love,” which was what we were just reflecting on, that it’s contained in our own life.
Jim Finley: And I think what’s significant, that book that she’s quoting, Margaret Mary, and they found the actual Therese’s copy in the monastery library that she read. Margaret Mary herself was a cloistered nun who in ecstasy had visions of Jesus as the sacred heart of Jesus, behold this heart. And you’ve seen pictures of it. It’s a heart crowned with thorns and flame is coming out.
And so she’s actually quoting a mystic of what Jesus revealed to the mystic in ecstasy as the science of love. And what’s interesting about Therese, she was not an ecstatic mystic. Right at the last moments of her death, there was like an ecstasy and she died. So she was not an ecstatic mystic, but it’s almost like the mystical realization of the intimacy of the unfolding moment as divine. And she walked that walk.
Kirsten Oates: I love the way she says, “The science of love, yes, this word resounds sweetly in the ear of my soul and I desire only this science.”
Jim Finley: Yeah, that’s great. When you desire only that. It’s kind of like a setup. It’s been set up in such a way that nothing less than an infinite union with the infinity of God will put to rest the restless longings of your heart. It’s a setup. We spend a lot of time roaming around in scattered ways, but when you know that in my heart, I desire only this love, even though there’s other parts that still do the other, the singularity, like the luminosity of this path, Therese helps us walk that path. And we’re walking it insofar as we’re moved by it, in the sincerity of our desire to be faithful to what she’s revealing to us about ourselves.
Kirsten Oates: Well, now turning to her discovery of having tuberculosis, this passage is quite stunning and perplexing. So I’ll just go to it on page 210. So it’s dark, and she’s not allowed to turn the light on. And so in the dark, she says, “I had scarcely laid my head upon the pillow when I felt something like a bubbling stream mounting to my lips.” And she didn’t know what it was, and she would have to wait till morning, but she had a sense that maybe it was something terrible.
But her approach to it, “I told myself I would have to wait until the morning to be certain of my good fortune, for it seemed to me that it was blood.” And so she calls it good fortune there. Then she goes to sleep. “And upon awakening, I thought immediately of the joyful thing that I had to learn.” And so she goes over to the window and it is blood. So just her approach, I think most of us, if we had this experience, it would be dread, it would be fear. Yeah, it would be sadness. Not joy and excitement. What do you make of that, Jim?
Jim Finley: It’s easier if you’re a cloistered nun to light up with joy that you’re dying. Do you know what I mean?
Kirsten Oates: Yes.
Jim Finley: Then if you are, you know that if you do die, people who love you very much are going to be very sad. But it was also true is what you’re saying. We’re so woven into who we are in time and so identified with who we are in time, knowing that we’d be becoming at the edge of the end of ourself in time frightens us. Even though we believe in eternal life, and we say faith, but that belief is vague compared to the intensity of how identified we are with the self in time that’s dying. Even as we talk now, it’s dying.
And so what I think she’s saying is this example that I use that helps me. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross talked about the stages of dying, and she worked with death very closely. So when you get the terminal diagnosis, first there’s denial because you can’t believe that death applies to you. She says to thee, to thee, to thee, but never to me. Next, when you get it, she said, “Then you strike a bargain with God. I promise if you let me live, I’ll…” And then when the bargain doesn’t work because you’re still dying, then there’s anger, then there’s depression.
She said, “This is the ego self in time coming to the end of itself.” She says, “But some people come to,” what she calls, “acceptance.” And what acceptance is, and I’m thinking of watching Maureen die, in acceptance, you look into the face of the dying loved one and it’s the gate of heaven because we’re eternal. It’s like freedom from the tyranny of death in the midst of death.
And then you realize that there’s something about the one who’s blessed and dying in this way that is something for you to sit with about yourself. And so I think that this is where Therese is coming from. We’re living this life on this Earth and God’s providentially with us because God is Lord of life. But if God is Lord of life, God is Lord of death because the Lord of death is to realize there is no death. The body dies, but none of us ever die. So she’s so vividly aware of that. She lives in the joy of it. And it’s the joy that’s going to be eclipsed by the depth of her own suffering that’s coming. Because tuberculosis was an extremely painful way to die because you can’t breathe.
Kirsten Oates: You referred to this act of ablation she made to merciful love, which helps us understand how she received this illness. Because a year before the diagnosis, she’d written this act of ablation to merciful love where she offers herself as a martyr. She so wants to join Jesus in taking on the suffering of the world that she offers herself as a martyr to love, and whatever that means for her. Could you start, Jim, just by telling us what an ablation is?
Jim Finley: I had to look it up. An ablation is a gift offered to God, is an ablation.
Kirsten Oates: Okay. So this is her gift to God. This strange wording, a victim of holocaust to God’s merciful love, but it’s this idea of being a martyr.
Jim Finley: To be a martyr of a holocaust of your invincible love. The fire of the holocaust is the fire that burns away in her everything that’s other than the infinite love of God given to us in Jesus as her very life. So it’s like a sacred fire that burns away everything that’s not the eternal love of God given to us.
Kirsten Oates: Like that divine furnace you talked about in the earlier session.
Jim Finley: She calls it, in an earlier session, like the furnace that just burns it all away until only love is left. And when only love is left, which is the sole reality of every moment of our life, there’s a kind of an inner wisdom of that, which is the wisdom of holiness.
Kirsten Oates: So in this desire to be a martyr for God, you’re saying is dying to everything but this love. She says, “I desire in a word to be a saint.” So she saw saints as people that did this. And then she says, “But I feel my helplessness, and I beg you, oh my God, to be yourself my sanctity.”
Jim Finley: There’s another dense thing. I want to be a saint, but I’m aware of my helplessness, which is another word for my littleness. So because I’m too little to be a saint, you’re going to have to be my sanctity. And what’s nice about it, you’ve already given me your sanctity because you’ve given me yourself in Jesus. So you already are my sanctity. That my sanctity doesn’t belong to me. My sanctity is the infinite love of you given to me as a very reality of myself and my nothingness without you. Praise the Lord. It’s very poetically dense.
Kirsten Oates: Yes. And it was written a year before she was diagnosed with a disease, and no one knew about it. It was a hidden offering to God, and they found it after she died. She says at the end, “May this martyrdom, after having prepared me to appear before you finally caused me to die and may my soul take its flight without any delay into the eternal embrace of your merciful love.”
Jim Finley: Yeah, I want to say something here too, I think too. This is where you talk about hindsight where you look back. I think sometimes when we’re still in the midst of things, we’re given an innate interior wisdom that we walk with, the relevance of which won’t blossom till years later, because we already knew it. So it isn’t as if when she saw the blood, it wasn’t precipitous. But it wasn’t precipitous because in a certain way, it was already given to her in the ablation of love. She was already steeped in this. And that kind of inner wisdom, I think, is a kind of a quiet kind of inner confidence or clarity, like trusting the intimations of our own heart that we live with.
Kirsten Oates: Yes. It’s quite profound to look back on that.
Jim Finley: It is. Very much so.
Kirsten Oates: To see what happened to her. Well, on that note, I’d love to just read the last section of the book, which talks about her death. I think you mentioned that she was not given any drugs, painkillers or anything. And I read also that they didn’t lighten any of her duties until she physically couldn’t do them and had to be in the infirmary. So she continued on life as normal, which I’m assuming was very difficult for her.
Jim Finley: When I was in the monastery, it’s changed since the Second Vatican Council, where this order that I was in goes back to the 11th century. And so I’ll give an example. We all went to bed at 7:30 because you had to get up at 2:30 to chant the Psalms. So you went to your cell, closed the curtain, lay down on your straw mattress. If you couldn’t sleep, you weren’t allowed to get back up and go down the library and read for a while. And you couldn’t turn on a light. There was no light to turn on. You just had to lie there in the dark. Likewise, when 2:30 came, and you got sick during the night, you couldn’t sleep in. I think I’ll do it later. It’s the discipline of the common life, of the death to self to be born into Christ. That was the kind of the mindset that she had.
And that’s why when the blood came up, she couldn’t light the candle to see if it was blood or not, because she had to live the common life, the aisthesis. And that’s why she points out too, Mary Frohlich points out that that last manuscript, the one that she wrote when she was dying, often the pen would fall from her hand and she’d have to get it and keep… So she just kept onward as she was kind of unraveling.
And as Mary Frohlich points out too, the thing about today, the pandemic that we went through and people, if you can’t breathe, they put you on a respirator. See, then there was no respirator. So it went on for weeks that she was suffocating. She said, “There are no words to describe the world that I live in with this pain.” And then she says about Jesus, she said, “I still know it’s true, but I can’t feel it.” So there was the dark night of the soul, like the loss of God and the loss of the ability to breathe. And you can see her premonition becoming a victim of love, the radicality, which is echoing Jesus hanging on the cross.
Kirsten Oates: And that her diagnosis, that she coughed up that blood on Good Friday.
Jim Finley: On Good Friday. When I was in the monastery, there was this holy old lay brother, Brother Joachim. He was up in his 90s. And he always wanted to die on Good Friday at 3:00 because traditionally they believe that’s when Jesus died, and you tolled the bell. And he died on Good Friday at 3:00, right on schedule.
Kirsten Oates: Really?
Jim Finley: Yeah, he did.
Kirsten Oates: Wow.
Jim Finley: And I say this living out here in the world and leading silent retreats. I think in the midst of the world, we’re being invited by Theresa and the mystics, the kind of the delicacy to see in the patterns of the day by day, the holiness of this. Because we have to grow where we’re planted. And we’re trying to see where we’re already in the midst of what she’s talking about, in the ordinariness of the life that we’re living.
Kirsten Oates: It’s so hard to comprehend that sense that you describe, Jim, of having no felt sense of God, no sense of consolation, all the ways that you used to feel the experience of God in your being and your body are gone, but there’s this faith that remains.
And when she was dying, there’s this moment quoted in the book on page 268 where she says, “I am afraid I have feared death. I am not afraid of what happens after death. That is certain. I don’t regret giving up my life, but I ask myself, what is this mysterious separation of the soul from the body? It is the first time that I have experienced this, but I abandoned myself immediately to God.”
The experience she’s describing, that kind of reminds me of the way you talk about that loss of God’s presence and consolation, but still living in the light of it. That she can acknowledge she’s afraid of death, but she’s not afraid of what’s on the other side of it. It’s the pain of the death itself.
Jim Finley: I would share two things. One where she says, “I still believe in Jesus, but I can’t feel it.” As a clinical psychologist, I work a lot with people in trauma and major depression. And they can’t feel it. Like the reality, the intensity of it, they have to sit and walk to find their way back out into the light and to find someone to help them do that. It shows you how real that can be where you can lose it. And the same way with severe pain, chronic pain. It can get so intense you lose it. And that’s the vulnerability of it. So it shows you how human she is. She says, “I’m not afraid to die, but what’s that going to be like when my soul-”
Kirsten Oates: Separates from my body. I’m not afraid of the other side of death.
Jim Finley: I’m not afraid-
Kirsten Oates: But the moment of death, I’m kind of a little concerned about.
Jim Finley: I’m very concerned. I’m about to find out. But it shows you the ordinariness of the pain, of the humanity of ourself. And Jesus became that. Because whatever that is, when Jesus died, “Father, into your hands, I commend my spirit.” He experienced it. And so he’s infinitely present in that very experience of death. I love Saint Catherine of Siena. She says, “I know a woman,” she’s talking about herself, “whose soul’s union with God was stronger than her soul’s union with her own body.” That’s a lovely thing.
Kirsten Oates: That’s beautiful.
Jim Finley: And I think it’s true of Therese.
Kirsten Oates: That’s what you see here. Yes. I love that. I’ll just read, Jim, to close out the season, because you’ve finished the season of Therese, your talks on her anyway, we still have the coaching session, et cetera. But I wanted to read this final section of the book where they talk about her death. What it says in context is that her death was approaching, and so all the sisters had gathered, but then it was taking a long time, so they all left again. And that went on and on for months, that kind of thing, where they thought she was going to die, and then she revived for weeks.
But so on this particular day, the sisters had been with her, but then they’d left. “Mother, isn’t this the agony? Am I not going to die?” “Yes, my poor child, but God perhaps wills to prolong it for several hours.” “Well, all right. I would not want to suffer a shorter length of time.” Then it says, “Her head fell back on the pillow and was turned toward the right. The prioress had the infirmary bell rung and the sisters quickly returned. ‘Open all the doors,’ she said. Hardly had the community knelt at her bedside when Therese pronounced very distinctly while gazing at her crucifix. ‘Oh, I love him.’ And a moment later, ‘My God, I love you.’
Suddenly her eyes came to life and were fixed on a spot just a little above the statue of the blessed virgin. Her face took on the appearance it had when Therese enjoyed good health. She seemed to be an ecstasy. This looked lasted for the space of a credo. Then she closed her eyes and expired. It was 7:20 in the evening. Her head was leaning to the right. A mysterious smile was on her lips. She appeared very beautiful.”
Jim Finley: Yeah. Lovely. Beautiful. And you know my sense of it? As you know, there’s a phrase in Thomas Merton, where he’s talking about death to the novices and he said, “In the moment of your death, you can get all the people in the room with you that you want. They can all get up in bed with you if you want. But you’re dying alone.” And he says, “You’re that alone right now. And you’ll never find the union and love you’re looking for by evading it.”
Here’s what I think. When someone is in the place where they’re not evading it, you can tell you’re in the presence of something heavenly. So I think they kept wanting to be with her, even though she couldn’t feel it, because they could sense the presence of God in the intensity of her presence and her brokenness. And then what a lovely ending when she died, that ecstatic, that love expression, and then death of Therese.
Kirsten Oates: Which is really a gift to all of us. I remember when my grandmother died, she had a moment like that, which is just such a confidence to the people left behind. Not only that the person was in the arms of something loving, but also that that’s there at the moment of our death for all of us.
Jim Finley: Not everybody finds that here. Some people don’t find it till they cross over. Everyone finds it in eternity. But some people do find it here, and you can feel it in the room when it’s happening. You can feel the depth of this deathless presence. Somehow when you’re in the presence of it, you almost want to kneel down on the floor. I mean, you’re in the presence of the deathless nature shining out from death, the resurrection intimately like washing over you this. And I think she died that way. And what’s interesting, she died that way because she lived that way.
Kirsten Oates: Yes. It reminds me even of that very first story, the Christmas story, when the mother says, “It looks like God wants you to suffer a bit longer.” And she says, “Oh, well, I wouldn’t want to do anything but what God desires of me.” That sense of, you said it’s kind of growing up and accepting what’s yours to do in the world on God’s terms.
Jim Finley: It’s like abandonment to divine providence. So if we’re suffering, quite understandably, we should do all that we can to relieve our… And we should. But the point is, to the extent in our efforts to lessen the suffering, to the extent that we can’t, “Fear not,” Jesus said, “I’m with you always.” We have to trust that in the powerlessness to lessen the suffering, that the infinite presence of Jesus is woven into that powerlessness. If God is Lord of life, God is Lord of death, and the Lord of death is the light of the resurrection that’s shining in our death. And so Therese kind of resonates with all of this in the simplicity of our sincerity.
Kirsten Oates: It reminds me too to say that when she was in that infirmary for the months she was in there in the terrible pain you described, all the sisters loved to come and visit her because she made them smile, she made them laugh, and they all just adored her. So it’s amazing, like you say, that even though she wasn’t receiving that consolation, it was so innate shining through her that everyone else could see it. I love the sense of time at the end, the look that she had. She had this amazing look on her face and the look lasted for the space of a credo.
Jim Finley: That’s right. See, which is the creed, I believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven. So it lasted as long as it takes to say… It’s an interesting image because the creed, I believe in God, the Father… And that’s how long it kind of lasted.
Kirsten Oates: It’s how long the ecstasy kind of lasted.
Jim Finley: That’s right. And also, you know how long it lasted because there’s no clocks.
Kirsten Oates: Yes.
Jim Finley: It’s a fascinating little detail.
Kirsten Oates: Yes. I love that. Marking time by prayers and credos.
Jim Finley: Yeah. That’s right. And I would say this, I would end with something too. When God said, “Let there be light.” And this very moment, for God, it’s the same moment. So what if our whole life on this Earth is the length of a credo? We count it as years, but from the light of eternity, what if the whole thing is the length of a credo, which is this love that she manifests and-
Kirsten Oates: Yes. Which is God’s belief in us. Saying the creed of us here on Earth, right?
Jim Finley: That’s right. I want you to believe in me.
Kirsten Oates: God believes in Kirsten and Jim.
Jim Finley: That’s right. Yeah. I want you to believe in me because I believe in you to the point I’m giving myself to you as your very self forever. Therese, she’s just a stunning woman. Just amazes me, seriously.
Kirsten Oates: Well, thank you for the three beautiful talks you gave, and I’ve enjoyed the dialogue so much. And it’s amazing how deep you can get in ordinariness.
Jim Finley: Good way to end. It is amazing. The deeper we go in ordinariness, we discover the depth of the ordinariness drops down into the bottomless abyss of God, welling up and giving itself to us as our ordinariness, which is mystical sensitivity to incarnation. Anyway.
Kirsten Oates: Amen.
Jim Finley: Amen.
Kirsten Oates: Thank you, Jim.
Jim Finley: Thank you.
Kirsten Oates: And thank you, Dorothy, in the background, and I’ll see you for the coaching session. 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.