Jim Finley:                    Greetings. I’m Jim Finley.

Kirsten Oats:                And I’m Kirsten Oats.

Jim Finley:                    Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.

Kirsten Oats:                Welcome everyone to season 13 of Turning to the Mystics, where we’re turning to St. Thérèse of Lisieux. And I’m here with Jim to discuss his first session. Welcome, Jim.

Jim Finley:                    I want to say right at the very beginning that here in Marina del Rey, while we’re recording this, it’s raining. And I’m on the top floor along this place I live on the beach here. And water draining off the roof and dropping down into the rain gutter. If you hear something in the background, it’s rain.

Kirsten Oats:                It’s the sound of rain.

Jim Finley:                    It’s the sound of rain, which is great.

Kirsten Oats:                Well, we have heard from some listeners that your voice is so soothing that it puts them to sleep. So add in the rain noise, people are just going to be passing out.

Jim Finley:                    They’ll be sound to sleep. Yeah. Anyway, I wanted to share that.

Kirsten Oats:                Yeah. Thanks for letting us know, Jim. Well, I wanted to start right with the big insight that came through in this session that you did. Thérèse’s big insight, because this insight really then guides her whole life and everything she writes in this book. So let’s start there. And I’m going to read from Story of a Soul and it’s page 14. We’re using the version by John Clark. It’s a second paragraph where she writes, “Jesus deigned to teach me this mystery. He set before me the book of nature. I understood how all the flowers he has created are beautiful, how the splendor of the rose and the whiteness of the lily do not take away the perfume of the little violet or the delightful simplicity of the daisy. I understood that if all flowers wanted to be roses, nature would lose her springtime beauty and the fields would no longer be decked out with little wild flowers. And so it is in the world of souls, Jesus’ garden he willed to create great souls comparable to lilies and roses, but he has created smaller ones and these must be content to be daisies or violets, destined to give joy to God’s glances when he looks down at his feet. Perfection consists in doing his will, in being what he wills us to be.” And this is why she’s often called the little flower, this big insight she had.

Jim Finley:                    That’s right.

Kirsten Oats:                And it comes out of a context where she’d grown up longing or desiring to do great things for God, to be a saint, to be someone heroic for God. And then she’s out in nature and she has this big lesson come through.

Jim Finley:                    She even starts out beginning on the preceding paragraph, wondering how God raises up certain great people. She uses Saint Paul, she uses Saint Augustine and so on. And then she says that she herself wanted to be great, to be like a great saint. She has this idea of Jesus personally guiding her or inspiring her as something we can cultivate within ourselves. And he said before me the book of nature, which is sometimes referred to as the first Bible, this creation. And she says that in creation, she sees in flowers, there is the rose and the orchid and the lily and so on, great. But there’s also the simplicity of the daisy and this delicate smell of the violet. And so if all flowers were roses, of all flowers, nature would lose the complexity of its beauty of the little flower. But then she radicalizes it and she radicalizes it and realizing that this the mystical insight she had that runs through all the mystics. The infinite love of God is true is being infinitely poured out and presencing itself as the rose, as the lily. But the infinite presence of God is infinitely pressing the infinity itself as the daisy.

In other words, the infinite love of God is not comparmentalized in any way. It’s an infinite totality that’s totally given. So the image would be if you’re holding a grain of sand in your hand and you compare that little grain of sand to a mountain, clearly the grain of sand is much smaller than the mountain, but the mystery is just as the infinite presence of God is presencing itself as the immensity, the mountain, the whole infinite presence of God is infinitely pressing itself as the grain of sand in your hand. And so it changes the whole idea of little. That no matter how little we are, the littleness incarnates the infinite presence of God, incarnate in littleness, and that’s what she sees in herself. And so she changes her hole idea, and this will go through the whole book. She wants to be a saint, not by attaining something. She wants to be a saint by being someone surrendered over to the infinite love of God that’s infinitely in love with her in her littleness. That’s why I sometimes called The little way of Saint Thérèse, and she’s the little flower, and that’s like an insight for us.

Kirsten Oats:                That’s so beautiful. And then Jim, this sentence in the third paragraph that she opens with, “I understood too that our Lord’s love is revealed as perfectly in the most simple soul who resists his grace in nothing as in the most excellent soul.” And that’s that last point you were making that she realized that she can reveal God’s love as perfectly as a great soul or a saint in her surrender to grace.

Jim Finley:                    That’s right. And two insights here too, I think important. Because don’t forget this Carmelite, she was just immersed in St. John of the cross and Teresa of Ávila. And as the passage that where St. John of the cross talks about walking in the mountains, it says “At first for possessiveness of heart, wish I could own this. You walk a little deeper in spiritual awareness and you see the beloved has passed this way in haste. You see traces of divinity left this way.” It goes even deeper, is that my beloved is the mountains. And so my beloved is the mountains and that the infinite presence of God is presencing itself in the mountains as God’s presence. But the same is also true that just as is present in the mountains in the same way the immensity of God is present in the simple soul who resists grace in nothing.

But I think there’s another nuance. And she says this throughout the whole book too. The point is the simple soul who resists grace in nothing realizes that it does resist grace because we’re afraid, we’re confused, we don’t understand, but the resistance is not intentional. It’s the resistance of frailty. And so by accepting the resistance and handing it over to God, we’re not resisting in our resistance. And now the humility, we’re opening ourself to God, taking us to the infinity of ourself and the acceptance of ourself as we are. That’s going to run through the whole book. She wants to be a saint, but later she realizes that she’s too weak. So she said, “God, you’re going to have to be my holiness and you give yourself to me.” And so it’s one of the big themes of the whole book for her and for us to realize too. She’s inviting us to take that to heart and be sensitive to that.

Kirsten Oats:                Yes. What a beautiful way to receive a teaching that she’s out in nature and she’s just enjoying looking at the flowers and she sees herself as one of these smaller flowers and she recognizes she sees the rose as something more superior or something more beautiful. And then she’s given this beautiful lesson, God’s equally present in the rose and the little flower.

Jim Finley:                    That’s right. And I think sometimes too, we know what that’s like to be momentarily taken by the beauty of a simple thing like a flower. I love this poem. She’s talking about her soul. It says, “It takes almost nothing to move her. A soft agitation in the rain, an ant going by that knows where it’s going.” So it’s interesting how the tiniest thing can catch … It’s soulful, like we sense the divinity or the incomprehensible stature of the simplicity of everything. That’s at the heart of Thérèse’s holiness, really. She’s helping us do the same.

Kirsten Oats:                Yes. Because you can experience God’s presence in the most simple thing. So if we’re open to that, there’s the opportunity to connect to God, to learn lessons from God, to feel God’s presence.

Jim Finley:                    There’s another lesson that’s going to keep growing through the whole thing too. Imagine you’re blessed to be deeply in love with someone. There’s a great depth of love for the person. You’re so grateful for that love. And it’s through your love for the person that empowers you to see how precious they are, but they’re precious in their ordinariness. In their ordinariness … If you look at their face, you see what anybody sees when they look at their face. But you, because of your love for them, you see in them the incarnate love shining out through their face. It can’t be measured. This insight runs like a theme as at the very heart of her teachings for us to walk with this and take it to heart and see ourselves this way.

Kirsten Oats:                I was thinking how counter cultural this is that really as society, we raise up celebrities. We have this idea that being the best is something to strive for. And even in the church, the sense of the saints, it gave her that same sense inside herself that she needed to become something, achieve something to be loved by God.

Jim Finley:                    That’s right. And this is why too, that she’s so steeped in a contemplative reading a scripture and in Jesus, because what she sees in Jesus … In Jesus, God descends down into and goes as deep as God needs to go to meet us in our littleness and walk with us. And that’s why we often meet Jesus in the midst of our own littleness, like our frailties. You see the light of grace shining out and sustaining us in our vulnerabilities and so on.

Kirsten Oats:                And Jim, I think that’s something we’ve really lost, the ability to be met by Jesus. Yeah. So many people I come across part of their religious baggage, so to speak, is this inability to orient to Jesus. They don’t know how to bring Jesus into their lives.

Jim Finley:                    An insight that helps me with this too, is that it’s amazing how willing we are to stay vague to ourselves. We might say it doesn’t seem vague. It seems like we’re preoccupied with ourself, but really we’re preoccupied with levels of functioning, like you say, more or less, whatever. So it’s almost like we’re lonely for the interior depth of ourselves and those depths open out unto God who’s one with us in the very depths that we’re walking over. So the more Thérèse the little flower invites us, and you can see this is exactly what she’s doing. The more we slow down and let her help us to drop down into the intimacy of our own simplicity, then we start to see this is where God’s guiding us. We might even say insofar as removed by these teachings, it’s Jesus, the living God personally touching us through the voice of Thérèse. It’s not mechanistic or distant. It’s innermost, intimate and close, like closest our breath, close as our heartbeat.

Kirsten Oats:                And that’s certainly what Thérèse would say about what’s touching us because that’s what she was trying to channel. That would be her hope.

Jim Finley:                    And all the mystics really. Everything that Jesus says read contemplatively, is actually the intimacy. That’s why I say that to experientially experience everything that Jesus says is like falling off a cliff because it’s like dropping down into the bottomless abyss of God that’s welling up and speaking to us in the world and meeting us where we are. It’s an intuitive insight and she’s inviting us in prayer to keep sitting with it and like rain coming down to let it soak in, to let it soak in and walk with it.

Kirsten Oats:                I think that’s so powerful what you’re saying, Jim, that Jesus also, because he came in human form, the incarnate presence, like the ability to put a face to it, to put words to it, to put actions and behaviors to it, we can find that resonance deep within ourselves. And even in the work I do with my leadership coaching, I’m often using the image of Jesus to bring out a resonance of connection to something deeper, to great comfort, someone who really understands every aspect of the human condition.

Jim Finley:                    That’s right. I think like a lot Jean-Luc Marion.. He said, God is revealed to us not as a truth, but is revealed as a person. And God is revealed as the person who reveals to us the person that we are, hidden with Christ in God forever intimately. And while I was studying philosophy at the monastery, Dan Walsh, the philosophy professor, Martin Heidegger asked, “Why is there something rather than nothing like the wonderment, why anything at all?” He said, “A deeper question is why is there someone rather than no one and I’m that someone?” And it’s the infinite presence of God presencing itself as the presence of myself in my ordinary. And so Thérèse is parting the curtains to help us intimately settle into the awareness of that and live by it. And that’s Jesus and that’s walking the walk.

Kirsten Oats:                Yeah. Yeah. So beautiful to see how she centers her experience, her relationship with God around Jesus. Through that centering, she goes out into nature and you talk about nature being the first Bible and then she connects to nature in this way that speaks to her, that offers her something.

Jim Finley:                    That’s right. Like Carl Joung saying, “How can we claim the ears have taught us anything if we’ve not learned to listen to the secret that whispers in the Brooks?” And so the whole world is God’s body and that it’s bodying for the love that’s uttering it into being the darkness of the night, the stars overhead, the passage of time, smell of flowers. She’s inviting us into that sense of Jesus embodied in the world itself and life itself.

Kirsten Oats:                Yeah. That’s a really big concept. If you’ve never heard that said before, that nature is the first Bible, that before the Bible was written, God was present in reality and so people could know God through their relationship with reality as it was with creation.

Jim Finley:                    And you see this in indigenous peoples and ancient cultures too. The sacredness, the sense of the divine knowledge of the sacred in a close understanding of the sacredness of the concreteness of the world. You also see in a spirituality of the ecology, like the holiness of the world is God’s body and we’re woven into that and that world’s woven into us.

Kirsten Oats:                And you said, Jim, that we don’t necessarily see this in ego consciousness, but in deeper meditative states of consciousness, we might experience this connection in nature.

Jim Finley:                    Yes. This is another thing that runs through the whole book. We’ll keep saying endlessly varied ways. In ego consciousness, we tend not to see this because the cell phone just went off and we’re already five minutes late for the next meeting and we can’t remember where we left our car … That. But it’s very interesting, but anytime we pause to ponder something … I remember Brother Lawrence looking at a tree or listening to the rain or lying in the dark, listening to your own breathing. Anytime we pause to ponder something, we interiorly drop down into more interior dimensions of our own presence, one with the presence of the darkness of the night, the smell of the flower. And in that moment, that’s contemplative consciousness. We’re dropping down. And that’s always there. We all have flashes of this now and again, we all do, but what we’re trying to do is … The path talk is the desire to abide there that is once I’ve tasted it, and I know that in these fleeting … Some of them are very intense, but usually they’re very delicate, like a whisper.

Once I’ve tasted that, I’ve tasted that without which my life will be forever and complete, because it’s going on all the time right now in every moment. So what is the path where I could be healed from what hinders me from being habitually stabilized in the divinity of ordinariness? And that’s Thérèse. And that’s why when we read her, it’s Lectio, we’re lured into following her sentence by sentence and listening to her, and she helps us find our way to ourselves.

Kirsten Oats:                And Jim, I like the way you brought up Brother Lawrence, because the tree with Brother Lawrence going out into the flowers for Thérèse, John of the Cross with the mountain, I’m just curious about the power of being in nature versus things that humans create, like buildings or planes or cars. What is it about nature?

Jim Finley:                    Yes. I think there’s two things. One way of looking at this is before creation, there’s just God. And therefore when God said, let there be light, let there be stones and trees and … There was nothing for God to make trees out of because there was nothing there. That’s why they say creation takes place ex nihilo, out of nothing. We’ll really put it another way. It’s God presencing itself forth as the reality of the tree, the stone, the river, and it’s nothingness without God. And that’s why strictly speaking, we don’t create, we fabricate.

Kirsten Oats:                Oh.

Jim Finley:                    So for example, if a carpenter wants to make a table, he needs wood. If an artist and a painter, they need paint. See, we fabricate. So what we make are fabrications.

Kirsten Oats:                Yes.

Jim Finley:                    But here’s the thing, in the aesthetics of something beautiful, we do participate in the creativity of God, in the artistry of God. That’s why an image that I have often … I’m looking at my living room right now. You can sit in your living room and the configuration of the furniture and ego consciousness, look at it every day, it’s just furniture. But what if a meditative stillness, the very pattern of the furniture is like God’s mandala. A mandala’s a sacred image. It says the longer you gaze that it, the less obvious it gets. So we’re looking for patterns where divinity is concretized in the patterns of the ordinariness of things.

Kirsten Oats:                That reminds me then of Teresa of Ávila’s teaching where she did use the idea of a mansion, which is something fabricated by humans, but it also could teach lessons about God in the way she used it.

Jim Finley:                    Yeah. She saw the mansion as a a sacramental symbol as a way to help us understand our own soul. And so Teresa of Ávila says, “If heaven is where God lives and says, the kingdom of heaven is within you. Your soul is God’s heaven.” And so she does this whole thing on teaching us on prayer on the interior castle. She sees our own soul as the end being perpetually created by God, for God and how we convention into our own soul. And Thérèse was steeped in that lineage. She’s a discalced Carmelite nun. And so this is her wheelhouse, this is where she lives.

Kirsten Oats:                Jim, I wanted to ask you a little bit of context and historical background on the way she talked about the saints. I was really curious about this idea. She said, “I was surprised when I saw God shower his extraordinary favors on saints who had offended him.” For instance, St. Paul and Saint Augustine. So I was just curious about how these two both offended God and then did things to become saints.

Jim Finley:                    St. Paul talks about … He was a zealous thing about rounding up Christians for imprisonment, take them off to Roman umpire and the all of that. And in the midst of that, it says he was struck by a bolt of light and knocked to the ground. And he heard a voice and the voice said, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? That is all these Christians he’s gathering up are Christ. And so he was converted in the midst of this gathering up of violence against Christians in which he was awakened. And Saint Augustine will be looking at him later in the podcast. In his youth, he was really wild. Wine, women and song, except he didn’t sing that much. So he said a lot of wine. He said, “I used to pray to God, ‘Dear God, make me chaste, but not yet.'” He didn’t want to be chaste yet.

And also he got Manichaeism. There was a heresy which out there were two gods and for about nine years he belonged to that heresy. So he was sexually acting out, he was wild and also he was gifted orator as a gifted speaker and he was so into himself judging his worth by the size of the crowds that used to come to his talks. And so that’s Augustine.

Kirsten Oats:                And then what happened? How did he become a saint after that?

Jim Finley:                    Well, what happened was, it’s a great thing in the confessions of Saint Augustine, that’s really a lovely thing. He was sitting there in a garden and he heard a child singing and he heard a child singing a lovely little tune, a child nearby. He thought the child was singing tolle lege, tolle lege. He spoke Latin. This was the Roman Empire. He spoke in Latin. Pick up and read and pick up and read. And he had a Bible sitting there because he was using it for literature, for his talks. And he opened up to Paul’s letter to the Romans about putting aside sin and brokenness and hurt and turning it over and handing it over to the love of God and he … It was his conversion. His heart broke open and he became a bishop in North Africa and became one of the main theologians and the guiding of the early church about Christ’s consciousness and the church. It was like a great saint.

Kirsten Oats:                He became a contemplative after that.

Jim Finley:                    And a mystic. He talks about talking with his mother, St. Monica, mother back and forth, and they were both mystically awakened talking about God. And you can tell when you read his writings, the very first sentence of his book, he said, “Oh, beauty ever ancient ever knew. I sought you without and you were within.” He has this lush interiority about everything that he says, but it was born out of chaos, craziness. It’s like with a lot of us, I think a lot of things we learned about mercy and tenderness, we were met by God in the midst of our craziness. He came stumbling out and we learned things, hopefully.

Kirsten Oats:                I know that’s true for me.

Jim Finley:                    True for me.

Kirsten Oats:                Okay. Well, now I wanted to go back to the beginning where you started and you started with that very first paragraph. What struck me so much about the way you opened up this first paragraph, you just did sentence by sentence, is that I’m pretty sure if I had picked up this book and started reading it, I would’ve read pretty quickly through that first paragraph because like context only, like setting the scene very briefly, nothing deep in that, just like facts about how this book came to be. So I’m just curious, what inspires you to slow down so much with each and every sentence?

Jim Finley:                    Chesterton, the Catholic writer. He says, “A spiritually awakened person pauses to ponder what the average person walks by in haste.” I think with all these mystic teachers like Thérèse, everything they say counts and just that you can’t skim read the mystics because you’re passing over the very depth they’re embodying. So almost like the Lectio, like the pedagogy, is slowing down enough to be present because she slowed down enough to write it. Do I mean she’s writing it one sentence at a time. It’s in that sense, I think, and nothing that strikes me. She was so young. It’s interesting. She’s not an ecstatic mystic like Thérèse. Just at the moment of death, she had this painful death, we’ll look at it with tuberculosis and went through the dark night and went on and on and on. There was a brief ecstatic vision and she died. But it isn’t as if she had visions, but there’s almost like an eloquent divine intimacy and the simplicity of everything that she saw.

And what’s interesting about it, Thérèse VÁvila and John of the Cross and Akar, they’re writing to help us and they’re trying to help us discern the signs that we’re being led into more unitive states with God and how to cooperate with. She’s not doing that. She’d be stunned to think that years later we’d be reading her book because the Prioress, the superior asked her to write the story of her soul. And it happened that Prioress was her older sister who’d entered the caramel before her. The tonality of everything she says, “It is to you, dear mother, who are doubly my mother, that is you’re my mother, you were motherly presence to me when I was a little girl, especially when our mother died and now as Reverend mother, as Prioress, you mother are doubling my mother.” And so it’s affectionate and therefore she’s experiencing the love of God in the love of the tenderness of the intimacy of their relationship with each other, that I come to confide the story of my soul and she never leaves that.

She’s so simple, but it’s like the divine depth dimension of the simplicity of herself That’s what makes her so accessible. She’s inviting us to do the same thing when we listen to this and we go, “Insofar as we’re touched by the beauty of this at all, we’re touched in the intimate simplicity of our own sincerity with ourselves.” It’s not a method, it’s not a strategy. It’s almost like the luminosity of the immediacy of ourself that she invites us to sit with and walk with and be more stabilized because that’s where God’s present is in our heart. Turning to the Mystics will continue in a moment.

Kirsten Oats:                I think that’s a really important point you’re making, Jim, that all these mystics have their own charism or what they’ve given to leave in the world. And what you’re saying is we’re not looking here for a path or even a practice like Brother Lawrence offered, a practice with suggestions of how to do it. For me, what it feels like is I’m listening in on her conversations with Jesus, with God. It’s like Jesus is sitting next to her all the time and she’s just in this constant … Everything’s referenced back to Jesus and to God. And it’s just an invitation to sit in on that conversation and then realize that I have access, that same kind of access.

Jim Finley:                    That’s right. I notice that she goes through this first manuscript, a lot of it is her childhood and the childhood are illuminations that she had that she sees like divine significance and closeness and they’re utterly ordinary. So she’s inviting us to calibrate our heart to see the divinity of the ordinariness of ourselves. This is why sometimes I think in our own life we can look back to quickening moments. Sometimes there is events we can look back sometimes where it happens. But very often I think we can’t find exactly when it happened. The image I use is like water filling the marshlands. It’s imperceptibly slow, but at some point there was a subtle gravitas or a subtle inner subtle gratitude and delicacy. And you can tell she’s speaking in that delicacy and that’s what makes her so accessible. She’s inviting us to our own delicacy. The way we listen to her is itself, she’s luring us in to God’s oneness with us and the delicacy and sincerity of ourself. And in a way, that’s her teaching.

Kirsten Oats:                So just going back to that first paragraph, she says, “The day you asked me to do this, it seemed to me it would distract my heart by too much concentration on myself.” And I loved that phrase and you said, “Distracted from what? ” And really it’s back this conversation she’s in with God. I And Jesus constantly. Will I be distracted from my relationship? What a great question. What a humble question.

Jim Finley:                    It is a great question. And I want to touch on again, we were alluding to it earlier. In a way, see what we’re talking about is this, what she really says is this, but since Jesus made me feel that and obeying simply, I would be pleasing him. To obey simply see, like to obey simply is to please him. And I think this, here’s how I see it helps me to see it. All of us are in the midst of a situation. I’m in my own living room right now. I’m 82 years old. Marine’s ashes are on the table, the ocean’s outside. It’s raining. After I finish, I got to go have lunch and my daughters will call me. And I’m in a situation right now teaching. So we might say, how can I, by obeying what love is asking out of me in the concreteness of my situation, it’s actually I’m obeying how God is present because God’s ribboned in the details of my situation.

Kirsten Oats:                Yeah.

Jim Finley:                    And that’s what we’re trying to see. We’re trying to see the providential wisdom of the presence of God, this ribbon to the details of our situation. So if we’re wiping down the kitchen counter, it isn’t as if we have to do the dishes real quick and sit down so we can find God and pray. We’re wiping down the kitchen counter when somehow God is present in the mystery of the ordinariness of wiping down the kitchen counter. And she’s trying to bring us into that perpetual sensitivity that everything matters more than can be explained. But that means the ego has to be left behind where it matters in terms of itself, trying to perform something, achieve something. And so it’s that. Yeah.

Kirsten Oats:                So then what you’re saying, Jim, in a way, everything could be a distraction or everything could be an opening. So I could be distracted by my work and all caught up in my work and stressed about my work. All my work, I could discover God’s presence flowing through me in my work and being a part of the organization I’m working for.

Jim Finley:                    Yeah. When we were doing T.S. Elliot The Four Quartets and he says, “I was distracted from the distraction by a distraction. Don’t distract me now. I’m being distracted by this. I’ll be distracted by you later.” And as he says that, and so what she’s saying is we move from distraction to distraction because we’re afraid if we wouldn’t be distracted, there’s nothing there. And it’s almost I’m just the self things happen to. I’m just what I’m doing and I am doing what I’m doing, but I’m caught up. I’m afraid there’s nothing more. But Thérèse is saying, but if you look real, real close at moments of love or moments of simplicity, there’s something unexplainably more that’s shining through and transcending the chores. So you’re exactly right. The work can be seen as a chore and it is a chore and has a chore aspect to it.

Kirsten Oats:                Yeah.

Jim Finley:                    But the point is the task at hand matters. It’s like this. I hope this time goes well. Seriously, I worked hard on it and you worked hard. We all hope it goes well.

Kirsten Oats:                Yeah.

Jim Finley:                    But we hope it goes well, not in the sense like a bullseye, like achieving something. I hope it goes well in that God might help us turn to Thérèse and helping everyone who’s listening to this deep in their sense of God. I hope it goes well in that sense. So when I’m achieving anything at all, I’m achieving something that’s meant to be of service to the world. If I’m selling washing machines or insurance policies or whatever, it matters because people matter and life matters. And it’s like that, I think.

Kirsten Oats:                I love what you’re saying and what she’s teaching us because what she’s saying is, “I know when I’m distracted, I know what I’m distracted from.” And that’s what you’re saying. It’s almost like often we don’t know what we’re being distracted from. We’re so caught up in the distraction.

Jim Finley:                    That’s exactly right. And we can tell we get distracted from God and all the moments we get reactive. There are all moments in which we feel and believe that the outcome of the situation has the authority to say who we are. It’s like the authority of conditioned states over the infinite love, the transcendence and its permeating condition states. And Thérèse is always trying to help us. See, the light shines in the darkness and the darkness grasp it not. It’s true that darkness doesn’t grasp it. We can unexplainably be illumined by what we cannot grasp. And that’s the shining forth of love or sensitivity or caring. So everything she says, especially when we slow way down like we are now, you can see this quiet luminosity that’s shining in what she’s saying and it’s shining in so far as we’re touched and listening to it.

Kirsten Oats:                And then I love this idea that as she’s processing, she turns in her discernment to this conversation, this ongoing conversation and she hears from Jesus. “Jesus has made me feel that in obeying simply I would be pleasing him.” So she had this very strong innate connection and discernment of Jesus’s will for her.

Jim Finley:                    She did. And Jesus’ will was concretized what the present moment was asking out of her. So right now it’s asking out her to write this. I love James Baldwin, the author, saying I like so much. I like his writing. He says, “Not everything in life can be solved, but nothing is solved unless it is faced.” And so she was always facing what was asked of her and doing it with all of her heart, like writing this. You get this feeling she tried to be present this way and engaged in the holiness of the task at hand.

Kirsten Oats:                Is what you’re saying that we start by looking at reality as it is, accepting reality as it is, and then we turn to our discernment process to work out what action we should be taking.

Jim Finley:                    That’s exactly right. And I also think Thérèse’s saying this. We were talking for a previous session, I forget what saying it was on. Dan Walsh in the monastery was saying, Thomas Aquinas is asking, “When it comes to the things of God, where should we begin?” And Thomas Aquinas says,” We should begin where we are.” But then Aquinas says, “But where are we?” From one standpoint, I’m right here with my understanding, but also it isn’t just that God’s in me, but I’m in God. See, where am I? Thérèse is raising that question too. See, it’s the concreteness that is the sacramental encounter with the infinite love of God shining in the concreteness of the act that she’s in and that all life is like that. She’s helping us to see him.

Kirsten Oats:                Yeah. I think that’s what I’m really learning from her, reading her and working with her is what true discernment is in relationship with God.

Jim Finley:                    That’s right. And she’s really the artistry of discernment. The discernment is an interior refinement of awareness that drops down into more delicate interior matters of God’s presence in our life. She’s constantly discerning this way, and that’s the delicacy of her language. And also then it’s the delicacy of ours as we listen to her. It’s us.

Kirsten Oats:                But I love that we’re just brought in to the depth of her conversation, her discernment process. It’s like a window.

Jim Finley:                    Exactly right. And the thing is, it isn’t as if I’m brought into her discernment, but listening deeply to her discernment, I’m brought into the depth of my own discernment, a God within myself, which is-

Kirsten Oats:                Resonating. The resonance of the truth of what’s going on with her is also inside of me.

Jim Finley:                    That’s right. That’s right. She says,” God made me feel that obeying simply, I would be pleasing him.” And then she says … This is a great last sentence. “Besides, I’m going to be doing only one thing. I shall begin to sing but I must sing eternally, the mercies of the Lord.” So here’s the thing, at our passage through time, throughout all of eternity, we’re not going to be doing dishes eternally and we’re not going to be locking the door eternally. But we will be doing one thing eternally is we’re going to love. So it’s almost right now she’s singing the song of love that she’ll be singing forever and she’s singing it now to us. It’s love that’s eternal. It’s a nice way to end that little paragraph.

Kirsten Oats:                That little paragraph. Yeah. And it so reminds me of what she said over the page. I understood too that our Lord’s love is revealed as perfectly in the most simple soul who resists his grace in nothing. And this saying yes to writing the book leads to this singing of the love.

Jim Finley:                    That’s right. Exactly.

Kirsten Oats:                Which in God’s great sense of humor made her a saint.

Jim Finley:                    It made her a saint. Go figure. She was in the same way as making us a saint. We tend to see the bigness of the teacher, but don’t forget, has she not written this, she was a cloistered nun. She would have been the anonymity of the dead. No one would ever know she existed. It’s like when I was in the cloister as I was visiting there again, the anonymity, all these crosses, no one knows that they existed. So there’s the anonymity of us, which is really the being internally known and loved by God perpetually throughout the whole world. So it’s mysterious.

Kirsten Oats:                Yeah.

Jim Finley:                    Yeah.

Kirsten Oats:                Well, one last thing I wanted to touch on was this idea of the love that she was expressing that you just spoke about, that last sentence. She learned a lot about that as a child in the loving family she grew up in. And you talked about how it can be helpful for us to reflect on loving relationships we had when we were younger.

Jim Finley:                    That’s right. It’s interesting how she goes back through her childhood, but what she sees in the childhood are lessons that she learned. So in the next session, we’re going to be talking about the child Jesus. So how do we as adults cultivate the qualities of children in which spiritual maturity consists? And here’s a way that I put it. How has it come to pass that we become the person who’s capable of being sensitive to matters like this to the degree that we are capable, and it wasn’t always like this with us. How did we learn this? If we look back, it’s tracings of shifts and sensitivities, which at the time we didn’t see the implications of the shift, but the accumulative shift of sensitivities, including the sensitivities learned in setbacks, brought us providentially right up to this very moment in which we’re able to be present like this to each other. And I think that’s very much too at the heart of her teachings.

Kirsten Oats:                Because she went through a great suffering after her mother died when she was four. She really experienced that loss profoundly, but then she also learned a great love with her older sister who stepped in and just took over the role of mother and really cared for her.

Jim Finley:                    That’s right. And then also her four older sisters, they all left and joined the cloister. So she was there all alone with her dad, and then she lost that. And then also later, she’s going to talk about when she enters the … Not long after she entered, her father developed a cognitive impairment like Alzheimer’s, which then had a lot of shame connected around. People didn’t understand it. So you also see loss is ribboned and woven in the bittersweet alchemy of loss and blessings and the providential nature of those patterns that’s in all of us, really.

Kirsten Oats:                Yeah. I was really struck by a phrase in your session where you said, the rhythm of light and darkness in our heart that to be human is to live inside of a reality that creates that rhythm in our heart.

Jim Finley:                    And that rhythm is in all of us, it goes on and on and on. As a clinical psychologist, who as a therapist, you sit with that rhythm because I think another insight with Thérèse though. The rhythms of light and dark, let’s say the lighter moments of grace and plenitude and thank God for those, I’ll take all I can get. But the point is the light is finite. So the big thing is we see an infinite light transcending that and shining down into and giving itself to us as that. Likewise, in the darkness of trauma, loss and so on. It is trauma and loss. But what you start to discover down into the depths of the loss is the presence of God unexplainably present in the loss. Sometimes when you’re shooting the rapid, you can’t feel it, but it’s always there. And a lot of the things we talked like earlier we were saying that we know today about the mercy of God and so on, a lot of it is we learned it in hours of loss.

And it’s not to romanticize the loss because what was terrible was terrible, but it’s not just terrible. We were given things that we wouldn’t know today had we not gone through this. And so this pattern of light and dark is riven with the divinity that’s woven through that pattern, transcending it and present as the pattern itself. Here’s Teresa and ordinariness again.

Kirsten Oats:                I think that’s so key. Jim, what you just said about God being present in the rhythm itself of the light and dark, because I think a lot of people, myself included, when you think about enlightenment, this longing to be enlightened, that it would feel like you’re always in the light.

Jim Finley:                    That’s right.

Kirsten Oats:                And what you’re saying is that’s not what it will feel like. This rhythm will still be, but you’re in the humanity, the rhythms of light and darkness, but in the faith, you know that the light shines through the light and the darkness.

Jim Finley:                    And as we go through these sessions too, we’ll see. Like for her St. John of the Cross, he did Dark Night of the Soul and moments of deep loss. Then he says, “It’s in those moments of laws, oh night lovelier than the dawn.” And he says, “This darkness that we feel were actually being blinded by an infinite light.” And he says, “If we don’t panic and just sit with it,” he says, “Oh night lovelier than the dawn.” So that’s the divinity of the darkness in which we lose our way, but that’s where God finds us. God comes looking for us in the very places we’ve lost our way. And we all have our own pattern. We can name moments that that’s been true. And we could be in the middle of one right now waiting to be found, headed right towards us. And hopefully these talks are embodying that.

That’s lovely. Yeah.

Kirsten Oats:                I love that. And Jim, just to expand on that a little bit, if I think of St. John of the cross, say in the light side of circumstance, he met Thérèse, they had this beautiful friendship. So that would be a light in his life, but also in that relationship, the divinity of God shown through. So it had the positive circumstance and the experience of God’s presence. Then he went through this very dark and terrible experience where the people of the church of his denomination put him in prison and imprisoned him and tortured him and didn’t feed him. And so he had these very dark circumstances, but God’s light or God’s love found him there also. Is that what we’re talking about in those rhythms?

Jim Finley:                    It’s really, really true. One of the things I like so much about a psychotherapist, I work with trauma. With people wanted spirituality to be reached in their trauma. Interesting thing about therapy is there’s no small talk in therapy. And a person is sitting and they’re trying to find someone in whose presence it’s safe to let themselves feel the internal life’s hurt and how to have someone to help us find our way that we’re not alone, that we’re seen, understood, and so on. So I think we see spirituality explicates the divinity of that pattern. Thomas Merton says that with God to understand us to realize we’re infinitely understood, we might say to see is to know we’re infinitely seen. And this is at the heart of Thérèse.

Kirsten Oats:                One thing I was curious about, you were talking about how love is such a critical factor in Thérèse’s story and in the way we discover God. And I’m curious about her relationship with Jesus. So say for those of us who don’t have a loving family that doted on us the way Thérèse did, I’m curious about the role of Jesus to be the one that helps us discover that love incarnate in the human experience.

Jim Finley:                    I want to clarify something that I think is important too. When we look at the different mystics, some people don’t experience Jesus. It’s not their calling. Like Meister Eckhart, he doesn’t know about Jesus this way. He really does. He talks about God at the infinity of the nothingness of everything and how we can have this state. So some people, Jesus might not be their way. So that’s why these different mystics, you find the mystic that resonates with your way. For a long time, I didn’t either. Actually, for some reason I’ve gotten older. For some reason, I’m becoming more Jesus centered. And I think what it is see for us in the Christian dispensation of grace, what we find in Jesus is that whatever it means to be God, whatever it means to be human or inseparably intertwined is one unity. So Thomas Merton says when Jesus says I and I say, it’s the same I, the order of grace and love. That’s who she saw Jesus to be. To be intertwined into the very humanity of myself because the word became flesh and dwelt among us. But the word that became flesh, namely the flesh that I am in Jesus is the divinity of myself where Jesus meets me in my brokenness and takes me to him.

So unexplainably forever, which is the mystery of the cross. Greater love than this is no one than he lays on his life for his friends. So she saw Jesus as his friend who meets us and takes us to his self and is woven into our humanity, that our very humanity is woven into divinity. That’s holiness.

Kirsten Oats:                Yes. Having a similar experience in that, I was much more drawn to a mystic like Meister Eckhart.but now just really, maybe it’s the troubling times in the world, but just really finding great comfort and inspiration from Thérèse in how to be in discernment and relationship with Jesus.

Jim Finley:                    And I think also it’s lovely about going through these mystics that I was introduced to in the monastery. A lot of people to respond … I was so moved by when we did the way of a pilgrim, like the Jesus prayer, because it’s so heart … It’s a narrative of experience. And then you look at Eckhart and then Julian, Cloud of Unknowing Nothing doesn’t talk about Jesus’ way either, but Julian, that’s her-

Kirsten Oats:                Whole Julian, that was her hope.

Jim Finley:                    So I think we’re to find our way that’s like our primary way, but no, there’s intimations of all the ways. And as we go through life, it’s ribbon back and forth. So the primary way now, it might shift and fall in more into the background. It’s included. So we have to ride the waves of where we are, how grace is moving us. And it’s always true, I think.

Kirsten Oats:                Last question is on this theme of sincerity that you speak often about what’s so amazing about her is her sincerity. And I wonder what you mean. I’m assuming it’s a spiritual sincerity. What is the kind of sincerity you see in her and that we could cultivate in ourselves?

Jim Finley:                    That’s right. Thomas Burton said, “With God, a little sincerity goes a long, long way.” Look at our love relationship, depends on sincerity. It isn’t as if the person’s pretending that they love us and we’re not pretending that we love them. So it’s almost when we go to prayer, we remind ourselves that we’re sitting in the presence of God, all about us and within us, closer to us than we are to ourselves. We say to God in prayer, “I’m sitting here like this seeking you, Lord. It’s just me.” And we hear God interiorly say back to us, God says to us, “Well, it’s just me.” I think we got something going here because we all want to see God’s the infinity of sincerity. Jesus was infinitely sincere. And that’s why when we meet him in discipleship, it’s heartfelt sincerity to walk the walk from our heart to be real.

Kirsten Oats:                Beautiful. Well, I sincerely loved your first session and I’ve sincerely loved this discussion, Jim. So thank you.

Jim Finley:                    Thank you. I did too. A practical note, in the real world, we need to be prudent about who it’s safe to be openly sincere with.

Kirsten Oats:                Yeah. That’s a good point.

Jim Finley:                    Jesus said, “Be wise as a serpent and simple as a dove.” He was nobody’s fool. But don’t be so serpent-like and knowing the waste of the world, what could happen to him. You forget how to be simple as a dove. And there’s this artistry. I think of the discernment of finding … Also, there’s parts of ourself we’re not safe with yet, like the interpersonal. So it’s life. But I so love that we’re doing her. She’s meant so much to me over the years. So it’s a delight to share her with all the people, hope it helps them.

Kirsten Oats:                Yes. Me too. And see you next time, Jim. Thank you. And thank you, Dorothy, in the background.

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.