Jim Finley:                    Greetings. I’m Jim Finley. Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.

Greetings everyone, and welcome to our time together, turning for trustworthy guidance to the teachings of St. Therese, the Little Flower. But when Therese was still a young nun in the monastery, the prioress came to her and told her under obedience that she wanted Therese to write The Story of the Soul. And she said that in The story of The Soul, she wanted Therese to share how she, going back to her experience as a little girl, began to experience God’s presence in her life and how the deepening sense of God’s presence moved her to enter the monastery, the cloistered monastery when she was 15 years old. Therese did that. So here we have the story of a soul, and so this is how she begins. This is the third edition of The Story of the Soul, translated by John Clark.

This is page 13. “January 1895. It is to you, dear mother, to you who are doubly my mother that I come to confide the story of my soul.” I’d like to start there. It’s interesting how she begins by responding to the prioress in such affectionate terms, calling her dear mother and that she’s “you’re my dear mother,” twice over. And she’s speaking in such a loving way because the prioress who told her to write The Story of The Soul was her older sister, who entered the Carmelite monastery before Therese. And when Therese was very young and their mother died, her older sister took Therese on, took a watchful eye over her. So she’s like her mother twice over. So her mother is her mother who died and now the prioress is her mother. And in a way she’s threefold Now, she’s Mother Prioress, she’s Reverend Mother Prioress.

So what you have then, I think, in the teachings of Therese right away is, and she starts to write about this a lot in The Story of The Soul, is that the family, they were blessed at how much they all loved each other. They all cherished and just loved each other so much, and it’s in their love for each other now that she’s able to write in such a personal, affectionate way to her sister about the disclosing of the story of her soul. And I think for us and taking her on as our guide, she helps us to be aware of who is it in our life that when we look back, they cherished us, they loved us, and who are the people that loved us and do love us and the people that we loved and do love that add to the interior richness of who we are, the inner richness of our life.

She starts there. She invites us to be sensitive to that dimension of ourselves. She then goes on to say, “The day you asked me to do this, it seemed to me that I would distract my heart too much concentration on myself.” I reflect on this that she was really concerned and starting to do this, that she would be distracted by focusing on herself. And so the question is, distracted from what? And she goes on to say, and this runs to The Story of The Soul, that she would be distracted from realizing that it’s in the love that they had for each other growing up as a family, that she experienced the love of God, that she thought the love of God was incarnate in their love for each other. And she also sensed that it’s in the love of God incarnate in their love for each other, that she so found in Jesus that the love that God had for her in Jesus personally.

And she was called to deepen not just for love for the presence of God in her family, but she was called to give herself in love to the God who in love was giving the infinity of God to her. And so as this love bond, it was really at the heart of her contemplative vocation as a nun. So that’s what she was worried that she would be distracted from, that if I think too much of myself, I’ll be distracted from the love bond of God’s infinite, being infinitely in love with me, inviting me to give myself in love to the love that’s in love with me. And she said that this was a concern for her.

And I think what we see in it is the delicacy of her sincerity, a fidelity to love. And again, I think there’s another lesson like the intimacy of her teachings for us about the love of God and where are we at in terms of our own sensitivity to God’s love for us and our love for God, and where are we at, and being perhaps distracted by that since we don’t live in cloistered convents, probably distracted a lot. But when we listen to her and we sit in her presence, she guides us into this sensitivity, which I think is a devotional sincerity that moves us to listen to this. It’s a gift in our life.

She then goes on to say, “But since then Jesus made me feel and obeying simply I would be pleasing him.” I’d like to reflect on this for a minute. It isn’t just that she had this psychological insight, but rather she saw that God was personally guiding her to simply obey. St. Paul, the Epistle to the Romans writes, “The Spirit helps us in our weakness for we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.” So there’s a sense the indwelling presence of God within us and love for us is personally inspiring us and personally moving us because the Spirit moves us with unutterable groanings. But the groanings give rise to insight, but it’s the arising of the groanings of spirit that give rise to our insight.

And so we should realize that the intimations that come to us, the insights that come to us, are actually the actual presence of God in loving ongoing communion with us, inspiring and moving us to what prompts our heart to love. And so we might say too with us, why are we listening to these reflections? Just out of curiosity? Probably not. Is it that we’re moved to listen to these reflections, to be present to these reflections because the Spirit within us is moving us to listen to these reflections? Because in these reflections, the spirit of God is personally drawing us to be more aware of God being in love with us and drawing us in the intimacy and the sincerity with which we’re doing this right now. This indwelling sense, this ongoing inspirational sense that is actually the presence of God moving and inspiring us, is very subtle. It’s very, very subtle.

She also saw that the subtlety of this love and then moving her to explore all of this simply obeying was also present to her and the love of God present to her in her suffering. And she reflects in The Story of The Soul when her mother died, is the suffering through the love. It’s the depth of the love that is the depth of the suffering when the beloved dies. Likewise, when the four older sisters of Therese all left home and went to the convent and because she was so tender and they loved them so much and loved her so much, the fact that she was all alone was another suffering, but she also sensed that the love of God was present in the suffering of the loss of their presence that moved her to be more deeply aware of in one with the God sustaining her and her aloneness, which also then moved and led her to join the convent.

So you can imagine what a love festival was when she walked through the gate and they were all hugging each other because they dowd it on her at home. Now they could all dowd on her in the monastery. This way it goes around, comes around. So I think another lesson that I would see in Therese is she’s so transparently sincere and she’s so disarming about the intimacy of love and how God moves in our hearts with love, to love and be loved by each other and to be loved and be loved by God. And this is really the essence of her teaching and as we listen to her, she lures us into this sensitivity within ourselves, this love teaching. Therefore, we’re kind of open to being attentive to what moves our heart. There can be the experience sometimes where there’s a friend who’s suffering, struggling, and in your love for the friend you say something and the friend finds what you said to be extremely helpful and you don’t know how you knew how to say that.

Therese would say that’s God. That God moved your heart to say what would touch their heart. And so she’s helping us to be sensitive to this kind of the nearness of God and also I think to heighten our attentiveness. There’s another moment of this for all of us, and she writes about this too in The Story of The Soul and later on even more, is that sometimes we’re not aware of any light at all. St. John of the Cross who she just read and absorbed, the Carmelite teacher also on The Dark Night of The Soul is the loss of the light and she writes about it that adds its own lessons on not to do violence to the fragility of our waiting because in the fragility of the waiting is where we learn to depend on God, who, perhaps in withholding the insight, is inviting us to a place where something starts to come through at a deeper level and that wouldn’t come through, had the insight come sooner.

I think very often I say this as a therapist too. Very often we struggle with things where there’s a long duration of living without closure and trying to get past the hurting place, but we realize that in that process we’d learned things and we learned we were being unexplainably sustained in ways that transcend answers and they transcend closure and go beyond, like the mysteriousness of love and the rhythms of light and darkness in our heart. She very much embodies that.

Notice something: we’re only in the third sentence. It’s going to be a long haul and it’s a long haul because she slows everything way down. A lot of psychotherapy is sitting with someone who keeps inviting you to listen at the feeling level to what you just said. We’re constantly walking right past what we’re looking for. As a young woman. She’s an amazing woman. She’s 23, just an amazing woman to have such succinct clarity that comes out of transparent sincerity and she’s helping us find that in us, not to walk right past into the complexities of things, into the underlying intimate sincerity that illuminates and gives the meaning to the complexity, because life is complex.

“The day you asked me to do this, you seemed to me that it would distract my heart by too much concentration on myself. But since then Jesus has made me feel that obeying simply I would be pleasing him.” I’d like to talk about obeying simply. What I see in it is that we’re in the middle of a situation. She’s a young woman in a cloistered convent who the prioress is telling her to write what she’s writing along with everything else is going on in her day. So you’re in the middle of your situation. I’m in the middle of my situation and so to obey simply is to be aware of the providential presence of God in the concreteness of the unfolding of our situation.

We’re living in a pattern and like right now I’m sitting here in my living room and I’m sharing this and when this is done, I have to pack my suitcase because I have to go on a trip tomorrow and then I have to do the dishes and cook dinner and talk to my daughter. How can I learn to obey what love is asking out of me in the concreteness of my situation? Like incarnate infinity, intimately realized in the love nature of the situation at hand, like the holiness of it. And so if I just obey, that is if I just obey the situation this way, I will be pleasing him.

Then she says, “Besides, I’m going to be doing only one thing. I shall begin to sing what I must sing eternally in the mercies of the Lord. I’m doing right now what I’m going to be doing forever in heaven. I’ll be singing in heaven by obeying God, by surrendering to the infinite love of God that has drew me into the presence of God. And so I’m just getting the head start on eternity by obeying God through love.” And likewise with us, in the sincerity with which we’re present to our teachings. We’re just simply preparing for what we’re going to be doing for all of eternity because our eternal destiny is to love and be loved by the infinite love of God, because we’re God’s beloved and it’s concretized right now in the unfolding of our days.

So far, I’ve been following sentence by sentence, the first paragraph. I’m now going to skip the next paragraph and I’m going to go down to the beginning of the last paragraph on page 13, which begins, “I wondered for a long time” and now we’re going to walk through that paragraph. Also, I’d like to add this. Outside my window, I live here at the beach and they’re doing some construction work, three buildings down, but we’re going to continue on because this is the contemplative life in the midst of the real world. By the way, those workers are working, earn money to bring food to feed their family and they’ve been trained to do a service is helping people. And so it’s another modality what we’re doing: living this spiritual life and this is obeying the situation. See, we’re being obedient to the reality of the situation.

And so she’s wondering how God… “Then I wondered for a long time how God raises up certain people” and she uses St. Paul and St. Augustine as examples “and the rest of us are just left in our ordinariness.” How is that? “I wondered for a long time why God has preferences, why all souls don’t receive an equal amount of graces? I was surprised when I saw him shower his extraordinary favors on saints who had offended him, for example, St. Paul and St. Augustine.”

So you look and you see that God raises up certain people, St. Paul, St. Augustine, a great stature and she’s looking at herself, but she says, here I am in my ordinariness. And I think too, this is where the vast majority of us are. We’re living in our ordinariness, but we look to people of great stature, St. Paul, St. Augustine, God raises up these people. And so how is it that God raises up these giants this way? And here I am in my ordinariness.

Next paragraph, I’m going to move down and jump down to the beginning of the next paragraph on page 14. “Jesus deigned to teach me this mystery.” So here we have Jesus again teaching her something, “he said before me, the book of Nature.”

I want to talk about this as an important point really, is that nature is the first Bible and that God creates all of nature. There’s a lovely passage in St. John of the Cross. He’s out walking in the mountains and he says it first when we walk in the beauty of the mountains, he says, “Through possessiveness of heart we say, this is amazing.” I wonder if I could own some of this, like real estate. He says, “You get a little bit deeper. And the effect being in the midst of nature has on us when we just get immersed in nature.” He says, “I realize that the beloved has passed this way in haste. She traces a divine love in the contours of the mountains.”

And then he says at the end, my beloved is the mountains. So here’s a very deep insight she’s seeing in St. John of the Cross, is it in creation. In creation, the infinite presence of God is presencing itself as the presence of the world that it’s created. In the beginning, God said, let there be light. Let there be stones and trees and God’s the ongoing presence is presencing itself in the presence of the world. That the world is God’s body. It is bodying forth the love that’s uttering it into being. Carl Jung says, “How can we claim the years have taught us anything if we haven’t learned to sit and listen to the secret that whispers in the brooks?” So now here we have Jesus teaching her a lesson and the lesson he’s inviting her to see then is the lesson that runs through all the scripture, but also she sees it in St. John of the Cross and the mystics this answer, why does God race of certain people, another in their ordinariness? And she sees it in the mystery that he turns to see it in nature.

So it’s almost like with God’s grace, seeing the world to illumined eyes, here’s what she sees. “I understood through the grace of God” that is I interiorly saw, realized “all the flowers God 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 the flowers wanted to be roses, the nature would lose her springtime beauty and the fields would no longer be decked out with little wildflowers.” And she said, “I’m a little flower growing in God’s garden.” And that’s why sometimes she’s called Saint Therese, The Little Flower. She sees herself as a little flower. I’d like to reflect on this.

Imagine there is the glory of the rose and the orchid and all of that. But imagine a field filled with wildflowers in the springtime, thousands and thousands of flowers and to know that the littleness of each one, that God is personally loving each one into existence. Furthermore, what that little flower is and the intricacy of its design, the subtle scent of the violet is really what God eternally knows the violet to be hidden with Christ and God forever. God is eternally contemplating the little flower in God. And since everything in God is God, this is the divinity of the littleness of the flower being the flower that God eternally knows it to be and is loving it into existence this way. And so since God is not diminished in any way, the infinite presence of God is presencing itself in the immensity of the mountains, but also the immensity of God is infinitely giving the infinity of itself incarnate as the divinity of the little flower.

In other words, there is the mountain. Let’s say you’re holding a grain of sand in your hand compared to the mountain. The mountain is so immense, the grain of sand is so tiny, but since God has not diminished in any way whatsoever, the infinite presence of God is presencing itself into your hand as the infinite presence of God is the presence that little grain of sand, and it’s nothingness without God. We don’t see this in ego consciousness. We don’t see it in ego consciousness, but in meditated prayer states, we can sense the incomprehensible stature of the simplicity of things.

There’s a lovely image of this in Buddhism as then a love story allies. Then master Doggan says, “Imagine you’re out in the middle of a chilly night in a big field of grass in a full moon, and imagine that on each blade of grass there’s a little drop of dew. And imagine the full moon is completely reflected in each one of those little dew drops.” He says, “Not a single one of those dew drops will ever be forgotten.” He said, “There are those who understand this and there are those who don’t.”

So this is the mystery really, what appears in time ends in time. But what is appearing is eternal because everything real is forever. It’s the foreverness of everything. It never passes away. It’s endlessly ribboned through everything endlessly passing away. It’s like Therese, Therese passed away, she’s gone, but she’s not passed away at all because right here helping us. And so there’s the eternality of that which passes away. And there’s the stature of the divinity, the boundarylessness of God comprehended in the smallest of things. I’d like to use another image of this too, where Gwagan Torshi goes next.

Let’s say you happen to know someone who’s gifted in some way. When I was with Thomas Merton, for example, I felt that he was just gifted teacher to the extent that you love them. You see the mystery of who they are isn’t reducible to the giftedness with which they touch your life. When we see these teachers, these great teachers, there’s an insight that the mystically-awakened teacher senses your reverence for them as the teacher. But they also know that what you reverence in them is completely true of you because you’re the beloved, worth all that God is worth to the infinite generosity of God. But the teacher also knows you wouldn’t believe them that they told you that, and therefore they accept the reverence as a temporary arrangement. They have the tradition in Buddhism of slapping the master. You don’t literally slap the master, but you make the gesture of slapping the master that the master’s delightfully unemployed. You two are boundless at all directions in the midst of your wayward ways.

And this is Therese this way. So she’s taking this little flower, that she’s a little flower, applying it to the stature that each is all are beautiful in the light of God and she’s now applying it to herself like the stature of herself. “I understood too that our Lord’s love is revealed as perfectly in the most simple soul who resists grace in nothing.” And that’s Therese. She resists grace in nothing as in the most excellent soul. And by the way, therefore, and this is where I would mention Thomas Merton, when you really listen the gifted, when you really listen to them, that the fontal source of which they’ve been gifted to speak of these things in ways that touch us always have their origins and the humility of their own vulnerable simplicity. In Thomas Merton for example, he says, “Oh, how far I have to go to find you in whom I’ve already arrived. I only wished it were over, I only wished it would be gone”. So there’s a kind of groundlessness about him and he teaches out of that groundlessness.

So it’s in this humility that we see the stature of the teacher of the simple, and that’s us. We’re the simple soul, but the stature of our simplicity is divine because we’re God’s beloved. Might put it another way, might put it another way. Where do I stop? I’m sitting here in my living room right now. Where do I stop? Do I stop with the edge of my body? Where does Jim Finley stop? Do I go out and I stop with my body or do I stop with the walls of the room? But what if I don’t stop anywhere at all? What if I extend endlessly out in all directions this way? This gets back to the cloistered life again that Therese lived as Thomas Merton living in the cloistered monastery. He had insomnia and he was lying in his bed at night and he says, “Suddenly the bed becomes an altar. And in a distant city somewhere, someone was suddenly able to pray.”

Thomas Merton said, “Perhaps the people we will touch most deeply are people we won’t meet until left who we are dead.” It’s eternal. And this is the stature of Therese and also then it’s the stature of us. Martin Heidegger reflects on this as transcendence. He said, imagine you’re experiencing a luminous state. I also think it’s the kind of luminosity that Therese lived in a gentle glow. It is not an ecstatic mystic having visions, but it’s almost like the divinity of the simplicity of herself that she’s so graciously sharing with us, which invites us to the graciousness of our simplicity. And so Heidegger says, imagine you’re in the middle of this awakening and imagine you would try to draw a circle around what is gracing your heart at that moment.

He said, “No matter how big you’d make the circle trying to circumscribe it, even if you’d make the circle infinitely big.” I don’t know if you can have an infinite circle or not, but he would say, “That what you’re experiencing would breach the circumference of that circle. It would do so playfully and boundarylessly as that which it delights to do.” It doesn’t have a about at the feeling of that which ends, and Therese doesn’t either, and she embodies it, but she embodies it in the littleness of her simplicity, which is her stature as our teacher, as our teacher.

So I’m going to end with God’s sense of humor. Therese is writing this young woman writing about that she’s a little flower in the garden and God does raise up certain people that are so big. Now years and years later, God’s sense of humor, she’s one of these gifted people. Go figure. You know what I’m trying to say? Goes around, comes around. But the stature is not the stature of a kind of measurable importance like the grain of sand to the mountain. It’s a measureless stature, the incomprehensible stature of simple things, which is us and God’s love for us. So for me then, I’d like to say that, and I hope I reflected this on why Therese has touched me so much over the years. I find that she’s just so stunning, but she’s stunning by the radicality of her simplicity, which brings us to the radicality of ours and the divinity of our simplicity and to live by it and to walk in it day by day. So we’re in her presence. Then this is the trustworthy guidance that she gives us, like the divinity of our self.

So with that, then let’s end with sitting in silent meditation. And so what I want to be doing, as usual, I’ll be inviting you to sit straight, fold your hands, or bow, and I’ll ring the bell once and I’m just going to sit for a few minutes. But what we’re doing here always is how’s this strike you? What I been saying. The tone of it or what is it? Do I mean? It’s universally intimate. We’re right at the edge of spiritual direction. Where are you at in your heart of how God is personally guiding you in the listening to this? And I’ll be doing the same as I sit here, listening to this, and that’s what makes this contemplative church. We’re listening all over together. We belong to each other in this communal sensitivity and gratitude, in the presence of Therese, this little flower of Jesus. Okay?

So let’s end by sitting together in the presence of God in prayer. So with that, I invite you to sit straight, to fold your hands, bow and repeat after me. Be still and know I am God, be still and know I am, be still and know, be still, be.

So then we’ll slowly say the Lord’s prayer together.

Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever and ever. Amen.

Mary, mother of Contemplatives, pray for us. Saint Teresa of Avila, pray for us. Saint John of the Cross, pray for us. Saint Therese, the little flower, pray for us.

Blessings. Till next time.

Kirsten Oates:               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.