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 in our search for God to the teachings found in Thérèse’s Story of a Soul. In this session, I want to single out three passages in Thérèse’s Story of a Soul that helps us to understand her insight into the divine child.

When she entered the monastery at 15, a few months later, she began her novitiate, which means she took the habit of the Cloistered Carmelite sister. She took the name of the devotional name of Thérèse of the Child Jesus and of the Holy Face. In our next and last talk, I’ll be talking about the meaning to her of the Holy Face which is really the presence of love and suffering and death, but here, I want to explore her meaning of the Child Jesus.

Anyways, just as she’s known as the Little Flower, she’s also known as Thérèse, the Child Jesus. So I’d like to explore three passages in which she shares her understanding of the qualities of childhood in which we experience God’s presence in our life. This emphasis on childhood, the Child Jesus, it doesn’t at all suggest that we’re not to mature into adults, but rather, to see that there’s certain childlike qualities that are the essence of spiritual maturity. So how can we as adults cultivate these childlike qualities as a way to deepen our experience and response to God’s presence in our life? That’s the theme that we’re looking at.

So, we’ll begin with the first text. This first passage in the Story of a Soul is on page 188. This is the first text. She says on page 188, “Jesus daned to show me the road that leads to this divine furnace, and this road is the surrender of a little child who sleeps without fear in its father’s arms.” I’d like to reflect on this. So the image, and I’m thinking of her own father, because they were so close and so much love, that really the divine child is like an infant that’s in complete trust and safety, is sound asleep as the child in the arms of God. And she calls it a divine furnace because this child, this very simple, deep child-like, this divine furnace because of other mystics speak this way, to imagine a red-hot stove and you put a drop of water on the stove and it vanishes. This is such a deep love. There’s such complete trust that all fear vanishes because we’re infinitely loved by God and held by God in an infinite love that completely transcends and utterly transcends any source of fear, any source of sadness. We’re resting in the midst of a fear, in the midst of the sadness, but grounded in this love that transcends the fear and transcends the sadness.

She then goes on to allude to a passage on the inner child and the gospels. I want to look at it here. This is in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 18, verses 15 through 17. In this passage, Jesus is at the end of the day and he’s sitting and he’s tired, and parents are bringing their children to Jesus so he can touch them. The disciples are sending them away, he said, “He’s tired. Leave them alone.” And Jesus says this, here’s the text. “Now, they were bringing even infants to him that he might touch them. When the disciples saw this, they rebuked them. But Jesus called to them saying, ‘Let the children come to me and do not hinder them for such belongs to the kingdom of God. Truly I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God, like a child shall not enter it.'” I’d like to reflect on this.

In some passages, Jesus refers to the Kingdom of God as God’s ultimate victory over suffering and death, where time will be no more and the lion will lie down with the lamb. It’s our eternal destiny, an eternal oneness with the eternal love of God as our destiny, as the beloved. In other passages, Jesus says we should bear witness to the coming of the kingdom basically by living a life of love because God is love. And when we stumble and fall, which we often do, we get up again, but we get up again in the suffering of our frailty, knowing that as deep as our frailty might be, that when love touches suffering, that love turns suffering into mercy and God’s mercy on us is oceanic.It’s boundless and infinitely deeper and greater and more sovereign than our brokenness, no matter how broken we might be. He talks this way. And also not just towards ourselves, but we should see everyone this way with God’s grace, like infinitely love broken people, God taking all of us to this love as our destiny as God’s beloved.

In still other passages, Jesus says, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.” That is to say, the Kingdom of Heaven, that is the sovereignty of God’s love that’s all about you is within you. It’s already here. What Thérèse is really concerned about is where this divine love is all about us and within us where it shines through into our experience. How do we experience this? This is what I want to explore at the heart of Thérèse’s teachings, it seems to me.

The way we enter it experientially is to accept it.That’s how we enter into it, but we have to accept it as a small child accepts. So it’s good for us to try to accept it. It’s a lovely thought. And when we try to accept it, we’re off to a good start. But as long as we’re trying to accept it, we’re not yet accepting the way a child accepts. When parents love their child, the child doesn’t try to accept that it’s loved. The child is loved because children are acts of acceptance in our midst is what they are. That’s what makes them so disarming and it’s what makes child abuse so painful and how the pain of it can go so deep. So we are to accept the way we experience the Kingdom of God within us now, namely that we’re immersed in the love of God, immersed in us and about us, is to accept that we are the way a child accepts it.But as long as we’re still trying, we’re not yet accepting the way a child accepts because children don’t try.

So then the question is, this is Thérèse’s teaching, it seems to me: how can we learn to go beyond trying? To become an act of acceptance? What I want to say here is, when Jesus often spoke in parables, and the parable is a story about a person and a situation. And when we meditate on the story, we realize it’s about us, that we can recognize ourself in the story. So I would like to share with you a parable, a kind of a parable of ways that we become an act of acceptance, but it’s so subtle and it’s so delicate it’s difficult to calibrate our heart to a fine enough scale that we can experientially realize the divinity of our heart.

And I think this is why Thérèse’s little way is called the little way. It’s not a big, overwhelming experience. Those happen. But really is calibrating our heart to such a subtlety that the sovereignty of this love is realized within us. Not just in certain moments, but how it could be in an underlying habitual way be stabilized in this love.

And so what we’re looking for, one, we can look on that story itself as a parable. It’s like a story. But what I’m looking for are parables where we can realize this happening in our own experience, but it’s so subtle. We often don’t appreciate the divinity of what’s happening. So I’d like to share three parables, like three personal stories that help us to see in the story, the story of ourself where we experience this. And I’d like to look at this as these three phases of Jesus’ life and phases of our life as phases of childhood. So how can we, as an adult, freely choose these certain qualities of childhood as the mark of spiritual maturity?

And the first beginning with Jesus born as an infant is the image of a woman holding her newborn infant, noticing how limited it is in every way. The second thing, we want to look at a parable of acceptance. As children get a little bit older, children don’t try to accept because their parents love them. They are acts of acceptance in our midst. So what are certain moments we become an act of acceptance and we go beyond trying to accept, we momentarily become an act of acceptance and how can we stabilize in that?

And then thirdly, when Jesus comes of age in the temple where they go looking for him and they can’t find and they go back, why did you do this to us? And Jesus says, “Don’t you know I have to be about my Father’s business? I have to be in my Father’s house.” And what children do when they come of age is they grow up. So we’re always outgrowing childish ways in order and a childlike way to fall into true maturity. So I’m going to look for a parable of where we do that, where we’re invited to step forward and to face and to live our life. So by these poetic parables, it can shed light on these moments where we can appreciate these moments of our own life and how they can be habituated, which helps us to trace out the path that Thérèse is inviting and all the mystics and Jesus are inviting us to follow. This is the first image.

Imagine a woman holding her newborn infant. And as she holds it in her arm, she’s taken by how small it is and weighing hardly anything at all. And as she looks into her infant’s unknowing eyes, she’s taken. By taken, I mean, she is experientially moved by how limited her infant is in almost in every thinkable way. Her infant can’t feed itself, her infant can’t roll over by itself, her infant can’t dress itself. And she looks into her infant’s unknowing eyes. Her infant doesn’t know who she is. And also the infant doesn’t know who it is because it’s not yet emerged in reflective consciousness. And also it doesn’t know that it is. It doesn’t even know that it exists.

So we might say she realizes that the infant is the essence of limit. And yet, and here’s the mystical poetic part, and yet with the imperial strength with which her infant clasps her extended little finger, like a king or queen holding a scepter, it all carries her heart away. She knows that if she were to die in the act of saving the life of this infant, she would die in the truth. She realizes unexplainably the limitless nature of the infant in the midst of its limits. Going to go a little deeper.

She also realizes, and notices awareness on her part might be very emotional, but it might be very subtle, delicate. She also realizes that in a way, there’s a sense in which her infant is revealing her to herself as capable of seeing that. She’s experiencing it because she’s not trying to accept the Kingdom of God within her. She is unexplainably revealing to herself of capable of realizing it in the presence of the infant. And to go even deeper, she realizes, yes, she’s an adult. She can get up and walk around and feed herself and dress herself. She can do all that. For goodness’s sake, she had the baby. She’s the mother. But the thing, all those things are finite. And so she’s kind of so taken by the limitless nature of her limits, experientially resting in it.

And in this moment, we might say she’s a momentary mystic.She’s a momentary mystic in kind of a quickening or a realization. She’s not trying at all. It’s a kind of unexplainably resting in the limitless nature of herself, being infinitely loved by God all about her and within her unexplainably forever.

And in this way then, when we hold her in mind, we can see moments in which this happens to us. It’s so sweet, in endlessly varied ways in the arms of the beloved, in reading a child a good night story, in smelling flowers and lying in the dark listening to your breathing in a kind of a silence, a depth that silences you, a pause between two lines of a poem, extremely subtle or delicate. You realize that you’re an act of acceptance, that you’re an act of acceptance, God’s infinite acceptance of you as the beloved, unexplainably ever so subtle.

Now, it’s really true that we can’t stay there. The cell phone goes off, life is life. But what we can do is ask God for the grace to cultivate the awareness that this deep place within us that is the act of acceptance is always there, and we can be present to it by engaging in a very adult way, grounded in the childlike acceptance of the presence of the mystery of who we are as God’s beloved this way. And I think this is an insight into Thérèse, an understanding of the Child Jesus, of the quality of childhood.

There’s another dimension to childhood that’s found in the same text by Jesus. The saying is that in the act of acceptance, but we have to accept the way a child accepts and we’re going to explore another dimension of this acceptance. How do we do that? Another parable on another dimension of becoming an act of acceptance. Because he says, “We will not enter the Kingdom of God unless we accept it as a small child accepts.” And here’s another parable, another story, a true story.

Years ago, I was on a plane flying somewhere to give a retreat. And I was in the aisle seat and sitting next to me was a woman reading a magazine, and in the window seat was her little boy, maybe he was four. And the little boy was looking out the window and he said over his shoulder, “Mommy, does the man driving the plane know where Grandma lives?” So you can see he’s taking this in. And the mother said, without looking up from her magazine, she said, “Close enough.” Because the grandma lives in the greater Chicago area, the Chicago Airport is close enough. But the child was too little to appreciate how clever it was. The child just kept looking out the window and just accepted it because the child is an act of acceptance.

Then an amazing thing happened and here’s the acceptance. The woman closed her magazine and interiorly I since realized the close enough answer wasn’t nearly good enough for her or her child. They both deserved better. And she leaned in real close and put her face up against the child’s face to join the child in looking out the window and she became an act of acceptance. It’s like you lean into it. You don’t choose it. It’s a luminous atmospheric spaciousness that you just gently lean into it, you realize that you are that act of acceptance as your deepest identity that is an echo of God’s infinite acceptance of you.

And so we could see how for her and for all of us, we all have these moments. But we all see that we can’t stay there habitually, but with God’s grace we might say Thérèse helps us to cultivate the habit that underneath the complexities of the day, there might be this childlike acceptance, this act, and it might shine out here and there unexpectedly in little glimpses throughout the day in all kinds of ways. And this is the little way of Thérèse.

I’d like to end with another thought. This is on page 209 of the Story of a Soul. See, because when we listen to this, we can say, “I see it in a way it’s very lovely.” It is lovely, but the complexities of the day tend to take over. It’s hard to be stabilized in this. So she says on page 209, “Mother, you know yourself that those souls are rare who don’t measure the divine power according to their own narrow abilities. Because the insight is this, the soul measure of God’s love for us is not the extent to which we’re able to measure. Up to anything, the soul measure of God’s love for us is the measureless love of God being poured out and given to us whole and complete in the very midst of our limitations.”

So it isn’t as if we’re to give authority to our limitations. Rather with God’s grace and prayer and the sincerity of our heart, we’re asking God for the grace to give authority to the infinite love. It’s infinitely in love with us in the midst of our limitations. And we might also say that Thérèse is helping us do this now, that is insofar as we’re removed by the beauty of this, where we’re touched by the intimacy of this, and right now we’re experiencing what she invites us to experience.

There’s a third and final dimension of childhood that she mentions. So I’m going to read the text. This is the Gospel of Luke, chapter two, verses 41 to 52. I’m going to paraphrase.

Every year, Mary and Joseph would take Jesus to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover, and they celebrated the Passover, and they were going home as long trek back home with all their extended relatives and family and villagers and going along. And they assumed that Jesus was somewhere in the crowd of the neighborhoods. When they found out Jesus wasn’t there, they had to circle back all the way back to Jerusalem, and they searched in Jerusalem for three days looking for him. I think it’s interesting, they searched for three days and he was in the tomb for three days. And it says that when they found him, he was in the temple and what he was doing, he was sitting there with the rabbis and they were stunned by the depth of his questions and how he was responding to them.

So the passage reads. “After three days, they found him in the temple sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions, and all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers. And when his parents saw him, they were astonished and his mother said to him, ‘Son, why have you treated us so? Behold, your father and I have been searching for you in great distress.’ And he said to them, ‘Why are you looking for me? Do you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?’ And they did not understand the saying that he spoke to them and he went down with them and came to Nazareth and he was submissive to them and his mother treasured up these things in her heart.” I’d like to reflect on this.

“Don’t you must know I must be in my Father’s house.” Put it another way, the thing about children, knows he’s 12 years old coming of age. Children grow up. That’s what children do is they grow up. We have to grow up because we have a life to live. We have to be about the daily business as the adult and they’re holy and they’re important. “You have your life. I have my life.” The concreteness of it. And the question then is how can we live in that concreteness, maintaining a childlike quality based on a spiritual maturity of growing up?

And there’s a passage in the Story of a Soul where Thérèse shares, she sees this as one of the most significant moments in her life. This event happened when she was 13 years old. It’s found on page 98 of the Story of a Soul. I’ll paraphrase first. She said they went to midnight mass on Christmas. When they came back, it was a tradition where her shoes would be filled with presents. Because they all doted on her, her father and her older sisters, they. Delighted in her delight. She took the presents and she’s going upstairs and as she’s going upstairs, she can hear her father say to her older sisters, “Well, fortunately, this will be the last year.”

She says. “I was going upstairs at the time to remove my hat and Celine, knowing how sensitive I was and seeing the tears already glistening in my eyes wanted to cry too, for she loved me very much and understood my grief. She said, ‘Oh, Thérèse, don’t go downstairs. It would cause you too much grief to look at your slippers right now,’ knowing this would be the last time this is going to happen.” But Thérèse was no longer the same, she’s speaking of herself. “Jesus had changed my heart, forcing back my tears, I descended the stairs rapidly, controlling the pounding of my heart. I took my slippers and placed them in front of Papa and we drew all the objects joyfully again out of the like holding it up to lighting in this. I had the happy appearance of a queen. Having regained his own cheerfulness. Papa was laughing. Celine was leaving like it was all a dream. Fortunately, it was a sweet reality.”

Thérèse had discovered once again the strength of soul that she had lost, and so she grew up. It’s like a subtle moment. It was like a little thing. But instead of running up to her room and crying and her father, they have to go up and console her. Instead, she chose to come downstairs laughing. And I’d impose her sadness on the parents and delight, knowing that they were delighting in her delight in giving them this and throughout the story of our soul over and over again, we see this kind of interior courage in her. And we’re going to see it, especially as she’s dying and going through it. So there’s like a strength about her that is the strength of the adult and the the maturity of the child that’s grown up into the adult of the holiness of the child, Jesus.

And so I think she can help us do this, look for these moments. There are certain moments where we’re understandably saddened by something, but we’re saddened by something because we realize we’re saddened by something that we’re being invited to outgrow. And by outgrowing it, with God’s grace, by outgrowing it, and especially if outgrowing it is going to make those around us happier, or they’re going to be more reassured in our presence, that we’re not imposing on them our immaturity. And this is doing love’s work. So there’s a kind of a childlike quality to spiritual maturity to mature into this amazing woman that she was, really. And she helps us and invites us to do the same. So this little way, it is little. And notice there’s no ecstasies, there’s no trances, there’s no miracles. It’s so little, but it’s the intimacy, the interiority of our own heart that we learn to live by in the presence of God.

And so with that then, let’s end with the meditation. 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.

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 at your temptation, but deliver us from evil for thine is the Kingdom, the power and the glory forever. Amen.

Mary mother, contemplatives. Pray for us. Saint Teresa of Ávila, pray for us. St. John of the cross. Pray for us. Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus. Pray for us. Blessings until 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.