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 spiritual teachings found in Saint Thérèse’s Story of a Soul. When Thérèse entered the monastery, she followed the custom of keeping her baptismal name, but taking two devotional names that would embody her way of experiencing the presence of Jesus in her life. And we saw in our previous session, one name was Thérèse the Child Jesus. The other devotional name she chose was Thérèse of the Holy Face. And by the Holy Face, she’s referring to the Holy Face of Jesus. And that’s what we’re going to be reflecting on here. What she saw in her devotional sincerity to the Holy Face, the Face of Jesus, by following her, how it might help us in devotional sincerity to deepen our own experience of God’s presence in our life.

And I’d like to proceed with this in a a poetic, experiential way that’ll lead directly into the intimate interiority of where her mind is, and where she helps us go there too within ourselves. And I’d like to suggest first that the face of Jesus, really the context or the meaning of the face of Jesus is the presence of Jesus. That’s what she’s really talking about. And I would like to start there on a reflection on the presence of God revealed to her in the presence of Jesus as the context for the face of Jesus. And I’d like to begin to explain poetically with each other, and then see how that leads to our understanding of relationship with God and the presence. And when we love someone very much, father, mother, sister, brother, grandmother, grandfather, lover, spouse, brother, sister, whatever. When we look at their face, we see the face that everybody sees.

But in our love for them, when we see their face, we really see in their face their soulful presence, for which we are immensely grateful is in our life. It is a soulful presence that we see in the face of the beloved as the context of understanding where Thérèse is inviting us to go in our own understanding of God’s presence in our life. There’s an Irish singer that I like very much Finbar Furey, and he has a song, Sweet 16. And it’s about a young man being smitten by this girl that he sees on the village green. Finbar Furey says, “When I saw the love light in your eyes, the world held none but joy from me.” So it’s almost he just lights up inside. It’s seeing the love light in her eyes, which is seeing the beauty of her soul as the beloved. And so then we’re looking then to look at this presence of our soul that shines out through our face.

I’d like to get another image of this where Thérèse is really trying to help us. Sometimes it’s not the face, but the voice. And I shared this image that when Maureen died, I was used to seeing images of her face. I have the mirror in the living room. I was used to that. But then in a drawer, I found a videotape of the day we got married at Holy Spirit Retreat House. I even forgot that we did it. And when I heard her voice pronounce the wedding vow, I cried because the voice is the depth of her soul. So what we really mean by the face is that in the beauty of the presence of the beloved that unravels us, but it unravels us in a way that we’re so grateful for being rendered strangely the whole and being unraveled by love. And this is where Thérèse is going here with us.

And by the way, I want to say something too with love for each other, that when we see through love, the presence of the soulful presence of the beloved is shining out in their faith. If they return the favor and they love us, they reveal us to ourselves, and that they see in our face through their love for us, the depth and beauty of our own soul. That their love for us allows them to see in each unto each, then we reveal ourselves to each other in a reciprocity. And this is providing within ourselves sacramental sensitivity to how she’s leading up to how this is with Jesus and with God. A thinker that I mentioned before that I like so much, Jean-Luc Marion teaches the University of Chicago Catholic theologian, in his book Givenness and Revelation. He says, “The face of the beloved is saturated phenomena, but that the face of the beloved is saturated with unobjectifiable, undefinable, unexplainable presence.”

So the face is saturated with the unexplainable this way. It’s our love for the person that is a saturated state of consciousness that allows us to see the saturated state of phenomena as a depth of presence. Martin Buber, Jewish philosopher and mystic, Martin Buber talks about I-It and I-Thou. And he said, the I-It is what’s definable objective. So when you see the face of the beloved, that’s it. I-Thou it says, fills the entire horizon of your being. That is a lovely poetic say, like the boundaryless state of the presence of the beloved at their face embodied. And when they then in turn return and see that in your face, again, another layer of this reciprocity. Now what’s interesting, and we might say for Thérèse, steeped in the scriptures, is if this is the context for the face of Jesus. Who does Jesus see when he looks at our face?

Who did Jesus see when he looked at her face, looks at our face. Poetically was the direction we’re headed in, who Jesus sees when he sees our face. In the interdivine life of God, when God the Father and the Trinitarian unity of God, when God the Father expresses himself as the word, when God infinitely expresses the infinity of himself as the word, and then contemplates himself in the word. He then contemplates in the word. We might say the face of himself completely poured out as the face of the word in transubjected communion. And here’s the thing, that when Jesus sees our face, Jesus sees the face of who God the Father eternally contemplates in him before the origins of the universe. That God didn’t have to try to imagine what your face might look like, but your face in the interdivine life of God is the face that God the Father eternally contemplates in Christ.

And since everything in God is God, he contemplates the divinity of your face. So when Jesus then walks this earth and looks at the face of each person, he sees that face. He also sees that we don’t see that face, and that’s the fall, that’s the fallen state. So Jesus comes for Thérèse. Jesus comes to walk this earth so that in his presence, we might see reflected in his eyes, the face that he sees, which is the face of the unborn divinity of ourself hidden with Christ. And so for Thérèse, then these are the poetic connotations or sensibilities that’s so evocative for her. And so strange about it is she’s so intimately experiential in the depth of the exploratory sensitivity. So as we listen to her, she gently guides and lures us into this sensibility. And the pedagogy is kind of being followed by her in the intonations of her voice revealing to us our own face.

In scripture, chapter one of Paul’s letter to the Colossians, verse 15, he says, “Jesus is the image of the invisible God.” It’s a very evocative metaphor to be the image of the invisible God, and she’s inviting us to see that. What’s very interesting for Thérèse also, is she saw this face revealed in the face of her sisters and her mother and her father and their love for each other. See, it’s in our love for each other. In her love, she saw incarnate, the face of Christ, incarnate in their face that they saw in their love for each other.

Likewise, we might say for us, when people don’t love us and they don’t see us, that I’m not who my father saw me to be, I’m not who my mother’s… Insofar as they failed to see the preciousness of who I am. And insofar I’ve internally traumatized, so I become blind to my own faith. As I’m also not who I think I am, but in so far as I can see in those who love me, father and mother, where would he be without the people in our life who is able to see in us as value.

We see that’s the face that we are, and that’s the face that Jesus saw in everyone that he saw when Jesus said, “What you do that least the least to my brother and you do unto me.” And so we’re to see the presence of Christ and the presence of each other. Toward the end of her life, she wrote an Act of Oblation to Merciful Love. It’s on Page 276 of the Story of a Soul. She wrote this ablation to mystical love when she was 23 years old, about a year before she died. And in the first paragraph to this ablation, “I desire to be a saint, but I feel my helplessness. And I beg you, oh my God, to be yourself my sanctity.” So how could she say, “I want to be a saint, but I feel my helplessness to be a saint, and so I want to count on you to be my holiness.”

And she can say that because in Jesus, Jesus God gives to us God’s own holiness present to Jesus, given to us, and taking on the human nature that is our own human nature. So God is our holiness given to us in Jesus, and that’s who she saw in the presence of Jesus, and that’s what she sees in the face of Jesus. It is then, in the light of these poetic sensibilities, like fine-tuning this atmospheric sensitivity, that we can now read a poem that she wrote to the Holy Face of Jesus. This poem is on Page 123, a Mary Frohlich book, Saint Thérèse of La Sue, the Essential Writings. She quotes it from a book, The Poetry of St. Therese of Lisieux, translated by a Carmelite Priest, Father Donald Kinney. And it’s published in the Institute of Carmelite Studies, which is also the Story of a Soul is published by them.

The complete works at Teresa of Ávila is published by them. The John of the Cross is published by them. So this poem is found there in her collected poetry. So it isn’t in the light of this, but I would like to poetically walk through at least the first two stanzas of this poem as Jesus and walk through it prayerfully. First stanza. “Jesus, your ineffable image is that star that guides my steps.” So your image is ineffable in that it’s sweetly unexplainable. The face of the image of the invisible God, it’s ineffable. It’s saturated phenomena out of the divinity revealed as the love of God incarnate in you and incarnate in giving yourself to me. Your ineffable image is that star that guides my steps. And that is to say, since your faith is the star that guides my steps, I’ve become an effable to myself.

I can no longer comprehend myself. I have become my own day by day walk has become a self-ineffable. I think this is an important thing about Thérèse and about all of us too. This is very close in understanding of solitude, like the solitude of Thérèse or the solitude of ourself. We may say that solitude is a transformative process in love in which we’re less and less able to explain to anybody, including ourself what’s happening to us because it’s infinite. Matter of fact, it’s an infinite love that’s given to us in our littleness, and in our nothingness without God. And she said, “This is what guides my steps. This is the walk that I walk.” You know your sweet face is for me heaven on earth. This echoes, again, we were saying earlier that your sweet face is the face that God the Father eternally contemplated before the orgs of the universe, giving the infinite love of the Father away as you.

And also, it is my face that God the Father contemplated in you before the origins of the universe. And that’s why it is for me heaven on earth because my earthly day by day faith is the faith that you saw before I was born in you and through your love, you’re helping me to see it too. My love discovers the charms of your faith adorned with tears. I smile through my own tears when I contemplate your sorrow. And here she’s starting to illumine the cross of Christ and the cross, which is the foreshadowing of her own approaching death. Stanza two. “Oh to console you, I want to live unknown on earth.” What if Thérèse was never asked to write The Story of her Soul? We wouldn’t know anything about her. And since she was cloistered, she was hidden. So Thomas Merton lived in a cloistered monastery, hidden, no active ministry, hidden.

He has an insomnia and he says, “Suddenly the bed becomes an altar and in a distant city somewhere someone’s able to pray.” The cloistered life that she lived… And I lived it in the monastery too, as the hidden life. But it’s fidelity to this hidden life is the life that touches the whole world in ways we don’t understand. It just so happens that through God’s providence, she was led to write this, and that’s how we know about her. But what do we know? What we know about her is her hiddenness, because she reveals our hiddenness. And the hiddenness is the hiddenness known only to God. It’s present throughout the whole world with efficacy. It has efficacy in the world. She has a subtle mystical insight about how we’re woven into the lives of everyone on earth, woven into the life of God woven into us this way, hiddenly.

“Your beauty, which you know how to veil.” I’d like to talk about this “how to veil.” So on Page 187, it isn’t just that she’s hidden on this earth, but she also reveals us that she’s hidden from herself. And also the faith of the Christ that she’s beholden is hidden from her, and it reveals itself to her as hidden. Here’s the subtle text on how she practices Lectio Divina, but we might also suggest it’s the text by which we sit with her in Lectio Divina, because we go crazy trying to figure it out. It’s a non-linear, intimate immediacy of what we can’t be explained. And she never lets up, and she invites us to stay there and be with her. Here’s the text. “Do not believe that I am swimming in consolations.” This is Page 187 of The Story of the Soul, which is the beginning of manuscript B, which is the second manuscript that she wrote, sharing with her the insights she had on this retreat, sharing it with the prioress, perhaps to be also her older sister.

“Do not believe I’m swimming in consolations. Oh no, my consolation is to have none on earth. Without showing himself, without making his voice heard, Jesus teaches me in secret. It is not by means of books, for I do not understand what I’m reading.” So she’s in Lectio Divina reading her spiritual book, but she doesn’t understand it. “Sometimes the word comes to console me, such as this one which I received at the end of prayer, after having remained in silence in aridity.” So she reads it, she doesn’t understand it. She’s sitting there in aridity that is emptiness, and she’s sitting there in silence about what she doesn’t understand. And she hears these words, “Here is the teacher who I’m giving you. He will teach you everything that you must do. I want to make you read the book of life where it is contained the science of Love, the science of Love with the capital L. Ah, yes. This word resounds sweetly in the ear of my soul, and I desire only this science having given all my riches for it.”

And it just so happens that quote is from Margaret Mary Alacoque, who is the nun who in ecstasy at night, she was a cloistered nun, had the visions of the sacred heart of Jesus. Behold this heart with flames of love coming out, crowned with thorns. And they found her actual copy of that in the monastery library that she read. So it’s interesting that in the words of a mystic, which she reads and doesn’t understand, but in sitting with it, it like reins down on her incomprehensively and is given to her as a unexplainable clarity. And I think she’s inviting us. It is not what we comprehend, but in the inability to comprehend it, incomprehensively realize in our heart. And she’s inviting us to go there because she lived there. Because that’s where the presence of Jesus is. In the faith of Jesus, none distinct from her face and our face.

I now like to turn to these illusions in the poem at the end of the first stanza of your face adorned with tears, I smile through my own tears when I contemplate your sorrow. And here’s an illusion to the cross of Christ. And here she’s very close to Julian of Norwich and the mystery of Love crucified, but also to her own approaching death. How was love present then and suffering and in death? At the very end of that first manuscript on the Child Jesus, as she was ending that, she had an experience of blood coming up into her mouth. And in the second manuscript, she describes this experience to the prioress verses… So I want to read you the passage of this turning point in her life. This is at the end of Lent. It was during Holy Week, it was on Good Friday night.

So symbolically on the night that Christ died, that she unexpectedly has this experience. This is on Page 210, the last paragraph beginning, “God granted me this last year, the consolation of observing the fast during lent and all its rigor.” That she was pleased in her frailty that she was able to observe the rigorous of lent with extra fasting and so on, the time of penance. Never had I felt so strong, and the strength remained with me until Easter. On Good Friday, however, Jesus wished to give me the hope of going to see him soon in heaven. Oh, how sweet the memory really is. “After remaining at the tomb,” she was referring to one of the rituals of prayer and the monastery at the ritual.

“After remaining in the tomb until midnight, I returned to ourself. I had scarcely laid my head up on the pillow when I felt something like a bubbling stream mounting to my lips. I didn’t know what it was, but I thought that perhaps I was going to die, and my soul was flooded with joy. However, as our lamp was extinguished, I told myself I would have to wait until morning to be certain of my good fortune. For it seemed to me that it was blood I had coughed up. The morning was not long and coming. Upon awakening, I thought immediately the joyful thing that I had to learn. And so I went to the window. I was able to see that I was not mistaken. Aw, my soul was filled with a great consolation. I was interiorly persuaded that Jesus on the anniversary of his own death wanted me to hear his first call. It was like a sweet and distant murmur that announced the bridegroom’s arrival.”

I’d like to reflect on this. Why is it so she gets in bed, blows out her candle, her little lamp. She’s lying in the dark and this blood comes up into her mouth. She says, “But however, since the lamp was extinguished, I’d have to wait until morning to see what it was.” Why does she say that?” Because in monastic life, I want to say what it was like for me at the monastery. We all went to bed at 7:30 and you went to your cell, you closed a little curtain on your cell and laid on your straw mattress and went to bed. It wasn’t an option. You couldn’t say, “I think I’ll stay up and read a little bit.” You went to your cell and closed the curtain, whether you wanted to or not, the common life. Likewise, if you had insomnia, you couldn’t get up and go down and read for a bit. You had to lie there in the dark to live the common life.

And when the bell rang at 2:30 in the morning for vigils, you said, “I don’t feel up to it this point. I think I’ll sleep in.” You weren’t allowed to sleep in. And that’s why she couldn’t light the lamp to see what it was. That’s obedience. But notice, we’re not used to seeing things this way like blood. “Oh glory, I’m dying.” You know what’s strange about that? I mean, it’s understandable in a way. We already know that life on this earth is fleeting, it’s fragile. And we already know that really we’re on this earth for a short time to learn how to love. We know that love is present veiled and efficacious under holding us through our insights and our mind, and our memory by how mysteriously we’ve been awakened to God’s presence in our life. By our will and our desire for God, which is given to us by God as an echo of God’s desire for us in our emotions as consolations and stirrings and awakenings and so on.

But when we die and cross over, it’ll be unveiled eternally forever in God. To be as one with God as God is one with God, because the generosity of God is infinite and we are the generosity of God, or the song that God sings. We know it now in a veiled way, but then it’s unveiled. And even though it’s true, death is something we’re ambivalent about it. Do you know what I mean? It’s so strange. We’re so bound. It’s understandable, we’re human, but she’s inviting us to be sensitive. The death is the gate of heaven. And which she’s really asking in this to the whole manuscript. Is it possible to die of love to the point that nothing will be left on me but love? And insofar as nothing left of me but love, even though I’m still on earth, I’ve already crossed over. So that when I biologically die, nothing will happen because I’ve already crossed over into the infinite union with the infinity of life given to me, but it’s obscure.

It’s hidden, but it’s intimately known. And it’s to that hidden place that her poetic sensitivity invites us to go. We somehow unexplainably know what she’s talking about. And by sitting in her presence, we can become more habitually established in it. I’d like to share with you, for me, she wants us to be personal, but what’s an experience where you’ve experienced this? So I want to share with you an experience how I experienced it. So maybe as you sit with it poetically, how have you experienced it where you’ve gotten like a glimmer of it? And I put this in my memoirs. When I was 14 years old, I was in the ninth grade at a Catholic high school. And instructed a religion class mentioned monasteries in Thomas Merton. And this is where the trauma was really horrible at home. It was just like a nightmare actually.

And he mentioned Thomas Merton. So that day at the end of school, I went up to the school library. And in the school library, they had one book by Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas, which is a journal that he kept in the monastery. And what’s very interesting, the same edition that I opened from the high school library is the edition that I have now. It’s the same cover and everything. I opened up to the very first page, this is December the 10th, 1946 of his diary. And Thomas Merton says this, “For myself, I have only one desire, and that is the desire for solitude, to disappear into God, to be submerged in his peace, and to be lost in the secret of his face.” At 14, I didn’t know what it meant, but something in me said, “Me too.” Because I think by the vulnerability of his longing, it access and awakened a longing in me.

And I would suggest, this helps taste the essence of Thérèse’s teachings, is the intimacy of a longing that we quietly sit with and rest in it and learn to live by it. Another thought I think with Thérèse, we all have moments. She’s sharing them when she sees the blood. I mean, there’s certain moments. She talks about the way she walks. So what we’re really talking about, it’s true that it flashes forth here and there like glimmers, but how can we be healed from what hinders us from being more habitually established in this oneness with this? And this is where I’d like to show the story that she was certainly familiar with of the story of Veronica’s veil. Veronica’s veil in the 17th hundreds by the pope was made as a universal, the stations of the cross, as a universal practice in Catholic churches.

So there’s 14 stations of the cross. Each one depicts a moment in the crucifixion and the death of Jesus. So it’s a devotional practice that practice the stations of the cross. And sometimes it’s done liturgically and lent, but you can go on your own and just practice, stand before each station. “We love thee, O Christ and we bless thee, because by thy holy cross, I always redeem the world. We can meditate on the cross.” When I was in high school, all the trauma was going on. I’d walk down to the church and make the stations, and I was consoled by the stations that I was not alone in my suffering. And she’s consoled by the cross of Christ and the suffering of Christ this way. The one station that’s not in the gospels is the story of Veronica, but it was a very early poetic image in the life of the early church.

And the story of Veronica is Jesus is going by carrying the cross falling down, and some people jeering and yelling and so forth. And Veronica is there, and she’s moved by love to step out and offer to Jesus the only thing she can offer. And it was risky to, and even admit that you knew Jesus because they might do to you what he did to him. She offers her veil. It says that Jesus takes his to her veil, closes his eyes and buries his face in her veil. The softness of her veil was the only tenderness he could find in the life turned harsh.

And notice if you close your eyes and put your face in your hands, the world disappears. So when he closed his eyes and put his face in the veil, it disappeared. And in that moment that it disappeared, Jesus without going anywhere in the midst of his agony dropped down into the oceanic merciful tenderness of God. And Veronica dropped down with him. And all the people jeering at the side, they dropped down with him. And we dropped down with them because it’s celestial, heavenly place. Because when he lifted his face and gave it back to her, it went on to be executed.

But when she looked at the veil, she saw his face on the veil. At least in the piety of the church, in the Vatican in Rome, there is that veil. And one day in length, they take it out and show it for the veneration of the faithful, whether it’s historically the veil or not, but in the devotional sincerities that is the face of Jesus. I have an icon here that I have which is modeled after that face, the face of Jesus. But here’s the real question. When you look at the veil, and this is at the heart of Thérèse, whose face is it? It’s Jesus face but it’s yours, because the faces are in her post. Because the face that Jesus sees is the face that God saw in Jesus. This is the face of love crucified, which is you because you’re walking your walk on your way to your own death.

So there is that face in you that’s growing older by the minute and will die. But the face that the one who loves you sees is the face of the beloved that never die because you’re eternal, and love is eternal. And that’s the mystery of the face of Christ. She’s talking about, we have to talk to the anguish that she went through. Tuberculosis was a horrible disease, and what’s so horrible about it is you can’t breathe. It’s a terrible feeling when you can’t breathe, so they put you on a respirator. There were no respirators. And so Mary Frohlich on Page 24, she’s commenting how Thérèse ended her life. These profound insights and aspirations were born all the days of grace and pain, which she had lived up to that point where to be radically put to the test by the events of the last 18 months of her life.

This went on for 18 months. On the night between Holy Thursday and Good Friday, she caught up a large quantity of blood. People of that era in which tuberculosis was rapant, knew from experience this was a sign that the disease was far advanced. And by an agonizing death was probably not far off. Perhaps it was exactly because they knew this so well that they tried to deny it as long as possible. Thérèse wanted to continue carrying out all her normal obligations, and her prioress concurred. Meanwhile, she received very little treatment for her disease and none that was at all effective. And I should add too, the reason none were effective is that there was no treatment. It was a terminal illness, and a very painful way to die actually.

Mary Frohlich continues. “At the same time, her intensifying physical suffering was compounded by even more profound spiritual trial. For on Easter Sunday, she was suddenly overtaken by a complete loss of the consoling sense of God’s presence, the dark night of the soul.” And that went on for months. So it was like the essence of desolation, physical, and that’s how she died. She kept saying, “I still hold you to the truth of Jesus, but I can’t feel it.” She’s like a patron saint of the dark night. She said, “There is no way to explain to you the nightmare that I’d live in.” Also, they gave her no morphine. They believed into monastic custom they shouldn’t give her anything. Just before her death, they gave her some morphine. And so she died really life of anguish. So not only was she dying in agony, but she also had lost God. And I think what she saw was this for us, what is the lesson of this?

And the way I put it poetically is that when Jesus died, see that Jesus lived our life, suffered our suffering, and died our death. And on the cross of Christ, he lost his faith. “My God, my God, why are you forsaking me?” So that in our loss of faith and we can’t find God, God is mysteriously impressed in our inability to find God. And she lived by that, but she says although she couldn’t feel it. So then when Jesus died, it says, they pierced Christ’s heart with a lance, and blood and water float out like at the birth of a child. Then poetically, we could say there was no more Jesus left in Jesus. And the only Jesus that was ever really there was manifested throughout the whole world of this day. And Thérèse gets to the point where there’s no more Thérèse left in Thérèse.

And when there’s no more Thérèse left in Thérèse, then the only Thérèse that’s ultimately there is shines throughout the world to this day, and shines this way. And just before her death, at least one account, she went into a ecstasy and fell back and died. And so literally, it’s so mysterious that the death itself is like a whisper. You’re going to exhale and not inhale. But the conditions that lead up to death, especially if we see someone we love dying, it’s heart-rending to see sometimes what we have to go through. We might hope that we’re spared of that. Maybe we are, maybe we won’t be, but it’s temporary. And also to lose God, what you’re really losing is that experiential access to God that’s impossible to lose. Because God’s present and is somehow the infinity of your loss of God, which is empathy with those who can’t find God throughout the whole world, that our suffering doesn’t belong to us.

And so then at the very end, she says that when she dies, she’s going to spend her whole heaven helping people on earth. And here’s what she discovered in the communion of saints, that in crossing over into death, she’s now in heaven. Because in the mystical body, those we know on earth that loves us and they died, they’ve crossed over into God and they still love us. The line between birth and death is ephemeral so that the eternity and time and death and life, so we’re all woven. And by the way, and we’re going to be joining them soon enough. And when we die and cross over, the people we love and love now will still love them because they’re going to cross over and join us. It goes on and on and on, and she saw that. So I think for Thérèse then, and our devotion to Thérèse is so poetically dense with simplicity.

Mary Frohlich points out that when she sees the suffering in the face of Jesus, it was also the suffering she saw in her father’s face because he died of dementia. She lost her mother to death and she saw in her own father that the fading away of his faith. But in the fading away of his face was the fading away of her father’s love for her that would never be lost. And so she invites us to sit with these things, to sit with him with a a childlike tenderness and a childlike delicacy for the mystery of the holy face of Jesus, that’s none distinguished from our own faith, and the divinity of our ordinariness. And this is why she calls it the little way, picking up a pin for Jesus. It’s so little. She says, “One act of pure love moves throughout the whole world in ways that are greater.”

She says, “Even what God achieves in the heart of the one who loves God and the simplicity of love is greater for God than the glory of creating the whole universe.” So the incomprehensible stature of the poverty of our heart is celestial. So she invites us to see in our own way how we can live by it and walk by it, and we can be so grateful for her presence in our life. So with that, let’s end with meditation. And as always, when we sit in meditation, I’ll just sit for one minute. But you as you’re so inclined can move as your heart moves you to sit. So I invite you to sit straight so we can ground this in prayer because that’s where we meet Thérèse is where she invites us into God is in prayer. So I invite you to sit straight and fold your hands and 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. And bow…We’ll 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. Amen. Marry mother of contemplatives, pray for us. Saint Teresa of Avila, pray for us. St. John of the Cross, pray for us. St. Thérèse of Lisieux, 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.