The Little Way of St. Therese

Everyone at some time or another has the opportunity, even responsibility, for the formation of someone in their life. It is not just ordained religious or consecrated religious who can benefit from the ideas in the following. Parents, teachers, good friends all have opportunities to be guides for others.
The following pseudo-dialogue between St. Therese and Hans Urs von Balthasar was constructed from material in Two Sisters in the Spirit, a study of St. Therese of Lisieux and St. Elizabeth of the Trinity, written by von Balthasar.                                                                                                       
Therese:

You did not hesitate, dear Mother, to tell me one day that God was enlightening my soul and giving me the experience of years. … I am too little still to coin well-turned phrases in order to give the impression of great humility. I prefer to admit quite simply that the Almighty has done great things in the soul of his divine Mother’s child; and the greatest of all is to have shown me my littleness, my impotence.

Balthasar:

Before she could write such words, Therese had to become detached from her own person in an entirely new way, through the praise and even more the graces that her office brought with it. Her period as novice mistress teaches her … the complete discrepancy between [her] office and [her] achievement. Indeed, this discrepancy represents the essence of very ecclesiastical office … simply to be an instrument of the divine will and a channel for divine authority.

Therese:

When I was given the office of entering the sanctuary of souls, I realized at a glance that the task was beyond my strength.

Balthasar:

Obviously, an instrument can do nothing of itself, and the person who wishes to serve as a divine instrument must rest completely resigned to whatever use the divine hands make of it. And, when someone resigns himself into God’s hand, his own gifts and experience are shown up for the puny things they are. At one time they can be of use, and at another time they remain unused or may even be disturbing.

Therese:

From a distance, it seems easy and pleasant to do good to souls, to make them love God more by molding them according to one’s own aims and ideas. Up close, it is quite the contrary … one feels it is … impossible to do good without God’s help …. One feels it is absolutely necessary to forget one’s likings, one’s personal conceptions, and to guide souls along the road that Jesus has traced out for them without trying to make them walk in one’s own way.

Balthasar:

This sentence contains Therese’s own judgement on herself and her existential method; clearly her tenure in office had taught her the limits of this method … it was only her ebbing strength that prevented her from explicitly revising it to bring it into line with her interior progress.

Therese of the Child Jesus did at least learn to modify her method. Everything purely personal is expunged … there remains the one immovable landmark, the office manifesting the will of God. It is as though she stands aside from herself and she can turn the light on herself or away from herself … not as she feels but as her office demands. Everything personal only counts as material that can be used or just as well left aside.

Therese:

From the first, I saw that all souls have more or less the same battles to fight, but they differ so much from each other in other aspects …. It is impossible to act with all in the same manner. With some souls, I feel I must make myself little …. If I am to do any good with certain others … I have seen that I have to be firm ….

Oh how it [that is, the grain of sand with which she identifies herself] desires to be reduced to nothing … nothing but to be forgotten …, not contempt, not insults, that would be too much glory …. To be despised it would have to be seen, but it wants to be forgotten. Yes, I want to be forgotten, not only by creatures but also by myself.

Balthasar:

When she thus turns herself into an instrument, she excludes the possibility of judging the work she is doing …; in the first place the achievement is due to the artist, not to the brush; secondly, there is here no relationship between the quality of the instrument and the work it accomplishes.

Therese:

If the canvas painted by an artist could think and talk, it would certainly not complain of constantly being touched and retouched by the brush; nor would it envy the lot of that instrument, knowing that it owes the beauty in which it has been clothed to the artist, not to the brush. Nor could the brush, for its part, boast of the masterpiece it had helped to produce, for it would not be unaware that artists … sometimes amuse themselves by making use of the poorest and most defective instruments.

Motherhood

Last Christmas the cousins and aunts again celebrated the annual Bagnola party. The party is almost entirely composed of females and on occasion a privileged male is present to witness the spirits of the opposite sex having a gay old time opening ornaments in an ornament swapping revelry. It was during the ornament swapping that cousin Peggy asked if I missed my mother who had passed away nearly two years before at the age of ninety eight. Being the slow thinker that I am, I gave some bumbling answer the meaning of which even eluded me at the time. This incident must have been ruminating in the back of my mind the past few weeks and has now been brought to the fore, prompted by the passing of the mother of my good friend Erica.
Mothers have a certain aura about them, an invisible emanation that is perceived to be a source of safety, nurturing, love. This is probably most evident to their children. I like to think that this ability to project such an aura derives from a mother’s willing and numinous cooperation with God's creative power. We are so fortunate, those of us who have had the privilege of our mothers being with us until their old age. We've had the good fortune to experience and realize as mature adults this amazing quality inherent in motherhood. This aura does not leave us children (we are always children to our mothers) when our mothers leave to join the Lord. It remains with us and in many ways, some unconscious, we draw upon it to guide us and inspire in us a greater love for our creator.
In a certain sense we never lose our mothers; not just in the Catholic sense of the Communion of Saints, but, we can still experience their presence in a very visceral and palpable way.

Unless we take deliberate steps to avoid contact with the news of the day we cannot avoid the thought of the dire possibility of losing our American way of life. Consider the current issue of immigration with all its possible consequences. Possibilities that range from the generosity of sharing our vast resources and wealth with others who do not have access to such largess to the possibility of diluting and potentially losing not just our material wealth but a way of life that is a product of that unique democratic American experiment. 

One can see in these extremes an opportunity to love and a selfishness born of a fear of losing something dear. Proponents of either side can argue as to love’s true meaning verses the result of a loss of a way of life that has produced so much.

In the March issue of First Things author Mark Helprin warns of modernism and its potential to destroy from within as well.

“In the life of the United States thus far, we have had a great though imperfect and, in historical perspective, brief respite from tyranny, oppression, and “ignorant armies clash[ing] by night.” Powerful forces from within and without have often been and are now poised to end this. The fundamental inhumanity, regimentation, mechanisms of control and conformity, and ceaseless reductionism inherent in modernism are the fertile seedbed of political tyranny, loss of human dignity, ideological madness, and genocide of the born and unborn. In the triumph and worship of the modern and its unprecedented riches is much ugliness and danger.”

A Prayer for Passion

Photo of a wood carving at the Shrine to St. Therese in Darien, Il

Lord give me the grace to believe.

Help increase my belief in Your Word,

for Your Word is the cornerstone of my Faith.

May my Faith grow on this foundation

and inspire me with a passion that is just a tiny bit

of the passion of St. Therese.

“I have put on the breastplate of the Almighty

and he has armed me with the strength of his arms.

… I advance to the battlefield, fearing neither fire nor steel,

my enemies shall discover that I am a queen

and the bride of a King.”

“The proud angel, in the bosom of light, cried

‘I shall serve forever’ and I feel the stirrings within me

 of a courage that is prepared to brave the fury of hell.”

These quotes are taken from St. Therese’s poem, My Weapons, Verses 1 and 4.

Motherhood

Having just found out that our tenth grandchild is on the way I am again called to reflect on the unique spiritual relationship between mother and child. The post of November 22nd spoke of it. While going through my notes I came across this passage from a novel, The Prophet, by Jewish author Sholem Asch. The novel is a fictional account of the life of Deutero-Isaiah, or the second Isaiah.

"And was not God indeed the primal source, the father and mother as it were of all existent things? Did he not pour out his unique lovingkindness on all his creation? And was it not from the source of divine love that every created thing obtained the feeling of mother love? This love is the first and primal condition of the existence of every living thing. And do we not see every day the uniqueness of motherhood revealed in every creature? How do the birds know how to refrain from quenching their hunger or thirst in order to bring the berry or the worm they find upon the ground to the nest built for their young? How often, standing on the banks of the Euphrates, had he not seen the eagle bearing a locust for the open beaks of it's young eaglets who trustingly stretch out their necks not yet covered with down in order to take their food?"

What then is my God, what but the Lord God?

For Who is Lord but the Lord, or who is God but our God?

O You, the greatest and the best, mightiest, almighty,

most merciful and most just,

utterly hidden and utterly present,

most beautiful and most strong,

abiding yet mysterious,

suffering no change and changing all things:

never new, never old, making all things new,

bringing age upon the proud and they know it not;

ever in action, ever at rest,

gathering all things to Yourself and needing none;

sustaining and fulfilling and protecting,

creating and nourishing and making perfect;

ever seeking though lacking nothing.

You love without subjection to passion,

You are jealous but not with fear,

You can know repentance but not sorrow,

be angry yet unperturbed by anger.

You can change the works You have made

but Your mind stands changeless.

You find and receive back what You have never lost;

are never in need but rejoice in Your gains,

are not greedy but exact interest manifold.

Men pay You more than is of obligation to win return from You,

yet who has anything that is not already Yours?

You owe nothing yet You pay as if in debt to Your creature,

forget what is owed to You yet do not lose thereby.

And with all this, what have I said,

my God, my Life and my sacred Delight?

from The Confessions, St. Augustine

St. Therese on Being Holy

Sanctity does not consist in this or that practice, it consists in a disposition of the heart that makes us humble and little in God's arms, teaches us our weaknesses and inspires us with an almost presumptuous trust in his fatherly goodness.