Reflections on St Therese as a Revolutionary

So today during my Carmelite formation meeting, we took in a talk by Fr. Kieran Kavanaugh, OCD on St. Therese as a spiritual revolutionary. The following is a smattering of notes from the talk and my own thoughts and reflections on it.

What was really valuable to me about it was how he clearly outlined the historical development of the prevailing spiritual attitude among the French Carmelites of St. Therese's day. It is one thing to say that Jansenism had had a negative impact on French Catholicism and that the waves of it were still being felt in the 1890s. It is quite another thing to hear quotations from the influential books and the formative figures of those intervening centuries, and to understand how various private revelations and juridical aberrations lead to imbalances which led to St. Therese's Little Way then corrected.

What I thought was very interesting was how Jesus was understood in the milieu of French Catholicism, and Carmel in particular, after the Counter Reformation. Fr. Kavanaugh mentioned how the incarnation came to be understood as Jesus "handing over his human nature to the Incarnate Word" crushing his natural humanity by complete abnegation and austerity, and how glorifying God in imitation of his hidden life entailed seeking to do the same. It is all about crushing, mortification, crucifixion, and about how large hearted souls would seek to be immolated with Jesus in this way.

This sounds nothing at all like Teresa of Jesus or John of the Cross. The fire of Love is not leading the way here. There is almost exclusive emphasis on the annihilation of the human self.

The French Carmels were under the jurisdiction of Cardinal Berulle of France who managed to bring them there from Spain, yet sought to separate the Sisters from the Friars and stand in between as the sole figure responsible for their formation. Under him, the formation of the Sisters kept this severe austerity popular at the time and it colored the teaching of the Carmelite parents, Teresa and John.

In the mid 1800s, the private revelations of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque had their deep effect on the spirituality of the Carmelite Sisters. She spoke often of the justice of God, his anger at the outrages of France ad the wounds inflicted by his chosen people. The first French prioress (after the two original Spaniards, friends of the then-deceased Teresa of Jesus, left the French foundation) was of this mind centuries before. She also spoke of the need to "make reparations for the outrages," to "atone for the sins of France", to "appease the anger of the Father". Jesus was to her the "perpetual victimhood". The devotion to the Holy Face had this flavor to it, and of course that was part of St. Therese's experience in the Lisieux Carmel.

This simply sounds like Catholicism had become classical Protestantism. It is hard to distinguish between Luther, Calvin, and some Jansenist-flavored Catholic teaching of that time. "God beholds His Son as a sinner; Jesus suffers the disdain of God".

But the simple fact of the matter is that none of this is true, nor does it match with Teresa and John's teaching about Jesus and the spiritual life. It is not Catholic, and it is not Carmelite. It's plain wrong.

God the Father did not crush the innocent Jesus with sin. God the Father did not reject the hideousness of sin in Jesus. God the Father does not call us to destroy our humanity in imitation of Jesus nor to crush ourselves with suffering. God does not call us to become victims of his justice, nor does he wreak vengeance on innocent souls or Jesus to atone for sin.

It is impossible for Christ to be an object of God's wrath.

It is all, always, and only about God's love.

Jesus chose to love us unto death. His love redeemed us. The Trinity did not rip asunder; Jesus did not become foul in His Father's eyes. From eternity, the Second Person of the Trinity poured out love (Third) to the First. He did this on earth in his humanity, and this is called the Redemption. His love transformed everything.

For us, God's love is a fire that burns, and it causes suffering to the extent we do not allow ourselves to be loved. To the extent that we push away vulnerability and the suffering that comes from loving, and the love that desires to consume us, it causes pain. All of the expiation and reparation we do really boils down to allowing ourselves to be loved by God. This is what relieves God's heart. God does suffer thirst for us. He does not suffer from a lack of perfections, as human beings do. He suffers out of the superabundance of His love. Love suffers violence when love meets in encounter with sin. But it is also a happiness in suffering, because it is the result of love. This is what St. Therese knew.

I believe we are poised at a time when the felt need for love among humanity is so palpable that inventing new ways to make ourselves extremely vulnerable is almost an addiction. We need a theological realignment to dump substitutionary atonement and to embrace instead God as a Fire that burns and purifies with love. But we can't have a true doctrinal shift without the lived experience of holiness. The two will help each other. At some level, I believe this is what awaits us in the reunification of Christians.

Blessed Be God Who Filled My Soul With Fire!

The title of this post was the Psalm response from today's Mass. I don't recall it from years past. It's my new favorite.

The homily I heard today focused on fraternal correction -- that we need to give it, and how, and the humility to requires to receive it. We were encouraged to ask for the grace to give and receive, according to God's will.

A salient point was omitted about the nature of fraternal correction, though, something I was taught some years ago. When you boil down fraternal correction, its essence is this: You have forgotten how ardently and jealously loved you are.

When we sin, when we are stuck in screw-up mode, or are chronically deficient in virtue and character, what we suffer from is not a lack of being nit-picked by people who know the rules, the definitions, the logical progressions, the historical development, etc of virtue and right. What we suffer from is a deficiency of the inflow of Love. We have walls in the depths of our beings against God and reality. We have put up defenses to keep us away from Truth, for fear of what Truth is.

Fraternal correction says, "You are loved. You have value. You are better than that."

Oh, I know terms like love and value are worn out and they become white noise against our interior realities. This is why fraternal correction also requires being known, and taking the time to know another before presuming to correct them.

That reminds me of an experience I had in my 20s. I was coming to daily Mass but had not yet been received into the Church. I wore a sweatshirt to Mass one day that says in bold white-on-black letters "Carpe Diem". After Mass, a gentleman approached and instructed me that the phrase on my shirt represented hedonism and an immoral approach to life that excluded love and trust in God. He wasn't mean about it, but neither did he ask me anything about myself, or extend to me any other invitation into the community or anything better than what he perceived me to be a part of. Had he asked me, I would have told him I bought the shirt because of a lifelong struggle with passivity and to help me with my fears of stepping forward and living my life, which included at that time entering the Catholic Church.

And guess what? I still have that sweatshirt. :)

So what the man said did not remind me that I was deeply loved by God; he merely reacted to something he saw. That wasn't fraternal correction; it was being a busybody. It might have been very nice had he introduced himself and asked me about my shirt. Generally if people ask me "why" questions, I have ready answers, and you will meet my soul.

Look what happened when Jesus told and showed people how profoundly they are loved. The woman caught in adultery. The woman who anointed Jesus' feet at Simon's house. Lazarus. Things things set off firestorms of indignation from those who felt God was their personal possession. That is how you know you have real love making real waves into real hearts: some people melt and repent, others see and become furious.

It takes courage to love. It takes courage to open yourself to God to allow Him to love through you. We are not our own; we are bought at a price. His love bonds us to Him and our souls are filled with His fire. 

Hypercompetence

I'm seeing a negative tendency of mine surface again; I'll call it hypercompetence. I don't mean by this a special giftedness. I mean a tendency I have to mentally and emotionally take on what I perceive as problems caused by, or poised to happen as a result of, the incompetence of people around me, whose responsibilities they actually are. I get confused about whose job is whose.

I've told my spiritual director about this scene several times: many years ago during a snow emergency in Steubenville, I decided to go outside and shovel the driveway. A snow emergency means there are legal restrictions on travel due to the bad conditions of the roads. Most of the time, it also means that streets are not cleared at the time, especially not side streets like the one I lived on at the time. I couldn't stop with shoveling the driveway; I was compelled to go out and shovel in the street as well. Later, an acquaintance told me he'd seen me shoveling, and not knowing it was me said he felt sorry for the poor soul out there taking on the snow storm single-handedly.

There is something noble in this Goliath-style battle, and there can also be something danged neurotic in it. It all depends on why the battle is engaged.

Elijah expected God's presence, because God had told him to be ready. But Elijah had learned not to respond to everything as if it were God's messenger. Not everything is God's call to action. The need here is to be intimate with God, to know Him, to recognize His voice. Knowing him requires letting some things that would naturally get our attention pass on by us, and to wait for the supernatural presence of God.

This is no excuse for laziness or lack of discipline. Daily we pray, daily we meditate on the Word of God, daily we receive Eucharist, daily we examine our hearts and confess our sins. We respond with sacrificial love when needs are put before us; we don't walk by on the other side of the road and allow religion to exempt us from love.

But it does mean there will be monkeys and circuses that truly are not ours.

They may even be close enough that we hear and smell them; some of those monkeys may touch us. But to live with God is not to take on all the problems we see. I am not called to be the fixer of all things. I am called to be the lover of Christ and His people. A thousand competitors may clamor for my attention, but not one of them should pull me from this love into panic, worry, or hypercompetence, whereby I launch out to become the Savior apart from Christ. I am not the Savior, but I know Him. My call is to love, and by loving to open paths of grace in prayer, and sometimes grace in speech -- including encouragement, correction, rebuke, and teaching.

And sometimes all it takes is a deep breath, and letting the wind, the earthquake, and the fire pass by.