APPROACHING AUGUST 9, THE FEAST OF ST. TERESA BENEDICTA OF THE CROSS

                                  THOUGHTS AS WE APPROACH AUGUST 9

       THE FEAST OF ST. TERESA BENEDICTA OF THE CROSS: EDITH STEIN

"This spiration of love is the Holy Spirit himself, who in the Father and the Son breathes out to (the soul) in this transformation in order to unite her to Himself" (St. John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle 39:3).

How can we understand 'spiration' as a way of transformation and how might we explain it to someone who wishes to grow in love of God and the Christian life?

St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein) directs our seekings when she intertwines the concept of the "mystical night" with that of the "cosmic night." She teaches us that both are crucial for the soul's transformative journey into union with Christ through our offerings of our prayer and of our sufferings. When our souls are drawn into these "nights", the "spiration of love....the Holy Spirit Himself" ceaselessly breathes the love of Father and Son into our souls as He de-forms, re-forms and trans-forms our disordered spiritual life .

To understand 'spiration' as a way of transformation necessarily requires a statement concerning the meaning of the word 'spiration' within Catholic theology. This is almost impossible for a lay person to define in a book let alone in a sentence but even a feeble effort is appropriate.

The God of St. John of the Cross is Trinitarian.

God's act of Self-knowing generates the Son. The love of the Father and the Son, proceeding from a single spiration and a single substance results in the spiration of the Holy Spirit, third Person of the Most Holy Trinity (adapted from Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae).

Therefore, when the Spirit breathes, the Ruah of Father and Son breathe their single breath of unified love, never not creating, never not transforming, healing, beckoning, drawing all of creation into Self. 

We might liken this endless act of God breathing His life and healing and knowledge of Himself into our souls to a sort of Mouth to mouth spiritual resuscitation, born from within, endlessly breathing Breath of Life into our soul, desiring to lift us in our sinfulness out of spiritual disorder into His own Life. His Breath becomes intermingled in ours, we become one, yet He always leaves our will and our identity as distinct and uniquely our own.

"Through the Spirit, Father and Son breathe out into the soul in order to unite her to Himself" (St. Elizabeth of the Trinity).

And in our union with the Divine Three, Their Desire becomes our desire ... we then long to breathe Him out to other. 

"Spiration is the love of Spirit Lord," God, Ruah, breathing His continuous life-giving Breath into souls and into all of His creation. The Hearts of the Divine Three, Father, Son, breathing through the Holy Spirit, endlessly breathe into and pour Self into Self. The same Breath is breathed into us by the Spirit, the Breath of God. 

We breathe the Breath of God.

Pere Marie Eugene's words silence us unto awe ... "He penetrates us and envelops us. There is not a molecule of our being where He is not; there is no movement of our members nor our faculties that He has not animated."  

Just as Father and Son dialogue through the Spirit, that same Spirit draws us into Their communication teaches us their language, their language of love, total self-giving, goodness pouring itself into other. This awareness in itself is transformative. The humility of the Holy Trinity cannot but cause awe when we pray. 

Our initial attempts to speak the language of the Divine Three may involve a great deal of stuttering. Our spiritual speech impediments can be gradually corrected. When we pray, the Holy Spirit will inspire us to find ways to identify our obstacles to becoming spiritually fluent. We humbly seek His Wisdom. And He begins to reveal to us the multitude of worldly attachments that keep us firmly rooted in self. Spirit Lord blesses us with a desire for detachment. 

This invites us to meditate on how 'spiration' could be a way of transformation for our souls as well as for those whom we meet and who also want to be transformed into love of God.  St Elizabeth of the Trinity desired to be transformed  to resemble Christ. Spirit Lord empowered her to rest in the Heart of the Trinity and this was the means of that transformation for her. 

"The Trinity dwells in my soul in order to transform me into Itself" (St. Elizabeth, Letter 185).

These are uplifting and encouraging and inspiring words for our soul and for us to share with others. Our Saint is telling  us that it is the desire of the Trinity to transform our souls into Itself.  When we pray about what means of transformation Spirit Lord may give us to begin to resemble the Savior, we can pray and beseech the Holy Spirit to breathe a profound desire in our soul for detachment from my self, to make a spacious place in our soul for the Trinity to enter, make a home in us, let us put His Name on our mailbox, give Him our house keys. And lovingly invite anyone who seeks Him to find Him in us and in everything we used to own that now belongs to Him.

As He breathes this gift ever more deeply into our soul, He empowers our own journey into transformation in Christ and to share this knowledge with other. On our soul's journey of descent into transformation, empowered by Spirit Lord, He never "imposes Himself from without" but rather, this transformation begins in and affects the interior of our soul alone. 

In "Science of the Cross", Edith Stein describes painful experiences which will arise when the soul is being purified by God as He draws us ever closer to Himself. When we offer Him our will, the war against self rages. With His grace, we battle my fallen nature. With every new call to deeper surrender to His Will, we experience  " loneliness, desolation and emptiness ... ( a cessation of ) ... my faculties, ...(fear) ...by threatening horrors." This is "mystical night" in the soul. The "nocturnal light"  that pierces this darkness is God's Presence, a distant Beacon that never flickers but that endlessly lights the way. 

The "cosmic night" described by St. Teresa Benedicta involves that other force which opposes the surrender of our soul and our desire for union of our will to God. This is the  spirit of the world, coordinated and strategized by Satan, warring against all that seeks God. Spirit Lord blesses us with the same "nocturnal light" and illumines the outer world where horrors are concealed but which assault the soul. His grace makes clear their presence and their motive. The spirit of the world has no power against us except the power given to it by God, therefore, every painful  and frightening life-circumstances which seeks to damage the soul has already been measured to our faith by God. 

We endlessly pray the words of St. Therese of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face:

"Your lot indeed is a beautiful one, since Our Lord has chosen it for you, and has first touched with His own Lips the cup He holds out to yours."

Through the gifts of the Spirit, our soul and our prayer offerings are enriched in mystical understandings which reveal to us how this "outer world is given back to us entirely transformed." When the soul suffers the pains of its own sins, we can offer to willingly bear that pain for another who does not pray and does not do penance and who has separated themselves from God. In small acts of vicarious suffering/atonement He draws us into His Act of Redemption in the saving of that lost soul.

"God has imprisoned all in disobedience that He may have mercy on all" (Romans 11: 25, 30-36).

--

Anna Rae-Kelly OCDS
www.annaprae.com

OUR LADY, QUEEN OF MOUNT CARMEL

It is July 16 ... IT IS THE FEAST OF OUR LADY, QUEEN OF MOUNT CARMEL

Do we call her Mother? For St. Therese of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face Mary is "much more Mother than Queen."

"If a child is to cherish his mother, she must cry with him and share his sorrows." 

Knowledge and love can only deepen for our tender Mother Mary when we seek wisdom about her from her Sacred Spouse: Spirit Lord. 

In prayer, He may direct our thoughts by drawing us into the revelations about our Beloved Mother that He has inspired in holy souls throughout the centuries. Through His Wisdom, revealed through them, a contour of her gentle, sweet features begins to take shape. 

Mary was described by St Louis de Montfort as "our powerful Sovereign, our beloved mistress, ... the world of God."

We have therefore a world of reflections to explore in our search to glimpse her beauty: her interior silence, her profound humility, the light of her faith that will shine through the darkness of our mind, her total self-emptiness, her willing enslavement to God's Will. When we accept Mary as our Spiritual Mother, she will "reveal our thoughts" (Luke 2) to us and we begin to grow in self-knowledge, that gift which gives us deep humility under the Gaze of God. 

There is an abyss between God Who is Infinite, Numen, and we, who are finite. The depths of the abyss are highlighted in a conversation between Our Father and St Catherine of Siena. The Father asked her: "Do you know, my daughter, who you are, and who I am? ... You are she who is not; I am He Who is."

1200 years before God illumined Catherine about her finiteness, her nothingness, the Archangel Gabriel appeared to Mary at the  Annunciation. When we stand, in unobtrusive silence listening to their dialogue, it becomes clear to us that Mary, the Immaculata, the God-bearer, the Hodogetria, was fully aware that she was the one "who is not."  We hear her describing herself  as the "handmaid of the Lord" (Luke 1:38).

This word, "handmaid", holds profound meaning. We remember that this was the same ancient word that St. Paul used to describe the Savior in Philippians 2:7: Jesus "emptied himself, by taking the form of a slave, (doulos) being born in the likeness of men..."

Mary His Mother, the self-described handmaid, the douly of the Lord, the bondslave of God, His total possession, the one whose Owner had all rights to do with her as He willed, even and including should His Will be to take her life. 

Mary was empty of self. She was, as it were, the "prelude" (St John Paul II) to her Son's total self-emptiness, God's Doulos. 

And God accepted His Son's self-sacrificial death on the Cross, Christ, the Saving Victim. 
 
Mary, Queen of Carmel, embodies the beauty of a Carmelite heart and life in her love for the Saving Victim. In her self-emptiness, Mary embodies the being who could be filled with God. It is Spirit Lord Who "opens her lips and her mouth declared His praise" at the Visitation. 

Blessed Marie-Eugene of the Child Jesus OCD wrote that, "prayer finds its supernatural efficacy in the quality of the faith that animates it." Because she was totally empty of self, Mary's prayer was filled with supernatural efficacy, with a faith that animated every thought, word, action that she made.  Mary will gently mother us into an awareness of the abyss of our finiteness, helps us to offer ourselves as God's doulos/douly, leads us into the wisdom of self-knowledge where our awareness of our nothingness deepens in the perspective of the Infinite Who is God. 

If the awareness of our nothingness nips at our spiritual pride and disheartedness begins to lurk in the depths of such self-knowledge. St. Therese of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face encourages us:

"You, Lord, will descend to my nothingness and transform that nothingness into living fire.....and even when I have nothing....I will give Him this nothing."

And so, we may stand gazing into the vast abyss between the Infinite Who is, and the finiteness of we, "who are not". With St Therese, we may humbly offer all that we are to God ... and give Him our nothing. 

With Mary as our Queen of humility, we offer our Yes, ourselves, to be His douly, His doulos, to do with as He Wills.

And the mighty power of Spirit Lord will rush into our depths, fill our souls with Himself to the capacity pre-ordained by God, and transform our "nothingness into living fire". 

All who meet us, every moment of our days, will touch God as He moves in and through us and all will taste His sweetness as He transforms us into His own Image. And He will draw souls to God through our "nothing" that He fills with Himself. 

How?

When He fills the measure of ourselves that we give to Him, that measure becomes the property of Spirit Lord. He has one Desire....to draw us into winning souls for God and that Desire begins to propel us at disconcerting moments. We may be watching a tense TV movie when we feel His unmistakable invitation to join Him in prayer. Ten minutes before the exciting conclusion  of the movie. 

We obey, take ourselves off into solitude with Him and at the knee of Mary, we pray an urgent Decade of the Rosary......and our great, great grandchild, yet to be born, who will only ever see photographs of us, will be snatched by God away from a life of drugs, or pornography, or alcohol. St Therese teaches us that prayer soars beyond space and time and God already owns the decades where our great grandchild moves. What was, what is and what is yet to be are all one in Him. Through our small sacrifice, united with in and through Christ Jesus'  ultimate Sacrifice, we have won the soul of our loved one. 

 God has gratefully accepted the little space of ourselves that we have given Him, filled it with Himself and His Desire for souls,  and then waits to reward us in unimaginable ways for doing something that He gave us the power to do in the first place.

And we begin to understand how he transforms our “nothingness into living fire”, even beyond space and time.

More words from St. John Paul II come to our mind: “Prayer united with sacrifice is the most powerful force in human history.”

Mary was filled with self-emptiness. And filled with God.

Mary: "zealous for the glory of the one true God and the sanctification and salvation of souls"; Mary: the "Woman"-made-prayer; Mary: whose sacrificial suffering from the "sword" that pierced her heart so that she could reveal our thoughts to us;  Mary: "united with Christ Crucified and His omnipotent prayer as Saving Victim"; Mary: the pure and most powerful intercessor for all of God's children for whom the Savior shed His Precious Blood; Mary: whose "adoration and contemplation of the Most Holy Trinity" is inexhaustible; 

                                                Mary, filled with Love Himself ...
                                                Mary, Mother, Queen of Mount Carmel, pray for us. 

(Quotes used in the final paragraph are from the ancient charism of the Discalced Carmelite Hermits of Our Lady of Mount Carmel)