Most of us live and laugh and love and experience sorrow and joy and concerns and hurts in lives that reflect the ordinariness of the 30 years of the days of the Holy Family in Nazareth. But God dwelt in those ordinary days and they were therefore mystical.
The mysticism of ordinariness.
October 1 is the Feast Day of St. Therese of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face. We may wonder if St. Therese, like us, lived a mysticism of ordinariness. We look to her own words for answers.
When she received Holy Communion for the first time, Therese reveals to us that a "fusion" of love caused her to write: "Therese had vanished as a drop of water is lost in the immensity of the ocean."
Therese was telling us that she and the Lord had become One.
Later in her life, Therese offered herself as a "victim of holocaust to God's Merciful Love".
Her own words describe this
mystical moment:
"... all at once I felt myself wounded by a dart of fire so ardent that I thought I must die. I do not know how to explain it; it was as if an invisible hand had plunged me wholly into fire. Oh, what fire, and what sweetness at the same time! I was burning with love, and I thought one minute, nay, one second more, and I shall not be able to support such ardour without dying.”
Therese underwent a "spiritual wounding of the heart" or transverberation.
And yet, it was this same Therese who gave all souls, for the rest of time, that pathway to holiness we know as “The Little Way."
This pathway to God is centered on knowing and accepting our own nothingness, totally abandoning ourselves to God's Merciful Love, the way a small child trusts in his parent. In Therese's doctrine of her "little way", she teaches us how to offer small, hidden, daily acts of love, totally surrendering them and abandoning them to God for his glory alone, trusting that He will transform them from our ordinary into His Extraordinary acts of Love.
Therese's mystical experiences suggest that she lived an extraordinary life. And yet, her gift to all of us revealed a call to holiness through "little ways", raised in love in the ordinariness of our days, lives.
So, we may wonder what "ordinary" looked like for St. Therese.
Many sources, including her own "Story" of her soul and her Letters, reveal to us that she lived a short life filled with anonymity, rejection, humiliations, great emotional sorrows, profound interior spiritual darkness, physical sufferings beyond description.
Such traumas were Therese's experiences of days and years of "ordinary", traumas that would make many of us question if God is present in our sorrows, pain.
It's from her writings that we recognize the Presence of God dwelling within her, guiding and strengthening her, letting her "borrow" His Love, His fortitude, His perseverance, His patience.
Therese lived with Him, and in Him,
and He in her, in the mysticism of her "ordinariness”.
She teaches us that where God is, "the Uncreated Word" is speaking endlessly. To her, and to us:
“To live by love is closely to enfold
The Uncreated Word ---- Voice of my Lord!
And with Thee, in my heart of hearts, to hold
The Spirit sending forth His flame adored.
Thus, loving Thee, the Father too is mine:
My feeble heart hath drawn Him from above.
O Trinity, the Prisoner Divine.
Oh, my poor love."
Therese lived by Love.
Therese helps us to dig and discover how and where God dwells in the mysticism of our ordinariness, how our "feeble heart" draws Him, to willingly become the "Prisoner of Love" in our souls.
And so Therese introduces us to one of her Little Ways of enthralling God, to hold Him in our heart of hearts in our ordinary days, years.
St. Therese writes to us about the power of a "trifle" and we begin to understand its triumph because Therese's "trifles" involve interior self-denial: self-denial of the will and the mind.
"There are trifles which
please Our Lord more than the conquest of the world: a smile or a kindly word,
for instance when I feel inclined to say nothing, or appear bored.
Believe me, the writing of pious books, the composing of the sublimest
poetry, all that does not equal the smallest act of self-denial."
We read of a moment when a novice had promptly answered a knock at the door. We are astonished at Therese's reaction to that novice's prompt action :
"You have done something more glorious, than if, through clever diplomacy, you have procured the goodwill of the government for all religious communities and had been proclaimed throughout France as a second Judith."
We may wonder why Therese applauded this behaviour with such joy. Perhaps because in the ordinariness of our days, fidelity to trifles requires greater heroism than doing great things which bring praise from many.
Her words help us to understand how these trifles, these small, hidden acts, filled with self-denial and unsought recognition, offered out of pure love for God , may, because they are unseen, offered “… in the dark... may obtain the conversion of the heathen, help the missionaries, and gain for them plentiful alms both spiritual and material dwellings for our Eucharistic Lord."
Maybe we too name dear ones every
day , those whose souls we plead with Spirit Lord to grasp and convert
into dwellings for our Eucharistic Lord. A
Our "Trifles", winning souls for God, trifles that triumph because they are filled with self - denial, hidden, enshrouded in humility, anonymously offered in Love, giving all glory to the Father alone. Trifles that make present to others the Voice of Our Lord, The Uncreated Word speaking in the mysticism of our ordinariness.
THE
TRIUMPH OF THE "TRIFLES" OF LITTLE THERESE.
