A Reprint
In the movie Therese, there is a very simple but profound scene: a climax, a turning point. It is where St. Therese herself says in A Story of a Soul, “my life was changed, in the time it took to go round the turning of a stair"; it is her passing from one with the will of a child to one with the will of a maturing Christian. It the movie, this change is shown visually as Therese kneels before the crucifix in her room and stretches out her hands in imitation of the small ivory figure nailed to the polished wood.
In the following days and months, Therese begins to conform her will to the Lord’s. She starts with very small things, she starts with the denial of self: not complaining when something unpleasant is asked of her; not weeping when something is said which hurts her pride. Then she moves to actively conforming her will to the Lord’s, by taking that habitual denial and filling the residual emptiness of self with acts of love and kindness towards others. Her eyes begin to be opened, and she begins to see all that there is to do for others, in very small and unseen ways; and then, she begins to see that in the strange economy of God, even her small acts, although done “with great cost to myself” can accomplish big things- even to the point of saving a soul. She once said, “A soul can be saved in the picking up of a pin”-that is, in conformity to God’s will.
In her conformity to God’s will, she begins to realize, as the years go by, that her vocation is to be in the center of the Church, in the heart: “My vocation is love”. And sheis the saint who knows in a special way that all of us, especially in the beginning of our journeys, have the wills of children, to whom each small sacrifice is insurmountably hard- because she herself was "a small soul." The journey, the success, the contemplation, the union, the love: all are God’s, all are His gifts! Also in the movie, Therese, the Mother Superior says to Therese, “The closer you come to God, the simpler you will become”. This is also the essence of contemplation.
Therese in all of this, is following in the august footsteps of the other great Carmelites, like St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila. These two were people who had their feet firmly planted on the earth- they were of humus, of the soil, or humble- but they were also two of the great contemplatives of the Church, and the mountain of Carmel was their haunt: they seem to be very high above us, on the sun-kissed peaks of that misty mountain. St. Therese of Liseux comes to us three hundred years afterwards as another great contemplative, but a contemplative flower in the meadow below the great mountain. Her road to contemplation is simpler, smaller, quieter. It is as if the Lord grew the Little Flower to show us that contemplation is a call for all of us- for contemplation is, simply, living in the presence of God. It is the daily, hourly, minute by minute practice of being aware of, and living immersed in, a Presence which is all around us and has always been all around us.
The mission of St. Therese, I believe, was to show with her life, her little life, that all can accomplish this with the help of God. But perhaps some are wondering still, what is contemplation and why is it so important? How do I practice and accomplish this?
Dom Zeller says, “Contemplation expresses itself in actively receiving.” There is a passive receptivity, which is more like fatalism. Then there is the more fully feminine idea of active receptivity, which can best be visualized in the conjugal relationship described in the Song of Solomon. The soul, whether it be that of a man or woman, is always the spouse of the Lord- to His activity, we are actively receptive. He sees the image of Himself in us, and as we actively conform to His will, we are receiving Him. As we love Him, He pours Himself into our being.
Contemplation is, really, at its highest level, total union with God. But all of us who are searching for God, longing for Him, trying to love Him and obey Him on somewhere on the journey towards union with God. As C. S. Lewis said, there is no such thing as ‘static’ in the spiritual life. We all, every person, are either moving away from God or towards Him; and now, in these times, I think the movement towards or away is much more clearly life or death. The battle lines are being drawn now, like blood in the snow. The writer David Hart, in his profound article “Christ and Nothing” argues that now the choice for Westerners is between union with Christ or union with the self- and the self is, set by itself with no reference to anything higher, a nothingness. Our modern culture in the West is now largely built upon this principle- that there is no greater moral law than that which each person makes for himself. This is the abyss incarnated: it is the Body of Satan. And as we see now, the West is globalizing itself and its values through the channels of economics, cultural outlets like the mass media, and pure force.
Therefore, as Mr. Hart argues, the choices for Christians becomes clearer and clearer. One cannot be of the world and be of Christ. It has always been thus, but it seems now that the murky options are clearing away: each rival cultus, from paganism to Islam are being corrupted into the worship of self, or the nothing. This is the meaning of the process of secularization.
How is this all related to contemplation? Because Christians who must live in the now largely pervasive culture of the nothing must learn to be aware in deeper ways of the presence of God. The traditional, visual and accessible societal means of being encultured into Christ are disappearing. One thinks of the typical religious service and how they are largely centered around the ‘congregation’ rather than the ‘bringing of the congregation to God”. There are too many examples to enumerate.
This does not mean that we must eschew all communal religious activity. To the contrary- we must search out and cultivate those small communities of authentic worship within the Catholic Church, which enculturate us to the union with God. And we must make, as our goal, to be in union with Christ. Contemplation is the daily, hourly, minute-by-minute expression of this. It is the longing look at the One we love. It is waiting upon the Lord. It is being like Our Lady, in her fiat. And contemplation can only flourish in prepared soil: a soil fertilized with the prayers, Rosaries, small denials of self, ascetical practices appropriate to one’s state in life, consecration to the Lord through Our Lady. The highest means of preparation for the life of contemplation is the reception of the Holy Eucharist. In a paradox, this is also a union with God in an incarnate way. It is the capstone of the life of the Church- for the Eucharist is Christ. Our Holy Church carries within Her all the means to union with God: but now they must be searched for under the crustations of modernism which have grown on Her.
There are some general practices which help: and the books A Story of A Soul by St. Therese of Liseux and The Choice of God by Dom Van Zeller are my recommendations. The expert is probably St. John of the Cross.
I think St. Therese, St. Teresa, and St. John of the Cross, all under Our Lady’s brown mantle of Carmel (the same material as the Brown Scapular), are calling every soul who wants Christ and eschews the nothing, to aim for contemplation as a means of the soul’s survival in the tempest.
