The following is the text of a paper I delievered on February 11, 2012 at the Edith Stein Conference held on the campus of the University of Notre Dame. The title of the 2012 conference was "Encountering Vulnerability: Courage, Hope and Trust in the 21st Century." The title of the paper is "Self-Forgetfulness: The Little Way to Love and the Path to Vulnerability."
Vulnerability is a particularly human problem. To be human, to have an existence which is
both spiritual and material, means that the possibility of suffering is
unavoidable. As long as we are alive,
there is a chance that somehow we will be hurt.
There are two possible responses to this fact of the human
condition. The first is what I take to
be our instinctive reaction. We can try
to minimize our vulnerability. It seem
like it would be best if we were free from the possibility of pain, brokenness,
and anxiety. And who can blame this
inclination? Life, comfort, and security are good things after all. The other response is to embrace our vulnerability. Although we might not want to seek out
vulnerability for its own sake, perhaps there is some great good whose
existence necessarily entails the possibility of suffering. One reason to think that vulnerability should
be embraced rather than avoided is because vulnerability and love are apparently
connected. The Christian author C.S. Lewis, in his book The Four Loves, writes that:
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly
be wrung and possibly be broken. If you
want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not
even to an animal. Wrap it carefully
round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up
safe in the casket or coffin or your selfishness. But in that casket–safe, dark, motionless,
airless– it will change. It will not be
broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to
the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The
only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers
and perturbations of love is Hell.”
A similar point is made by the author Madeleine
L’Engle in her Reflections on Faith and
Art. “When the phone rings at an
unexpected hour,” she writes, “my heart lurches. I love, therefore I am vulnerable. When we were children, we used to think that
when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability.”
My goal today is to explore this connection between
love and vulnerability, which is suggested to us by authors like Lewis and L’Engle,
and to really take up the question of how it is that we are to love and how
this leads in its turn to the possibility of pain and brokenness. I mean to do so primarily through a look at
the spirituality of St. Thérèse of Lisieux.
Her spirituality is sometimes called The Little Way and it can be
summarized as doing little things, particularly the mundane, day to day things,
with great love. If to love is in some
way the purpose of life, as Thérèse would most certainly have agreed, the
spirituality of Thérèse presents an immensely practical challenge and a call
for us to embrace our vulnerability.
Thérèse, you
may know, was a Carmelite religious who was born in Alençon, France to her
quite devout parents, Louis and Zelie Martin.
At a very young age she felt called to religious life and entered the
cloister in Lisieux at the age of just fifteen, taking the name Thérèse of the
Child Jesus. Although she lived a life
of relative obscurity, devotion to Thérèse spread quickly after her death at
the age of just 24, thanks to the help of her spiritual autobiography, today
commonly titled The Story of a Soul. She was canonized in 1925, a mere 28 years
after her death, and was later named a doctor of the Church by Pope John Paul
the Second.
Put most simply, Thérèse’s spirituality is one of
total self-forgetfulness. She recognized that to truly love God, above anything
else, requires a focus that is totally outward directed. Truly loving others and wanting what is best
for them necessitates that we set aside our cares, desires, and well-being for
the sake of others. This
self-forgetfulness follows naturally, as it were, from complete love of others.
This Little Way starts with humility. One of spiritual writings which had the most
influence on Thérèse, was Thomas à
Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ. The
Imitation roots its reflections in humility. “All is vanity,” the author reminds us,
“except to love God, and Him only to serve.” It is vanity to seek our own advancement, our
own wishes and our own desires, while neglecting the things of heaven. True humility is to recognize that nothing
really belongs to us, because everything, even our very life, was given to us
from without. We recognize our
dependence and our own weakness, and thus our insignificance. Inspired by The Imitation, Thérèse was nothing if not acutely aware of her own
littleness before God. She considered
herself but a ‘little flower’ offered to God.
It is only from this position of humility that one can
embrace suffering with open arms. Even
as a child, Thérèse realized that the way of perfect love is the way of suffering. She writes, “I realised at once that there
was no reaching sanctity unless you were prepared to suffer a great deal, to be
always on the look-out for something higher still, and to forget yourself.” Thérèse resolved to “choose the whole lot”
of suffering which was offered to her.
“No point in becoming a Saint by halves,”
she writes. “I’m not afraid of suffering
for your sake; the only thing I’m afraid of is clinging to my own will. Take it, I want the whole lot, everything
whatsoever that is your will for me.” Thérèse developed a great love of suffering,
rejoicing to put God’s will and the happiness of others before her own.
To be clear, Thérèse’s attitude towards suffering is
not one of self-destructive, self-hatred.
Suffering is not an end in its own right. The key thing is the self-forgetfulness which
is manifest by an acceptance of suffering.
It is true that thinking not of oneself often leads to pain which is the
denial of the will. There is also the
pain of empathy. But what matters is the
love embodied by the willingness to suffer, not suffering itself. Although Thérèse had a developed a great love
of suffering, she reached a point where she was willing to give up even
suffering itself if that was what was asked of her.
There is a certain danger in continually asking “what
can I do in this moment to better love and to surrender my own will?” That’s not a bad question. It’s just that the
question is itself self-focused. But the
goal here is complete self-forgetfulness.
Thérèse recognized this peculiar danger, as she prepared to enter
Carmel. After having been initially
denied permission to join the Carmelites at an exceptionally young age, Thérèse
went on pilgrimage to Rome with her sister, her father, and others from the
diocese. On a biographical note, it was
on this trip to Italy that Thérèse famously asked Pope Leo XIII at the audience
her group received if she might have permission to enter the Carmel early. But before this on the pilgrimage, Thérèse
describes riding on the train through Switzerland. She was amazed by the display of natural
beauty out the windows of the train, the mountains, the waterfalls, and the
valleys. It was so spectacular that it
took her breath away, and Thérèse remembers wishing she could have been on both
sides of the train at once to take it all in.
This memory left a deep impression on her, and she felt “as if I were
already beginning to understand the greatness of God and all the wonders of
heaven.” She recognized that this moment would help
her to keep a proper perspective as she closed her self away forever in the
cloister. “I shall find it easier to
forget my own unimportant concerns as I contemplate, in the mind’s eye, the
greatness and power of the God whom I try to love above all things.” It would help her to avoid what she saw as a
subtle danger of religious life. She
could see that the religious life was “the surrender of your own will, the
unregarded sacrifices you make on a small scale,” but “how easy it must be to
get wrapped up in yourself and lose sight of your high vocation.” Even in a religious life of sacrifice, there
is a danger in becoming self absorbed.
Thérèse welcomed this natural beauty as reminder of the smallness of
things we do, including the sacrifices we make.
One of the powerful images Thérèse used when thinking
about herself was as victim of divine love.
She describes how on the feast of the Holy Trinity one year she was
“given the grace to see more clearly than ever how love is what our Lord really
wants.” Turning towards Christ, she writes, “If only
you could find souls ready to offer themselves as victims to be burnt up in the
fire of your love, surely you would lose no time in satisfying their
desire…Jesus, grant me the happiness of being such a victim, burnt up in the fire
of your divine love.” Thérèse gives us an image of a heart
completely consumed with love for another.
She holds nothing of herself back, but offers herself completely.
If the Little Way seems difficult, that’s because it
is. It requires you to give your whole
self. But, the beauty of it is that this
is the only thing required. You must
love, plain and simple. Even Thérèse
struggled with the seeming smallness of this way of life. Thérèse describes how she wanted to do all
sorts of things. She would have been “a
fighter, a priest, an apostle, a doctor, a martyr,”
all at once if she could. Martyrdom was
her childhood dream, but just one kind of martyrdom wouldn’t have been enough
for her. “I should want to experience
them all,”
she writes. She describes being
tormented by all these unfulfilled longings of her heart, recognizing her own
littleness and inability to achieve these great things. On one occasion she asked an older nun,
Mother Anne, “Does God really ask no more of me than these unimportant little
sacrifices I offer him, these desires to do something better? Is he really content with me as I am?” Mother Anne had to assure her “God asks no
more.” What Thérèse soon came to realize
was that charity is the key to every vocation.
She writes:
“If the Church was a body composed of different
members, it couldn’t lack the noblest of all; it must have a heart, and a heart
burning with love. And I realized that
this love was the true motive force which enabled the other members of the Church
to act; if it ceased to function the Apostles would forget to preach the
gospel, the Martyrs would refuse to shed their blood. Love, in fact, is the vocation which includes
all others; it’s a universe of its own, comprising all time and space–it’s eternal. Beside myself with joy, I cried out: ‘Jesus,
my Love! I’ve found my vocation, and my
vocation is love.’”
Thérèse
realized that she was not meant to do spectacular things, but that this was
okay. She would be like a little child
scattering flowers, missing no opportunity to make small sacrifices,
and repaying love with love. Thérèse accepted who she was and her lowly
status, realizing as St. John of the Cross said that “the slightest movement of
disinterested love has more value than all the other acts of a human soul put
together.” To love is what she was meant to do. If she could do that, nothing else really
mattered.
The lesson here is that love is lived out in the
ordinary and the everyday, perhaps even more so than in the extraordinary. Moreover, the challenge to love and to
self-forgetfulness is not reserved only for certain, special people. If anything, love is even more important for
a person living an ‘ordinary’ life. All
one has to do is be fully oneself. Each
present moment for every person is an opportunity to love. This is the basic idea of the transformation
of the every day, and indeed the every-minute, found in Thérèse is also found
in the book Abandonment to Divine
Providence. This book, sometimes titled
in English The Sacrament of the Present
Moment is the work of a French Jesuit named Jean-Pierre de Caussade. In it, de Caussade writes that the key to
spiritual perfection is found in “passive surrender” to God’s will so that we
become like a tool “in the hands of a craftsman.” We are to submit with humble trust to God,
not worrying about the future or anything out of our control, but “reserving
for ourselves only love and obedience to the present moment.” For it is in each passing moment that God
reveals His unchangeable, eternal will. The lesson here is that self-forgetful love
is possible for everyone and, indeed, in every possible moment.
Until now I have speaking rather
abstractly, but the point is that this all pervasive love can’t help but have
an effect on lived experience, no matter how mundane. For Thérèse, love took the form of little
things like volunteering to lead the elderly and cantankerous Sister St. Peter
to the Refectory every evening. Another good is example is Thérèse’s
treatment of the sister who sat behind her in the chapel during the
evening. The sister would grind her
fingernails against her teeth, making a noise which Thérèse found extremely
annoying. Thérèse longed to turn around,
and just give the sister a simple glance, so that she would stop. But Thérèse figured the most loving thing to
do was to save the sister any embarrassment and keep on trying to pray, even
attempting to incorporate the frustrating noise into her prayer. In another example, when Thérèse would do the
dishes with a particular sister, the other sister would always splash dirty
dish water on Thérèse when picking up the handkerchiefs from the ledge. Rather than show her annoyance or even wipe
the water from her face, Thérèse learned to look forward to, as she put it, “this
new kind of Asperges.” Thérèse talks about how she would try extra
hard to show love to the nun in community whose personality rubbed her the wrong
way. Thérèse was so successful that the sister once asked Thérèse,
“What is it about me that gets the right side of you?” These are just a few examples of the ways in
which Thérèse lived out this call to love in the ordinary moments of life.
You will notice I have pointed out
only little ways of showing love which involved some sort of sacrifice. Of course, one should just as readily point
out the more pleasant moments of her daily life which also show love, such
moments in her relationships within her family.
These too are important, because they help to drive home the point that
love is the key thing, not suffering. But
these small sacrifices connect us back to the theme of vulnerability. Love, especially in the small and ordinary
things, makes you vulnerable in small and ordinary ways. For Thérèse, it took the form of possibly
being subjected to the auditory pain caused by a nail-biter. Lewis and L’Engle naturally lead us to think
of the personal attachments and empathy which we feel for others. Love means, though often in the smallest of
ways, we might feel sorrow at others’ misfortune, the burden of their problems,
or the pain of separation. Love,
self-forgetting love, is borne out in every moment and in hundreds of
ways. If this is fully lived out, one also
becomes vulnerable in every moment and in hundreds of little ways.
Up until this point, we have been
operating under the assumption that to love is very good thing, perhaps the
best thing that we can do. If this is
true, all the vulnerability that comes with love is certainly worth
undertaking. But why should perfect love
be the focus, if all I want is to be happy?
All this about forgetting myself and my own wants seems to be moving in
the wrong direction. At worst, love will
maximally expose me to all the pain and brokenness of the world. I’ll love if its suits me, and maybe there
are even good reasons even to die for someone, but why even think about making
the small sacrifices?
Certainly no full treatment of this
question is possible here, but one suggestion is that personal happiness,
living for one’s self, breaks down as a meaning for life. It may not be the best example, but I think
here of the movie Good Will Hunting, where the mathematical genius Will Hunting
has no motivation to do anything significant with his life. In one of the turning points of the story, he
has a conversation with his friend Chuckie Sullivan, who, like so many other
people, wants Will to make something of himself. Chuckie tells Will that there is no way they
should still be neighbors in twenty years.
You’d better have moved on to higher things, he tells him, because you
have that special ability, that “winning lottery ticket,” which no one else
has. Will responds angrily, “Why is it always this? I owe it
to myself to do this or that? What if I don't want to?” “No, no, no,” Chuckie interjects, “you don’t
owe it to yourself, you owe it to me.” Living and thinking only of himself and his
own desires, Will could find neither meaning nor motivation in his life. But once challenged to live for others, he
finally found a direction to go.
Another
reason not to make happiness an ultimate goal is more of a psychological
principle. You will never be happy so
long as you are trying to be happy. It’s a bit like the fact that you’ll never be
able to fall asleep, as long as you are thinking about how to fall asleep. Or like the fact that trying to avoid being
self-conscious makes you self conscious.
Perhaps the similar gospel principle is relevant here, namely “Whoever
wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake
will find it.” Trying to be happy entirely on your own terms
simply does not work. If you want to be
happy, forget about yourself, love to the fullest, and happiness will
follow. If this is not apparent to you,
one can only say “try it out and see what happens.”
To
return to Thérèse for one final point,
Thérèse’s eschatology is very striking.
It reveals just how deep this attitude of self-forgetful love goes. Thérèse did not look forward to heaven as a
place of well deserved rest from her labors on earth. “I really count on not remaining inactive in
heaven,” she writes, “My desire is to work still for the Church and for souls.” Elsewhere she writes, “If God answers my
desires, my heaven will be spent on earth until the end of the world. Yes, I want to spend my heaven in doing good
on earth.” You can see where this eschatology comes from;
indeed, one could say that it is the logical conclusion of Thérèse’s
spirituality. But it is still shocking to
realize just how powerful love is, transforming and perfecting desire itself,
so that we desire nothing more for eternity than to do what is good for others
and to reciprocate love.
The Little Way is a challenging
path. There is no doubt about that. But this way of perfection is open to
everyone. All it requires is that you
forget yourself in total love. Yes, it
will make you vulnerable in a million little ways, but this vulnerability is
something to be embraced. We need look
no further than St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus to see how this way of life,
this way of love, this way of vulnerability, produces something as beautiful as
a shower of roses, namely a saint.
