Self-Forgetfulness

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.”[1]

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.”[2]

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.”[3]  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.”[4]  Thérèse resolved to “choose the whole lot”[5] of suffering which was offered to her.  “No point in becoming a Saint by halves,”[6] 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.”[7]  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.”[8]  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.”[9]   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.”[10]  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.”[11]  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.”[12]  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,”[13] 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,”[14] 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?”[15]  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.’”[16]

 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,[17] and repaying love with love.[18]  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.”[19]  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.”[20]  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.”[21]  For it is in each passing moment that God reveals His unchangeable, eternal will.[22]  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.[23]  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.[24]  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.”[25]  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?”[26]  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.”[27]  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.”[28]  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.”[29]  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.”[30]  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.

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[1] C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1991), 121.

[2] Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art (Macmillan, 1995), 190.

[3] Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ (New York: Macmillan, 1924), Book 1, Chapter I.

[4] Thérèse of Lisieux, Autobiography of a Saint, trans. Ronald Knox (London: Harvill Press, 1958), 51.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., 51-52

[7] Ibid., 52.

[8] Ibid., 158.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid., 219-220.

[12] Ibid., 220.

[13] Ibid., 233.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid., 232.

[16] Ibid., 235.

[17] Ibid., 237.

[18] Ibid., 236.

[19] John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle, commentary on Stephen, XXIX, quoted in Thérèse, Autobiography, 238.

[20] Jean-Pierre de Caussade, The Sacrament of the Present Moment, trans. Kitty Muggeridge (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1982), 10.

[21] Ibid., 11.

[22] Ibid., 21.

[23] Thérèse, Autobiography, 295-297.

[24] Ibid., 298-299.

[25] Ibid., 299.

[26] Ibid., 268-269.

[27] “Quotes for Chuckie Sullivan (Character) from ‘Good Will Hunting,’” IMDB.com, accessed February 10, 2012, http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0003604/quotes.

[28] Matt. 16:25. New American Bible.

[29] Letter from Thérèse of Lisieux to P. Roulland, July 14, 1897, in Letters of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, Volume II, trans. John Clarke, O.C.D. (Washington D.C.: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1988), 1142.

[30] Thérèse of Lisieux, July 17, 1897, in St. Thérèse of Lisieux: essential writings, ed. Mary Frohlich (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2003), 117.