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HEALING THE FAMILY
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The different levels of relationship in time and in space have the same origin and end. They are all inscribed (excepting sin) in the flowing love of the Holy Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Spirit. They are made up of:
- events from the past and of childhood between father and mother.
- events from the present with maternal and paternal equivalents.
- spiritual life in the Holy Family.
The Holy Family,
perfectly inscribed in this dynamic, is the privileged place for healing of
the wounds of childhood and allows for progressive incarnation of the divine
life into our daily life. The Saviour gives it to us so we may better say
yes to mourning and heal our emotional maternal or paternal shortcomings
from childhood. In so far as we consciously recognize what are the painful
experiences from our childhood, we will learn how to live them again
spiritually in the Holy Family in order to grow in
trinitarian love
chapter two
For a better understand of a woman’s calling, we will look at Mary, little daughter of the Father, spouse of the Spirit, mother of Christ and mother of humanity. She is not too good for us to imitate, standing like a statue, frozen in unattainable perfection. Rather, she is like a stained glass window, allowing divine light to pass through. She is an example, a living school for all women who want to welcome God and let his light shine through them.
When St. Teresa of the Child Jesus states that “the treasure of the mother belongs to the child” (S. Thérèse de l’Enfant Jésus, PN 54, 5,4,NEC, Cerf/DDB 1992, p. 243), she understands that Mary is not closed off in inaccessible holiness but desires to be close to each one of us. Here is what Georgette Blaquiere explains in her book The Grace to be a Woman: “Misplaced devotion to Mary put her on a pedestal, so far above women that they disappeared. We must let Mary be Mary, not because she is a model to imitate but, deeper than this, she is a living word of God spoken to woman. (…) We must learn to consider her, not superwoman, nor inhuman because she is perfect, but rather as the most totally human woman there is, because God’s plan for all women has been fully accomplished in her” (G. Blaquiere, La Grace d’etre femme, Ed. Saint Paul 1981, pp. 178-179).
We are going study three qualities particular to the woman found in Mary:
- she receives and gives life;
- she designates the father;
- and she gives her child to the father.
Woman in Hebrew is nekeva, which means “hollow,” “receptacle,” “to create an inside space.” Whether she wishes it or not, her body shows that she is reception. It is supple and tender. It is made to console and to give life.
Woman by nature needs to be loved. That is why she naturally takes on an attitude that is eminently spiritual, that of letting herself be loved. This comes easier to her than to the man, because she was created for receiving and welcoming. She has a particular disposition to receive – so she can give in return. She is less spontaneously “a doer” than man. She has a greater propensity for an “inside” love (action of receiving), whereas man favors an “outside” love (he lays down his life by giving himself). Woman cannot be all she is meant to be without responding to this ontological need of being loved.
Because she has been created in this way, as woman and spouse, she is predisposed to a privileged relationship with God as spouse. St. Teresa of the Child Jesus clearly illustrates this, for when people talked to her about heaven, she would say, “I think only about the love that I will receive and about the one to whom I can give” and also “I need to love, to infinity.” And for Mary too. There was a priest who used to affirm in the course of his homily that her holiness does not come only from the fact that she is the mother of God, but especially from the fact that she let herself be loved, by believing and receiving the love of God. Mary accepted entering into preferencial love. And God proposes this very same love to each one of us. With Christ, with the Virgin Mary, we should be able to say, “I am the beloved, the chosen, the preferred, the cherished of God.” Yet too often we don’t open ourselves enough to this love. Mary is proclaimed blessed (Lk 1:48) because she believed and adhered with her whole being to that electing love.
The woman possesses an ability to receive that relates her naturally to the spiritual world. Her other name in Hebrew is ishah (aleph-chin-be) whereas man’s name is ish (aleph-yod-chin). Each has a letter of his or her own. For the woman, it’s the be, signaling spiritual breath. This is a letter twice present in the sacred tatragram YHVH (uod be vav be). One can say that woman is predisposed to a better understanding of spiritual matters. She will be able to help man enter more fully into the presence of God, and will awaken in him the desire to know him, to serve him and to love him. The man has the letter yod, standing for the hand – the hand of man but also of God. Thus, he will be more naturally inclined to action. To him in a special way comes actual realization, the incarnation in the here and now of the plans God has for the couple.
Woman is therefore by nature more religious than man. It is a recognized fact that the number of religious orders of women is three to four times higher than that of the masculine orders, and our Sunday assemblies are often made up of three quarters women. The Jewish tradition estimates, appropriately, that the woman is exempt from observing six hundred and thirteen commandments. Continuously being in touch with the divine thanks to her spousal nature, she has no need to go to the synagogue to pray.
However, this aptitude also makes her more vulnerable to the devil’s attacks. She will be the first to be tempted. For if she is capable of welcoming life and love, she can also be open to evil. Eve was the origin of the fall for man, but Mary, the New Eve, becomes the Annunciation, the Temple of Life, source of our recovery.
Woman’s spousal nature and her open disposition allow her to more easily perceive the work of God, the work of the divine Spouse in her and around her. She hears and receives divine announcements before man does. We see this in Mary who hears what the angel Gabriel has to say six months before St. Joseph is informed. We see it in the holy women (in particular Mary Magdeline) who believe in the Resurrection even as the Apostles are still unbelieving.
The woman often receives the prophetic intuition in the couple and she grasps and understands the work of the Holy Spirit well before the man. That is why it is very important for the husband to be particularly attentive to the intuitions of his wife. The Gospel give us several examples of this in Mary’s life. At her words little John the Baptist stirs in his mother’s womb and recognizes in the Spirit the coming of Christ the Messiah. It is again by her words – See how worried your father and I have been, looking for you (Lk 2:48) – that Jesus at age twelve accepts going to Nazareth in order to be about his Father’s business, while being schooled by his adoptive father Joseph. Again, it is her word at Cana which results in Jesus’ first miracle. She says to her son, They have no wine, then she addresses the servants, Do whatever he tells you (Jn 2:5).
However, while it is true that she is prophetic, the woman does not have the ability to pick time and moment: this gift, as we have seen, belongs to the man. She will need her husband to embody her intuitions in the here and now.
A man gives himself foremost in the work of his hands, risking becoming too oriented toward work and by what is exterior to him. Paying less attention to himself, he can take on suffering through giving himself in work, in a calling. The woman cannot do the same, for she is more interior, running the risk of losing herself in her own suffering (hysteria is found more often in women). She can deal with this only by giving herself, through physical or spiritual maternity. She gives direction to her suffering, then, by giving life.
From what we have said, it follows that the woman runs the risk of expecting fulfillment from her husband, whereas she must depend on God in order to live an abundant life. Above all else, she is the daughter of our heavenly Father. If she continues waiting for her fulfillment from her husband, she may be driven to disappointment, concentrating too much on her children to the point of hindering their development, forming a dependent relationship with them. We see right along in women the tendancy to dominate, particularly boys, which can be stiffling for the children.
The woman is sensitive to how she is perceived to a greater degree than is the man. She needs to please, to be recognized, admired, and especially loved. This affirmative has nothing perjorative about it. She carries within her the echo of the first amazement of man, of Adam for his helpmeet Eve, of the look which would make her fully woman and the echo of the happiness of man. Adam marveled saying: This at last is bone from my bones, and flesh from my flesh! (Gen 2:23) The gaze of the man on the woman fulfills her as a woman and as a spouse. The calling of the woman is to be the wonder of the man, and one of the essential needs of the man is to marvel at his wife. There will be enormous suffering in the couple when the man feels she does not satisfy his expectations of her.
Consequently, it matters that she remember she is her father’s daughter, but also and especially the daughter of her Heavenly Father. Her emotional and spiritual development has been marked by her relationship to her father. He represents her first contact with what is masculine and this will have marked significance for the future. Depending on her own previous choices and how she herself was hurt as a child, she may alternate between two extremes in her relationship to men: total dependency (she abdicates to him, letting herself be dominated, and not becoming all she can be as a woman) and independence (typical of feminism and its “I don’t need you; I can do it on my own”).
If as a child the young girl doesn’t obtain a certain degree of freedom from her father, then as an adult she will not be truly ready to become a spouse. For if she has not distanced herself from the male, she cannot be a true counterpart. She risks going from obedient daughter, conforming to expectations in order to please her parents, to totally dependent wife. Being a spouse is all about loving. Being married is to get beyond ourselves in order to give ourselves to the other. But we can only give what we have, what we are, and if our self is not fully formed and finished, inhabited by God’s presence indwelling in us, then the self remains waiting, and is not a giving self.
True freedom comes only when we liberate ourselves from worrying about how others perceive us and commit ourselves to living under God’s loving gaze. This is true of Mary, where tradition has it that she lived in the Temple at Jerusalem in her Father’s tender care. We see her totally attentive to the Father. At the Annunciation, she ponders in her heart the mystery of the birth told to her, and leaves to the Lord the job of informing St. Joseph (Mat 1:20: Do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife…)
Similarly, woman cannot find freedom and enter into a beneficial relationship with man unless she assumes some distance from him, placing herself under the Heavenly Father’s tender care. Our relationship to God the Father is foundational to our true self. By rejecting paternalism, patriarchal society and the father’s authority – whose excesses are certainly not to be tolerated – woman has in effect cut herself off from the paternity of God, who has the power to let her become an adult, at the risk of staying an adolescent forever.
It is a very bad thing to stay just a daughter, finishing as an “old maid.” Every woman is made to be fully daughter, then spouse and mother: daughter of the Father, spouse of Christ, mother of mankind, mother of humanity, in and through a maternity which goes beyond that of the flesh and which constitutes her deepest being. Mary is Mother of God, mother of Christ, mother of the Church, and mother of mankind.
Our society is experiencing a crisis of maternity where women no longer want to have children and are refusing to give life. This is really the devil’s strategy: “The Evil One is much more jealous of the woman than of the man, because her first mission is to be life, to give life, to give birth and in this way to participate most intimately in God’s work. The serpent knows that in order to hinder God’s work, he must take on the woman so that he can reduce her capacitities as life giver” (J. Croissant, La Femme sacerdotale ou le sacerdoce du coeur. Note: This chapter was edited with her participation.) If the woman no longer becomes a mother, the world is lost. For if there are no more mothers, what will our future look like? What will become of our children? How will God make them his if nobody brings them forth into the world? (Is 37:3)
The current struggle takes on an eschatological turn which is more and more pronounced, dealing with the very identity of the woman, with maternity, and the integrity of the family. It is certainly not by chance that God said to the woman, Your yearning shall be for your husband yet he shall lord it over you (Gen 3:16), for by nature the woman risks becoming dominant, precisely because of her power over the child she has brought forth; this insidious but profound tendancy is like the derailment of maternal love which can go from giving to possessing.
In order to escape the all powerful male, contemporary woman saw no other solution than that of becoming like him, not realizing that this would lead to a rejection of her feminity. But it is impossible to work like a man does when there are children to care for. Maternity quite naturally became the major handicap she absolutely had to overcome in order to claim equality.
Do we realize the human and spiritual consequences for our society that result from this fact? Women are dissuaded from their calling to have children. They are no longer ready to sacrifice themselves so that their children can become in turn fully realized men and women, and not wounded people, spoiled by too many material things, but lacking in this essential love a mother has, ready to give her life for them.
God chose to need woman so that he might pass on his own life, just as he chose to use man for assigning paternity. To give life is to pour out blood and when blood is lost, life is lost. Shedding blood in order to give life is a significant part of every woman’s nature. Her monthly periods are the powerful sign of this fact.
The woman is responsible for all those that she has taken in and cares for. She is responsible for relationships within the family, having the care of each person. The Jewish tradition recognizes in her this essential role of being the soul of the house, the guardian in a way of the Presence of God in the home. She answers for those whom she has welcomed and received. In recognition of this she is given the blessing of the light which opens the family liturgy of the Sabbath. In fact the sages of Israel mention that since the fall into darkness came through Eve, it is by the woman that the light must be re-introduced. This perspective speaks eloquently to us as Christians, since the new Eve, the Virgin Mary, brought light into the world by giving us her son. And it is remarkable that this tie between the woman and light goes well beyond the bounds of the Judeo-Christian tradition and can be seen in other cultures: in Africa, for example, where the mothers keep a small lamp burning, and when the man returns home he feels a presence, a life.
The woman’s body has been created to welcome and receive life. This physical reality is the sign of a spiritual reality. The woman is the Temple of life. A rabbi said it this way: “When I draw near my spouse, I am accomplishing a priestly act, for I am entering into the temple of life.”
What are the qualities of a mother? Tenderness, love, patience, sweetness, a listening ear. When looking for the definition of the word “tenderness” in the dictionary, the first example given is the “tenderness of a mother.” For the father is the protector and deliverer, and the mother is the consoler to her child. The liturgy invokes Mary this way, as “tenderness of God,” “consoler of the afflicted.”
Tenderness is not incompatible with strength. The blessed Mary of the Incarnation knew this and wrote: “Mary is the strong woman, the expression of God’s tenderness.” Tenderness which is not cloying or stiffling, but rather strong and exacting. It is standing at the foot of the cross that Mary lets her child go to the Father. She shows not only her own tenderness, but also the strength and tenderness of another. She counts on this Other and this is what allows her to stay courageously nearby her Son. She is willing to be consoled and loved by the Father. God has crowned her with love and tenderness. As tenderly as a father treats his children, so Yahweh treats those who fear him (Ps 103:4 and 13). Now, please let your love comfort me, as you have promised your servant. Treat me tenderly, and I shall live… (Ps 119:76-77). I will betroth you to myself for ever, (…) with tenderness and love; I will betroth you to myself with faithfulness, and you will come to know Yahweh (Hosea 2:21-22). Mary is mother because she receives in her very self the tenderness of God from the time of her Immaculate Conception, and she allows it to flow through her in a unique way starting with the Annunciation.
The presence of the mother is felt in a different way from that of the father. The mother touches her child and speaks to it, awakening it to life. In certain cultures, Hindu, for example, the child is massaged during its first year. Through this, the child develops a consciousness of the body, a confidance in the self and a sense of well-being, essential to his or her growth. Unfortunately, in the West, mothers too often let themselves be overwhelmed by other jobs. They no longer know how to caress their child enough. Because it is the expression of the tenderness of God, the love which passes through the mother will limit the presence of guilt feelings.
When there are shortcomings in mothering, the child lives out two interior conflicts:
- death desires and urges. Difficulties in living and tendancies toward depression that are so frequent today often come from an early maternal hurt, perhaps taking place even before birth;
- a feeling of guilt, meaning an unpleasant impression of not being as one should, shame at what one is, a feeling of indignity or impurity experienced even in the body. This feeling has taken root in separations, negative and perjorative words, and in gestures and attitudes which have not nurtured the child.
Doubtless, we have all received a lot from our mother, and that has made us what we are. But each one of us, however, has been lacking maternal love to some degree, for we have inevitably experienced times in childhood when we were not loved. What we have not received from our mother, the Virgin Mary can give us since she offers us the One who is Life, Jesus Himself.
Mary plays an essential role in the discovery of St. Joseph and the Father. We will discover this in three ways:
- The woman brings forth man;
- The woman submits;
- The mother names the father.
Every man is born of a woman. Thus, Scripture presents Eve as being genuinely the mother of all those who live (Gen 3:20). The psalmist equally sings: But all call Zion “Mother”, since all were born in her (Ps 87:5). And Christ on the Cross asks Mary to be the Mother of all mankind, through designating the disciple he loved to her. So tradition has interpreted his last words, Woman, this is your son. And to John, This is your mother (Jn 19:26,27 The original text even says: This is THE mother.)
Man, then, is born of woman, and it is not merely a question of birth in the flesh. Within the Holy Family, Mary brings forth St. Joseph in his role as father of the Messiah. Mary had already begun to be a mother for six months when Joseph learns, via the angel’s announcement, that he is called to be the adoptive father of the Son of God. Maternity precedes paternity, and it is the absolute condition for it: for the father of course cannot be father except by the mother. If the woman keeps the child for herself, the man is excluded from his paternity. Mary gives Jesus to St. Joseph, and draws her spouse into a pure and selfless love, totally oriented to the Father. In this way he will be prepared to receive in perfection the grace of the amazingly unique paternity laid on him.
The woman, according to what Genesis tells us, is a helpmate for the man (Gen 2:18). But because the woman brings forth the man, because she in some way “gives birth to” her spouse, she can also dominate him. She simply possesses a greater maturity than he does: for this reason she confirms him and helps him grow in his calling. That is why the Word of God asks her to submit (Eph 5:21-24). The temptation which threatens the woman is to dominate the man by her emotional power. The man, weakened by her, risks reacting by using masculine force to overpower her in turn.
If the woman brings forth the man, he, however, is her shepherd. Scripture specifies that the woman is taken from Adam’s rib (Gen 2:21,22). Here we find an expression of the marvelous equilibrium of the Trinity, where none of the divine Persons is self sufficient nor dominates the other. If we forget any part of this communion, we run straight into an anthropological catastrophe. Woman, unfortunately, has held on to the notion that submission implies male domination. Has she forgotten that she is in the strong position because she brings forth the man? God asks her to accept this man as her shepherd (ibid.).
That is why it is said that everything begins with the woman. If she loses her calling, the man can no longer find his. It is because she wants to be like him (feminism) that the man is lost. There is no more father because there is no more mother. The man only comes into paternity with the woman’s help. The man can no longer be father because the woman is dominating him. That is why we insist on the importance of the submission of the woman.
This is the stumbling block for feminism which dares to label the Apostle Paul a woman hater! In fact this comes from past sufferings and from a faulty understanding of Scripture.
Since the woman by her very nature needs to be loved and protected, she has to love her husband. This is why it is only asked of men that they love their spouse. Husbands should love their wives (Eph 5:25) says St. Paul in the immediate continuation of the same text. This implies that herein lies the difficulty for the man and not for the woman. The apostle never said to woman “love your husband.” The invitation consists in loving one’s wife even as Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her. How did Jesus love? He who said to us that a man can have no greater love than to lay down his life for his friends (Jn 15:13) offered his life for the Church, his spouse. And he leads us into the same sacrifice. This is my commandment: love one another, as I have loved you (Jn 15:12). St. Paul’s exhortation comes down to saying: Husbands, love your wives more than your selves, laying down your life for her. In this way St. Joseph loved Mary to death. The calling of the husband is to lay down his life for his wife by giving himself totally to her. And the woman has the right to expect a love which will go all the way.
It is to such a spouse that the woman is asked to submit herself faithfully. Because he came from the woman, he can only give himself entirely to a woman who submits to him. The difficulty for the woman is not in loving her husband, but in accepting not to dominate him and also taking him as her shepherd. The man for his part will have a problem faithfully loving his wife. He is weaker than she, taking his roots from her. Thus, if he is in danger of being dominated by her, he risks no longer respecting her and may become unfaithful. A dominating woman becomes a spouse who limits a man by her dependence and emotional childishness, or by the opposite, through searching for independence in work or in marital infidelity. As we see in Scripture, the man has the right to require holiness from his spouse: as beautiful as a bride, all dressed for her husband (Rev 21:2). Woman is the reflection of man’s glory (I Cor 11:7) affirms St. Paul. There is always in man the desire for the perfect woman, this “Eshet Hail” mentioned in the book of Proverbs (Prov 31:10 Eshet Hail means “a perfect woman” in Hebrew). A perfect wife—who can find her? She is far beyond the price of pearls. (Prov 31:10) Happy the husband of a really good wife; the number of his days will be doubled (Ecc 26:1).It is said likewise of Christ and the Church: He made her clean by washing her in water with a form of words, so that when he took her to himself she would be glorious, with no speck or wrinkle or anything like that, but holy and faultless (Eph 5:27).
A man often is looking for a mother in his wife. Mary is the perfect mother who can help a man to reconcile himself with his own mother and to love his wife.
Man, as we have said, needs woman. Through her he gives his utmost for only she can give life to his virility. Let her again find her rightful place by his side and together they will bear fruit. They will “know” each other. “To know” literally means “to be born with,” to receive together, and one through the other the gift of life, the gift of God. The woman who refuses the seed of her husband and wishes to be self-sufficient condemns herself to sterility; not only herself, but also the whole family circle. She paralyzes them and herself by depriving her husband of all action and responsibility for originating life.
There is between the woman and God something like a passive co-operation, a sort of partnership. She participates in bringing forth man, in the birth of humanity, by uniting herself to God. It is through the yes of Mary that salvation entered the world. The yes of Joseph is second: he will permit the realization of the incarnation. But it is through the yes of the woman, by the unconditional gift of her life, that the world is saved. She precedes man in understanding divine mysteries, and through her welcoming the Word in her body, she brings it forth into the Kingdom. She shows the way. That is why, through her specific mission in the plan of God, it is she who must first change (and why she is the first target of the devil).
“The decline of the two sexes in the fall has led to the subservience of the woman to the man… She who should become his companion…must through her own free will decide to come ‘help’ the man and thus allow him to become what he should be” (E. Stein, Woman and her Destiny, Ed. Amiot Dumont 1956). The woman can only do this by coming back to the Father. Her whole path of conversion will be made up of passing from domination to submission. And this submission will be mysteriously and incredibly redeeming.
To submit is “to put oneself under” the protection of the other. Just as Christ is the head of the Church, the husband is the shepherd of his wife precisely in as much as he lays down his life for her. St. Joseph is the head of the Holy Family, whom the Virgin Mary obeys in everything. The angel comes to him, warning: Get up, take the child and his mother with you, and escape into Egypt (Mat 2:13. Also 2:20 and 22) and that is sufficient for Mary, letting herself be guided by the Father through him. Thus, when the woman submits to the man, it is God whom she is obeying through the limitations of her husband, in the hope of carrying out his will (cf. I Ph 3:1-5).
Eve sinned for two very important reasons. For one thing, she was no longer in submission to her husband, by neglecting to consult Adam, and for another, she cut herself off from God, not speaking to him and forgetting the word of the Father which said: You may eat indeed of all the trees in the garden. Nevertheless of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you are not to eat… (Gen 2:16,17). She even transformed the divine word by adding: nor touch it (Gen 3:3).. Fearing God, Adam and Eve fled his face and found themselves face to face with each other. Man went from marvel to reproach, and from this point on he remains suspicious of woman as the one who can make him fall. At the same time, he will always remain searching for the marvelous being that God has picked out for him. The woman, on the other hand, looks to the man to fill her expectations, expectations that no man could ever fill. She knows from experience that she is weak and that her expectations make her predisposed to be dominated in spite of herself, just as she predisposes man to take advantage of his strength.
Submission is a requirement for the man as much as for the woman. However, the mutual submission of both spouses has its roots in the woman. How can a husband submit to his wife without being dominated, if she isn’t first submissive to him? In the way shown in the Gospels of renouncing ourselves through love of the other, the woman is first. It is she who introduces man into this new type of relationship, which is no longer a search for the self through domination of the other, but a gift of the self for the other.
The submission of the woman is eminently redeeming. For even as her insubmission led all humanity into sin, so her submission and her offering of herself to God is in his plan for humanity’s redemption. This is why one can affirm that, if man is first in the plan of Creation, woman is first in the plan of Redemption. She finds her joy in living in submission to her husband, and he is satisfied in giving himself entirely to his wife.
If the woman, child of the Father, brings forth the man, if she accepts entering into this submission to her husband, then it is easy for her to name him father. The mother is indispensable to bringing the father out into the open. It is she who first points him out to her child, naming him “daddy” in the child’s presence. Mary names St. Joseph in this way in the episode of finding Jesus in the Temple, when she says to her Son, See how worried your father and I have been, looking for you (Lk 2:48).
It is the same for us. How relations were with our father in childhood in some way lays the foundations of an incarnate relationship with God our Father. On cannot disassociate the two entirely. Mary teaches this to us when she reminds her Son that his father is looking for him. It is as if she were saying to us: “You cannot be about the business of your Heavenly Father if you are not busy with the affairs of your dad. You cannot be about the works of God if you don’t accept the paternity that St. Joseph is desirous of exercising toward you. Like me, he is looking for you so that we can help you enter into the Kingdom, to let Jesus be born and grow in you, to make possible the passage from the mother toward the father, and everything that you were not able to realize in your relationship to your mom and dad.”
Mary would like her spouse to be better known. She shared with St. Teresa of Avila how very happy devotion to St. Joseph made her. In the same way to Mr. Olier, she said, “I have nothing more dear in heaven and on earth, after my Son.”
On certain icons, Jesus is less than three years old He still isn’t weaned, and we see him with his arms around his mother’s neck, his cheek pressed against hers. On other icons it is just the opposite, with Mary presenting the Child Jesus to us. He seems to be looking at us. In fact, he is turned toward his father Joseph, toward his Eternal Father. Here again, we see the role of Mary. Jesus listens attentively to the teaching of Mary who is pointing out St. Joseph to him. He leads us into heartfelt filial devotion for his Father.
Let yourself listen to Mary and ask her, “Lead me to the Father.” She will answer your prayer, and give you Jesus even as she shows us the Father. She will open the way for you into intimacy with St. Joseph and will teach you how to murmur in your heart along with the Holy Spirit the Name of the Father. And the more that Jesus grows in you, the more you will discover the Father, for it is written: No one can come to the Father except through me (Jn 14:6). To have seen me is to have seen the Father (Jn 14:9).
Offering the fruit of one’s being also entails a separation, meaning suffering. Mary fully consents to separating from her only child She lets him go toward his Father. She has probably glimpsed the necessity and the price of this offering from the time of her fiat at the Annunciation, being troubled and feeling anguish at the words of the angel Gabriel (Lk 1:29). She felt it even deeper when Jesus disappeared for three days in Jerusalem (Lk 2:48). And she suffered fully at the foot of the Cross when her heart was pierced listening to the words of Christ, Woman, behold your son. It is here in fact that the Church Fathers recognize the sword prophesied by Simeon: this horrifying anguish of Mary facing the suffering of separation. From then on her heart is open so that God’s tenderness and his mercy are poured out on all mankind. She becomes “Mother of Mercies” by taking as her children even those who were crucifying her Son. Christ invited her to full pardon by bringing her to where she handed over, as the Eternal Father had done (Jn 3:16: God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son….) her body’s treasure into the hands of man.
It is normal, then, for the woman to suffer at being separated with her little one. For her it is another way to pour out her blood. And it is the calling of the father to be the sword of separation between the mother and her child. And it is for the woman to accept the distancing, even as she agonizes, so that her child might have life and meet with the father.
Mary did not keep her Son for herself, but she gave him. She will know how to take care of the children that we entrust to her. If you are worried about your children, offer them to Mary and implore her with confidance. She will know how to intercede for them and to give them back to the Father.
We can bring in here the testimony of a mother who lived through this agony with Mary’s help, when her son Samuel was called to Heaven:
“When my son was in a coma after his accident, the Lord gave us the grace to fully realize our calling as parents. Instead of trying to hold our son back to keep him for ourselves, we prayed to know what he wanted from us in his last hour, and it was that we accepted letting him go to the Father, and even more, helped him get there quicker. I’ll explain. Because of a painful past, and the death of his little brother Stephen, among other things, and then this last accident where he probably believed his other brother dead, Samuel was in anguish and guilt; we could feel this clearly while praying with him at his bedside. We decided therefore to help him make his “passing” in peace while invoking over him the saving power of the Blood of Jesus poured out for him in his Passion and his Death on the cross. We accepted in faith that this prayer of healing would bring results, and we were then able to tell our son, “go, run into the arms of the Savior and don’t worry about us.” Certainly we were even then hoping for a miracle, but we had done what every parent must do: helped our child be born into Heaven. Two days after his death, a sister in our community told me a recent dream of hers. She had seen Samuel in an immense light, jumping for joy, saying, “Victory, the Blood of Jesus has washed me of all my sins!” She knew nothing of the prayer that we had prayed over Samuel.
Curiously, the great suffering that I was experiencing as a result of these events was much alleviated several times by the Virgin Mary, but in an unusual manner. For example, during the night when I knew that they were taking his heart in order to graft it into someone else, I was imagining as a nurse the whole surgical procedure, and my suffering became so intense that I was sorry I had ever agreed to donate his organs, feeling that I had suffered enough already. And then all of a sudden I thought about the Holy Virgin Mary, and I saw her watching the soldier running his sword through the heart of Jesus, and her horrible suffering became “mixed” with mine. Then I saw that hers was greater and I wanted to console her, and as I was doing that, my own suffering and anguish was changed into peace and I fell asleep.
Another time, just after my son was buried, I was exhausted and upset, and a brother of our community stopped me. He reminded me that he was supposed to be ordained three days later and asked me to come to his ordination, telling me, “If you don’t come, I can’t be ordained…” There again a terrible, heart-wretching suffering overtook me and an enormous “no”, an enormous revolt rose in my heart. No, this isn’t my son. It’s Samuel who should have been the priest and I would have loved to attend his ordination. And then, again, my sadness was eased and I found the strength to say, “Yes, I’ll be there for your ordination.”
The help that the Virgin Mary brings us is to teach us compassion, which lets us get out of ourselves and helps us to be healed of our possessive loves, so we may enter into compassionate love.”
“I need to love to infinity,” said St. Teresa of the Child Jesus. These words fit exactly with the deep yearning of our heart! We are all searching for absolute happiness, wanting to be loved and to fully love. Yet each day we realize that we can’t do it. Why? Because we forget what the Savior says: What do you have that was not given to you? (I Cor 4:7. Man is made in the image of God (Gen 1:26), and he has been created to love in a divine way. From the very beginning he is “capacity” and he can only give what he has first received.
Each day, we come face to face with our limits, with our incapacities of loving which plunge us back into our misery and show us finally that we are inept at loving, continually running up against an intangible “I can’t,” and “I’ll never make it.” Yet, in the depths of our being there lies a limitless desire, ceaselessly reminding us that we are made for love. It pushes us to the realisation of life’s goal and source of true happiness, that is, giving ourselves in love, as Christ gave himself entirely to the Father.
Why can’t we satisfy such a thirst? Because we are concentrating on reaching our goal but we are cut off from our roots. Can a tree grow to be mature without developing good roots reaching deep into the soil? How can we give something that we haven’t first taken in? How can we offer what we haven’t received? We would like to love even before getting healed from our own incapacities of letting ourselves be loved. We are inevitably discouraged in this hope because we are trying to do and to give what we don’t have. The fundamental error is in fact a sin of pride. It consists in thinking of myself as a spring, whereas my calling is to be a fountain channeling water from the spring.
In order to fulfill our life’s goal and to live in the fulness of love, we must first go back to our origins, drawing from the life force that pours out from its roots. This step is fundamental in the spiritual life. The Talmud puts it this way: “If you want to know where you are going, know where you have been.”
Jesus teaches Nicodemus: …Unless a man is born from above, he cannot see the kingdom of God (John 3:3). Nicodemus doesn’t understand and asks: “Can he go back into his mother’s womb and be born again?” Jesus answers him: You, a teacher in Israel, and you do not know these things! (John 3:10) Many people today react just like Nicodemus, especially those who follow the New Age philosophy. They try hard to get reborn in their mother’s womb by looking for a lost paradise, hoping to usher in an era of utopian happiness. Looking or turning back always leads to sterility, as we know from the story of Lot’s wife (cf. Gen. 19:26). Furthermore, Jesus warns us in the Gospel: Once the hand is laid on the plough, no one who looks back is fit for the kingdom of God (Luke 9:62).
Christ’s answer to Nicodemus enlightens us. It is not about returning to a mother’s womb, but rather being born through water and the Spirit (John 3:5). And this new birth happens in Mary, our spiritual mother, figurehead of the Church.
With her, we will go through four successive stages, which are neither exhaustive nor obligatory:
(1) become aware of our refusal to let ourselves be loved,
(2) find our roots,
(3) be reborn in Mary
(4) and consecrate ourselves to Mary.
All along this path we will be learning about spiritual growth, and this will allow us once again to receive and welcome and let ourselves be loved.
The first step is the hardest to take. It calls for opening ourselves up to the very intimate desire to be loved in order to become aware of the often subconscious resistance we have in letting go and letting ourselves be loved. This step calls for a lot of vigilance, time and therefore patience. Without guidance from above, we do not realize the nature of what is blocking us, hindering us from welcoming life and love. Each of us thinks: “But this is exactly what I want! I don’t see where there’s a problem!” By saying that, we don’t realize that we live with an incapacity to welcome. Spiritual life consists in letting ourselves be loved by God so that we in turn can give ourselves to love. If we let love love us, we will be consoled in all our distress and anguish and we in turn will love and will become consolers for our brothers (cf. 2 Cor. 1: 4-6).
To show clearer where the difficulty lies, we will answer this question first: “Where do we have our greatest need for love without ever being successful in letting ourselves be loved?” Without question the answer is, “precisely where we are hurt.”
We see love coming to us daily in different ways. It can be through a person or an event, or by a direct intervention from the Lord in our heart through the gift of grace. But as soon as love gets close to us, to visit and purify our pain, we immediately get our defences up so it will leave us alone. Then we act aggressively, impatiently, and so on.
Why do we act this way almost in spite of ourselves? Because in the original hurt, going back to early childhood, we still keep, even subconsciously, the memory of a very painful experience of the lack of love or even of aggression. The little child we were was born receptive and open to the tenderness that his heart needed in order to live. But several times he ran into a wall of silence, abandonment, even into an attitude of aggression from his parents, without their even knowing about it. For example, he was crying at night in his bed because he wanted milk and love. But alas! His mother did not come to comfort him right away. As a result, his confidance, expressed in his tears and cries, was shaken. From then on he could no longer believe in his parent’s affection, here where he felt such emotional pain, in the hurt. So he comes to doubt their love, and later we will see him persuaded that his mother prefers the little newborn brother…And if the mother tries to get near him to show her tenderness, he doesn’t let himself be loved: he pouts, he pushes her away or he pretends to be busy with something else. Where he was disappointed, where his spontaneous confidance was crushed, he no longer believes in love.
For us to make progress in our spiritual life, we have to understand what is happening here. We have to pay careful attention as to how we enter into relationships and relate to events, and we need to ask for the Lord to illumine us. Then we will discover where we are resisting love.
Knowing that it is very difficult to clearly conceptualize what we mean by “letting yourself be loved” or “believing in love,” here are a few examples taken from real situations and from mentoring.
The Virgin Mary says at Medjugorje: “If you knew how much I love you, your heart would cry.” What does such a statement evoke in us? Let’s take a closer look at it and meditate on it personally: “If you (your name) only knew how much I love you, you would cry.”
The following is a testimony that was given to us on this subject:
“The first time I heard these words of the Virgin Mary, I was upset right away, thinking: “If you knew…! But why don’t I know it?” In fact, I resented Mary for saying “If you knew..” and deep inside I was crying: “It’s your fault, Mary, if I don’t know your love for me. That’s all I’ve been asking for!” I realized that I hadn’t experienced this love since I wasn’t crying for joy and happiness over knowing it. I didn’t know Mary’s love. Thinking about how I felt, I said to myself, why is love there, at the doorstep of my heart, and yet I’m not happy? How is it that I am loved to such an extent without being completely overwhelmed by it? I have a mother who loves me like Jesus and the Father do, and I don’t see it!”
That’s just what happens: we are sitting right next to a spring of living water and we’re dying of thirst. I am sitting at a sumptuous banquet table where everyone is feasting except me, because I’m sad and sick. I’m not eating. I’m dying of hunger at a feast. I’m not crying for joy at God’s love because I don’t know it. Why am I lacking so much? Is it God’s fault, or is it mine? No, it’s not the fault of one or of the other. In me, there is something which is blocking and making me deaf and blind. And this is true for every person: we do not feel, we do not receive—at least not totally—the love of God and others. Yet God created us for the joy of being loved and of loving. Why is there such a block?
The second account is a story told by Jean Vanier. A mentally handicapped woman named Françoise was hospitalized for several months in a psychiatric ward and received no visitors. It happened that one day, someone knocked on the door and entered. Overcome with joy, Françoise immediately held out her arms and invited the visitor nearer to her so they could talk. But her physical appearance was so marked by the handicap that the visitor hesitated. He stopped at the doorstep, then finally turned on his heels and left. A few days later the same scenario happened with another visitor. Françoise stretched out her hand again, less convinced than the first time, anxious about the visitor’s reaction. And here again, the visitor stood looking at her, hesitated, and abruptly turned away.
A new visit and a third time, still another visitor knocks at her door and enters, saying, “Hello, Françoise.” Now this time, Françoise doesn’t react. Lying on her bed, she seems to see and hear nothing. She is rocking and drooling profusely. The visitor slowly approaches the bed, repeating a more timid “hello” and extends her hand as a greeting. Then, all of a sudden, Françoise sits up in her bed, grabs the hand of the unknown visitor and bites it with rage.
It is easy to imagine what follows. Nobody dared to get near her any more because of her aggression. But we must remember what had preceded it: Françoise had been very open, she had been trustful and innocent, anticipating friendship. The distaste she read in the look of the first two visitors deeply hurt her and made her give up all hope of love. She was expecting affection, and she got abandoned! She was pleased to have company, and she was left alone with her suffering! This deep hurt opened her up to doubt, to a lack of confidance in love. In this context the second encounter was already an anxious one: Françoise timidly extended her hand, fearing betrayal again, but still hoping. By the time the third visitor arrived, she no longer believed, no longer hoped, even though love was coming near to her. Biting the hand became in a way the “test of true love.” If the visitor pulls back, it will confirm what Françoise fears the most: she isn’t lovable to anybody. But if the visitor stays even after she has bitten the outstretched hand, then confidance in the other can be reborn and Françoise will know that she is loved just as she is, and that she will no longer be abandoned.
The Lord Jesus acts in this way with each of us. He comes to us with his love, not counting the cost. We have insulted him, hit him, whipped him, spat upon him, scorned him, crucified him, we have killed him without eliciting from him the least cry of violence or of hatred. Ceaselessly he blesses us, and his first words after the Resurrection are these: Peace be with you (cf. Luke 24:36; John 20:21-26). Not one word of reproach to his disciples or to his friends. On the contrary, he promises to send them a force from above, the Holy Spirit, which will reveal everything to them (cf. John 14:26) and make them the beloved children of the Father.
In the place where we suffer, here is how we act: when God’s love comes, either directly, or by means of another, we don’t believe in it and we react by being aggressive and isolating ourselves, as if to say “we’ll see if love stays.” We refuse to let ourselves be loved where we hurt. The Savior takes our bitterness on himself. He comes to touch the dried up spring, the bitter water of doubt and suspicion which forms our loss of confidance in another and our fear of pain, of another betrayal. By enduring our refusals and assuming them, Jesus comes to deliver us from our imprisonment and re-establish our confidance in God and in others.
Here is another testimony. Valérie is a little girl abandoned at birth, and who had been adopted at age two. One day, when she was five, in a fit of anger, she exclaimed to her father, “You are a bad daddy! I want to change daddies! I want a daddy who is always nice to me, who gives me candy even when I don’t do the right things!” Her attitude means big problems for the adoptive father, for sure! However, one day when she had done something really wrong, her father, remembering her words, took a piece of candy from the cupboard and gave it to her, saying, “Do you remember? You asked for a daddy who loves you even when you do things wrong. Well, look! Daddy is giving you a piece of candy.” While he doing so, he read in the eyes of his little girl both desire for the sweet and refusal of his love. He wanted to spare her from immediately having to look at her own refusal to be loved, so he simply left the candy on the table with these words, “Here’s the favor you asked for. You may take it.” And he left the room as if he wasn’t aware of anything. Through the crack in the door, he was surprised to see his little girl pretend to turn away as if she didn’t want the candy, then, seeing that her father was gone, run and grab it.
This example sheds a lot of light on how we act when we are hurt. Very often we observe this type of behavior in our mentoring or in spiritual direction. For it is true that as long as we can accuse others of not loving us enough, we are not responsible, since it is their fault. Yet, that becomes painful as soon as we are confronted with this reality: I’m dying of thirst by my own choice. I’m dying of thirst because I refuse to let myself love and accept Mercy. As long as we haven’t had this realization, we accuse others and act in a covetous way. We try to take, as this little girl did, outside of the love relationship, through fear of being betrayed again. We refuse to be in a filial relationship, and we prefer to let the Father’s love and mercy fail, rather than opening ourselves to discover the Father’s preferencial love and his healing pardon.
The Sabbath is not a dusty institution that we pull out of some old cardboard boxes of history because of nostalgia or to imitate our Jewish brothers. The Sabbath is a divine and eternal initiative going back to Creation. God created the world in five days, man and woman on the sixth day, and on the seventh day he instituted the Sabbath in order to rejoice in his Creation. The Sabbath is thus the special time when we are loved and personally cared for by our Creator like at the first day. God saw all that he had made, and indeed it was very good (Gen. 1:31). God rejoices at being our Father, and we can then know the joy of being born of Him, the joy of the little child who is carried in his loving arms. Throughout the liturgy of the Sabbath, the Savior passes among us, drawing near to our hearts. We discover the delight of being sons and daughters of the Eternal Father, passionately loved. The Sabbath lets us savor this intimacy with God, an intimacy that we enter little by little because it calls forth contradictory emotions in us.
People who regularly celebrate the Sabbath have made numerous confessions about this to their mentors. The Sabbath never leaves people indifferent. It very quickly elicits revealing emotions that are important to truly accept. The Sabbath becomes in this way a privileged place of interior healing.
For example, the Sabba0th deeply unnerves some without their understanding why. In others, aggressiveness gives way to distress. Why these emotions and this difficulty of entering into rest, in the peace and joy of the Sabbath? Because the Sabbath is a spiritually intense moment during which the Lord approaches me personally, to bless me paternally, to put his hand on my head and say: This is my Son, the Beloved; my favor rests on him (Matt. 3:17). He visits me at the place where I have been hurt in my sonship, there, where in the past, I was betrayed in my confidance. Following that, I didn’t want to depend on anyone else, and now I no longer want to expect anything from anyone. I protect myself from my suffering by deciding that I don’t need this love, that I no longer want to face the fear of being disappointed. I say: “No, I won’t serve you. I don’t want to be your son, your daughter.” The liturgy of the Sabbath brings this wound to the surface and makes me want to run away, because love frightens me, and puts me in touch with my vulnerability. Love approaches me, and my Father shows me how much he loves me, but that unnerves and deeply distresses me. I refuse to let God visit me precisely where I have been the most hurt in my desire to be loved.
The Sabbath is a time of healing that is particularly powerful for those wounds of childhood abandonment: a radiant yet difficult path which requires that I pass through several years of pain before it can become a source of profound peace and immense joy. We then discover inexpressible happiness, the triumph of putting ourselves under the protection and blessing of our Father. We call him “My Father” and we listen to him murmur in our heart, “My son, my daughter, my beloved child.”
These few words about the Sabbath allow us to get a better understanding of “letting ourselves be loved.” Too often we associate these words with simple comfort only. This is a serious spiritual error. To let oneself be loved is not always pleasant, and calls for living through negative emotions. It’s like comfort over a bed of distress, sweetness over a bed of sorrow, peace and joy over a bed of suffering. Living in God passes through our wounded senses, our hyper or suffering sensitivity, with its fears and shame. And we recognize that God is moving among us not by the disappearance of distress, but by the presence of consolation in our distress. Union with God is often lived on the Cross. It is not a nirvana but the experience of intense happiness even when suffering is present.
We all have a great desire to be loved. And under certain circumstances we feel this even more sharply. For example, I might like my birthday to be celebrated properly. But if I’m surrounded by numerous friends, if the party becomes too extravagant, suddenly I’ll be ill at ease because there’s too much affection. On the other hand, if nobody pays attention to me, if they forget to celebrate my birthday, I’ll be upset about it and feel abandoned. Isn’t this paradox often present in all of us? Similarly, here is what someone said, speaking of his wedding: “Our marriage was a huge celebration and an extremely happy day. Yet, the most difficult thing to accept was the fact that these three hundred friends, who came from all over France to celebrate with us, were so nice. This much affection for me, for us, was almost too painfully overwhelming.”
The first step toward a new birth consists of realizing the fact that God never stops drawing near to us, but he can’t take us in his arms because we don’t let him. We are like a pouting child. We believe that we are looking for him and doing whatever is necessary, like going to mass regularly, praying, reading the Scriptures. We wonder at the slowness of God’s healing and his silence. Why is it so difficult to enter into intimacy with God? Isn’t it because we are in a spiritual mindset that is turned away from Salvation? We’re looking for God, believing that he is hiding. Certainly, God’s instruction of us sometimes leads to his hiding so that we might look for him and desire him more. But we should never forget that he is the “great lover,” and it is he who is pursuing us (cf. Gen. 3:9), while we’re hiding behind the trees in the garden. Sinful man hides from love. That is why he’s dying of hunger and thirst. So God, without sparing himself both pain and suffering, comes looking for his lost sheep so he can lead it back into the garden of love.
May we let ourselves be sought by God and grasped by his tenderness.
The second step makes a memorial of the past in order to tap into the life force at its roots, and it mobilizes our freedom and will to open up to receive God’s gift.
We’re not simply remembering a past event like we might stir around old ashes. To make a memorial of the past is to make something sacred out of something that wasn’t sacred originally, such as certain unbearable hurts which cause us fear, shame and suffering. It is to make a sacrifice (sacrificere literally means “to make sacred”) of this painful and guilt-inducing event that we’d rather not think about.
Making a memorial means recollecting past events, helping them come alive. In this way, during the holy Eucharist the priest proclaims, Do this as a memorial of me (Luke 22:19). He brings into the present an event which took place two thousand years ago. We memorialize the death of an innocent person martyred in the most infamous way on an instrument of torture, the cross. By living out this awful story, we make a eucharist of it, “a thanksgiving.” The memory now becomes a glorious event and the story of the tragedy which pierced Mary’s heart and shook Jesus’ friends to the core now becomes a sacred story. Life has swallowed up death, and love has overcome hatred. What’s more, the benefits that come to us from this sacrifice are not relegated to the past, but continue living with us today, in the present.
After we grasp the fact that it is our own refusal to let ourselves be loved, we must proceed to the second step of recollecting past events, in order to live a rebirth. Recollection makes a eucharistic sacrifice of our past. It allows Jesus to be born into our unhappy story, especially in those painful moments when God seemed absent. It allows his grace to be present, where before we hadn’t been able to receive it. Jesus becomes present as true man in our human story and as true God in these pages which need sanctification in order to become sacred. By making a memorial we mean performing a religious ceremony for this event, by associating it with the eucharistic mystery in order to consecrate it, to make it sacred by uniting it with God in his offering on the Cross. In this way our story of suffering is written into Jesus’ sacrifice. It becomes a holy story, since, by being associated with the Jesus’ story, it takes on meaning that will let it become divine and glorious.
If we enter into this divine pedagogy, our core will be revitalized and we will experience new life. Our origins will again become a life source and they will reveal our identity to us and point us in the right direction.
There are two stumbling blocks which threaten us in our spiritual combat: one is our doubting of love and the other is our forgetfulness, the result of our hurts. Indeed, we would rather forget sad events in order to stop suffering from them. Divine pedagogy, though, forces us to learn how to make a memorial, just as we have seen the Israelites doing. Remember that you were a servant in the land of Egypt, and that Yahweh your God brought you out from there with mighty hand and outstretched arm (Deut. 5:15). Why does the Lord insist on the act of remembering? It is because we are not abandoned. We are not orphins. God is with us. Our senses and our emotions tell us, “You are all alone, you are rejected, you are abandoned,” but the Holy Spirit is murmuring in our inmost being, “Come to the Father.” God makes a new Covenant with us in our very sufferings.
When we feel alone, abandoned or rejected, we know by faith that this is also when God visits us. He searches us, both body and soul. As Deuteronomy says, God wants to know if we accept being his sons and daughters by following his commandments (Deut. 8:2). This is the moment of free and personal choice when we make a stand for or against taking God as Father. Yet, what do we often do? We answer, “No, I can’t, I’m not able to. It’s too hard for me.” Our frightened senses stop us from receiving love and letting ourselves be loved by the Lord. God does not ask whether we can do this because he knows that it depends on him, and Things that are impossible for men are possible for God (Luke 18:27). He simple asks, “Do you want to be my son, my daughter, in the place where you are painfully feeling forsaken and abandoned? Will you let me come near you to care for you and to console you, in the place where you are feeling so much pain? Are you willing to receive me?” It isn’t actually a question of whether I can, but whether or not I want to.
All we have to do to say yes to these questions is to proclaim our willingness to love in an act of faith, expressing confidance in the Lord, precisely where we feel painfully abandoned and have no desire to lean on anyone. We must clearly understand this, for this attitude is real and most important in the spiritual battle. We can’t ever hide behind “I can’t.” Even when we’re feeling pain, anguish, and distress, we can use this spiritual power working in us to offer up small acts, saying, Amen, come, Lord Jesus! Maranatha! (Rev. 22:20). Then God’s comfort will come to us, maybe immediately, maybe little by little. God has promised in his Word, If one of you hears me calling and opens the door, I will come in to share his meal, side by side with him (Rev. 3:20).
The best way of making a memorial of one’s roots passes through this third stage of being reborn in Mary. Two events from the life of the Community of the Beatitudes clearly illustrate the way in which this new birth might be experienced.
- “We spent five days in a retreat with Ephraim, the founder of the Community, on the theme of “new birth in Mary.” There were about one hundred fifty of us. Each day, we had four to five hours of instruction. I was struck by the attitude of the participants. There were those who took in everything they heard without the slightest problem. Others realized that they were having some difficulties accepting such heavy doctrine and mysteries. More open to what their hearts were telling them, they noticed they were getting progressively more distressed and then irritated as the retreat went on, all of which made them feel exceedingly guilty.”
- “When we did the thirty-three day retreat of the ‘Communion of Mary Queen of Peace,’ I was very surprised to be living such a conflict. After fifteen days, I couldn’t take it anymore. I was feeling progressively suffocated and anguished. I got a stiff neck. The muscles in my neck were tight and I was experiencing a powerful resistance inside of me. Why had I reacted this way, when I had always loved the Virgin Mary? Suddenly I understood that spiritual rebirth in Mary pulls us into our most intimate places, even back to our childhood hurts.”
We see it, and it is normal, that when we enter into intimacy with the Virgin Mary, we feel painful emotions of deep distress and aggressiveness, and have the impression of being suffocated…What is important is to recognize the truth of what we are experiencing and not to deny it or to run away from such feelings. Neither must we bury ourselves in guilt. We must simply understand what we are going through. It’s an experience of reliving something with our mothers from our childhood. We knew both the tenderness of a mother and her limitations. She loved us, but she hindered our growth. We may have been oppressed from earliest childhood, smothered in the arms of a mother who kept us all to herself, and we may have felt distress or isolation. Our sensitivity keeps the memory of these events alive, which then surface in us during a spiritual experience.
When we intensify our relationship to Mary, we go back into the wounds of our childhood. New birth, this birth from on high, cannot come forth outside of our wounded sensitivity, outside of our heightened sense impressions. We feel all these emotions with Mary, and it is through them that we are going to be reborn of water and of the Spirit. The water is that of baptism, that of the maternal and virginal embrace of Mary, Temple of the Holy Spirit. By dwelling with her, under her care, in spite of these feelings and by laying at her feet acts of faith and confidance, we receive the Spirit of the Father, which, as it descends on Mary, wraps itself around us and makes us sons and daughters. For Mary allows us to become sons and daughters of God: she makes Jesus, the Son, to be born in us. She is, according to the expression of St. Louis-Marie Grignion of Montfort, “the mold of God” in which we become as Sons of God.
This instruction of God is for today. Even as the family is in danger of breaking apart (because there is hardly any father present, and the mother has lost her calling), the Lord firmly draws our attention, even at the heart of his Church, to the role of the Virgin Mary in the last days. St. Louis-Marie Grignion of Montfort had prophesied this in the seventeenth century, knowing that it was especially applicable to the “apostles of the last days.” St. Theresa of the Child Jesus deeply lived this in her short life. She felt this “new birth in Mary,” and she knows in her whole being what it means. That is why she taught by life and word the way of childhood, the Marian way which is the most excellent way of the littlest ones.
There is no child without a mother. In order to become like little children (cf. Matt. 18:3), we must be born from on high, which is to say be reborn in Mary. We don’t mean simply taking Mary for our mother, or acting through Mary or for Mary. That is what devotion to Mary consists of, and it is often seen in the life of the Church. But Teresa did much more. Like Louis-Marie, she went further than a simple devotion to Mary and entered into a true mystical union with Mary. Thanks to her example, we can clearly differentiate in our spiritual life the different meanings of acting through Mary, with Mary, and in Mary.
Louis-Marie Grignion of Montfort called this teaching of God, Mary’s Secret. This secret saw the light of day in 1854 with the proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, and was confirmed four years later at Lourdes, to the poor and unlettered child Bernadette, by the mouth of the Mother of God herself: “I am the Immaculate Conception.” What do these words mean in the inner healing experience?
Mary was conceived Immaculate, without the mark of original sin, in her mother Anne’s womb. Anne, although sanctified, was a woman marked by sin. During her pregnancy, like all mothers, she knew moments of fear or suffering that little Mary inevitably perceived, through her consciousness of love, as a lack of the fullness of love for which she had been created. Such premature stress continually leads the unborn child to put up a system of protection and closure. However, the Church teaches that this was not the case with Mary. By the grace of the Immaculate Conception, she was kept from any turning inward on herself. Each time that she experienced the lack of love and was hurt from it, she became more open to the Father’s love.
Tradition relates that Mary entered the Temple at Jerusalem after being weaned, at age three. A little girl of this age would not be able to leave her mother and father without experiencing a painful abandonment, leaving her suffering and deeply distressed. Such a separation from familial surroundings is not insignificant in a child’s heart, even an immaculate one, but Mary used it to accept to an even greater degree the Father’s love for her.
The Virgin Mary knew immense suffering and deep distress throughout her life. The Savior revealed to Martha Robin that his Mother’s suffering was second only to his. At the time of the Nativity of Jesus, there was no longer any room for them in Bethlehem (Luke 2:7). Mary, with her heightened sensitivity, was painfully aware of the indifference and opposition toward her Son. Each time that he was a sign to be rejected (Luke 2:34), she suffered: during the flight into Egypt, then returning to Nazareth, during the ministry of Jesus…She experienced the height of suffering and anguish at the foot of the Cross. But never did she doubt the love of God! On the contrary, she endlessly made a memorial to God’s wonderful works. She didn’t forget them. She didn’t close herself off to God’s love. Just the opposite. She turned each wound into a heaven sent opportunity to let herself immediately be made more receptive. So it is that Scripture tells us she treasured all these things and pondered them in her heart (Luke 2:19) in order to receive their meaning. When she perceived a lack of love in her family circle, she would orient her soul toward the Father and murmur lovingly, “Abba! My Father!” She drew the Spirit of the Father toward her, without ever turning in on herself, or setting up defenses. She experienced the depths of suffering when she saw her beloved Son humiliated and killed, but she never drew back into herself. She remained centered on the Father, totally open to God’s consolation, even where she was most wounded by mankind, who did not give her the love she expected. From the time of her conception, she kept this attitude of being completely turned toward God, her eyes in the eyes of the Father. She continually sought the Father’s divine will.
We might think that the privilege of the immaculate conception puts Mary in another world from us, strengthed by a grace that we cannot know, and in some way at a distance from us, leaving us uninvolved. Actually, just the opposite happens. The fact that the Virgin Mary is immaculate is very important to us. We could say that it’s precisely for us that Mary is who she is. By remaining close to her, we discover another way of praying that is almost always impossible for us. This is to pray the Father and to believe that he is good, slow to anger (and) most loving (Ps. 103:8) even when our inner self is crying out “abandoned,” and we are living through dark nights of pain, irritation or sadness. Because Mary is the Immaculate Conception, she restores our relationship to the Father, if we stay beneath her sheltering protection. Here lies the great healing that the Savior offers us in Mary. We must remember that the father cannot exercise paternity except through the mother, for she names the father, she recognizes him as authority, as provider and as benefactor. Mary, from the time of her immaculate conception on, knows the Father. She shows him to us, and she leads us to the Father by giving us Jesus. She leads us also into the arms of St. Joseph, true face of paternity. Such is the privilege of the Immaculate Conception.
In the purity of her conception the Virgin Mary can offer the world the One who is Immaculate, namely, Christ Jesus. This is the second privilege of the Immaculate Conception which is offered to us. Because she conceived the Son of God in her flesh, Mary receives the mission of conceiving him in each one of us, to the extent that we live in her. Protected from drawing back into herself and constantly turned toward the Father, she became the Mother of the Savior, the virgin Mother of the Holy One of God. She is the “pure and spotless form” who received the eldest of many brothers (Rom. 8:29). In turn, let us live in Mary, so that we may be “formed in this mold to the image of Christ,” as Louis-Marie Grignion of Montfort would say, and may become as Sons of God.
Mary is the Mother of the Church and the Mother of mankind. She brings forth the Son of God in us. This birth is not a theological affirmation of a far out mysticism empty of meaning, but rather an incarnate, sensory, and spiritual reality, full of power. Mary puts Jesus the Immaculate in us, and in so doing, she virginises us, she makes us immaculate. She comes “making sacred” in us, by putting the Child-God inside our sufferings, like in the manger at Bethlehem. She makes Jesus the Eucharist born in us, precisely where we feel pain and suffering, bitterness and sadness.
Teresa of the Child Jesus understood this in an incomparable way, and this is what she is teaching her sister Celine when she invites her to hide “under the shadow of Mary’s pure mantle.” She is already advancing on the little way. She is like a little child who needs her mother, and this mother is Mary, given us by the Father.
The Virgin says at Medjugorje, “I am your mother and I want to teach you life in me.” She began this education with the Apostles and she is currently intensifying it through the messages of Lourdes, of Fatima and today of Medjugorje. The Savior desires to make us little children so he can heal us at the origin of our sufferings, at the root of the original sin in us. According to St. Augustin, John the Baptist was purified from original sin in the womb of his mother during the Visitation. When she visited her cousin Elizabeth, Mary brought the Child Jesus to little John, who, sanctified by the Spirit, leaped for joy. St. Joseph is the first man to let himself be virginised in the intimacy of Mary, his spouse, and of Jesus, his Son, so becoming the perfect icon of divine paternity.
The Virgin Mary unites in herself the three essential qualities of a mother after God’s Heart:
- she gives life to her child (and not death),
- she shows him the father (instead of hiding him)
- she accepts separating from him in order to offer him to the father (instead of keeping the child for herself)
At the beginning of our life, as we have said, we were all both loved and wounded by our mother. Each of us could say, “My mother gave me life, but she also instilled in me the bite of sin and death. She offered me to my father, certainly, but she held me back, and she even separated me from my father. She accepted that I left, but today I am still feeling some of her attitudes and reproaches resonate inside me. And this is something that still bothers me daily, in living my life, in my relations with my spouse, my children and my friends.”
The Virgin Mary can be the perfect Mother for each one of us precisely where our own mother could not, didn’t know how to or even didn’t want to be. However, this is possible only if we accept it, if we choose to live in her. And her action in us is recognized by a characteristic sign: a softening of the pain. We feel, in the exact place where we hurt, a great consolation full of tenderness and motherliness.
Mary is there, totally receptive, ready to hold us in her embrace and to bring us back to life. Sometimes we complain that the Virgin Mary is not available, saying she is too perfect, too holy, and that she has too many privileges! Here again, Teresa of the Child Jesus comes to help us, reminding us that “The treasure of the mother belongs to the child.” This little sentence is exceedingly rich in meaning. “All that is Mary’s is mine.” Mary gives us everything, since she brings forth Jesus in us. For even as the Epistle to the Romans says to us about God: Since God did not spare his own Son, but gave him up to benefit us all, we may be certain, after such a gift, that he will not refuse anything he can give (Rom. 8:32), similarly we can say about Mary, “How could she refuse us anything, seeing that she has offered each one of us her child?” Yes, truly, everything that is hers is ours: her parents Anne and Joachim, her son Jesus, her husband Joseph, her Immaculate Conception, her virginity and her body the Temple of the Spirit, her filial relationship to the Father, her qualities as spouse and mother, her divine Maternity, her holiness and her merits…. But we must make this choice not to close our heart and to welcome the gift of God!
The fourth step leads us to a safe haven. It allows us to experience birth, prayer, and daily life in Mary.
To make sacred the unsacred life, with its past hurts, as we have defined them, let us then make a eucharist, meaning a consecration of our whole being and our life to God through Mary. Consecrated means to belong to God, to be set apart as his beloved son or daughter. We have a calling to attain this worthiness, for the Father, Before the world was made, he chose us, chose us in Christ, to be holy and spotless, and to live through love in his presence (Eph. 1:4). Let us make a memorial of all the blessings of God, in the happy times as well as in the sad, and, through an act of will, yield ourselves to grace acting in us, to consecrate our entire selves to God.
We notice in practicing therapeutic mentoring that what is not obtained through psychotherapy or anamnesis (recollection of past events) is possible by being born again in water and the Spirit. Numerous hurts find their resolution and their lessening in Mary, thanks to this consecration.
To be born again from on high, all we need to do is to consecrate our whole being to Mary: our body, our senses (eyes, ears, touch), our word, our sensitivity, our sexuality and our identity, our heart and all our affections, our trials, our sufferings, our life…Let everything without exception—as Grignion of Montfort says—belong to her. We will learn to pray, to act, to exist in Mary. The more we learn to be in Mary, the more we taste, breathe, feel, and understand in Mary.
For the past few centuries, unfortunately, the Christian faith has been shamelessly intellectualized. We have lost the experience of an incarnate mystical and spiritual life coming through the purified senses. By discovering our origins in Mary, who like a mother covers her child with kisses and tender caresses, we will know another way of living spiritually. In this kind of “re-education,” our psychic faculties are no longer marked by fear, evil desires, shame and aggressiveness. Just the opposite will happen. Our senses are progressively spiritualised, and we will be able to repeat the words of St. John: Something which has existed since the beginning, that we have heard, and we have seen with our own eyes; that we have watched and touched with our hands: the Word, who is life (…)we are telling you (I John 1: 1-3).
Psalm 131 expresses clearly what Mary teaches every day to her children:
Yahweh, my heart has no lofty ambitions, my eyes do not look too high.
I am not concerned with great affairs or marvels beyond my scope.
Enough for me to keep my soul tranquil and quiet like a child in its mother’s arms,
As content as a child that has been weaned (Ps. 131: 1,2).
When David wrote these lines some thirty centuries ago, he was already describing the little way of childhood that Teresa lived and taught. The little saint of Lisieux is considered the greatest theologian of our time because she knew how to announce sublime truths with very simple words.
The little child mentioned in the psalm is, according to the Hebrew term, a weaned child. This is the same term, which in the gospel designates the little child that Jesus takes in his arms and blesses (Luke 18:16). The child is naturally weaned from his mother’s milk at age two or three, as we still observe in Africa and in countries that keep a traditional rhythm of family life. And until that age he remains close to his mother, carried on her back or on her hip.
The child who has been weaned is very peaceful because he is assured of maternal tenderness. He is no longer turned toward his mother, but he is beginning to look toward the outside world and in particular toward his father. Psychology confirms this fact: a child has a basic need of his mother until about age three, when it progressively enters into the father’s world. Mary reconstructs, in our wounded persons, what was deficient in us up to age three, so that we can be weaned and oriented toward the Father.
To live and to be born again in Mary brings with it a great consolation in distress, a sweetness in sorrow, a joy and a peace in the Spirit as well as a great struggle. The actual spiritual experience of new birth is made up of all this. As we let go and let this happen, we will be consoled and filled with joy by Mary, precisely where our hearts were most bereft of love in our childhood.
This process of bringing forth new life takes place largely imperceptively. Its most precious fruit is the discovery of our identity as son or daughter, and in strengthening our desire for the Father. For the thirst of the paternalistic God unfolds in our soul. This is the most beautiful work of the Virgin Mary in us. Mary invites us to a simple and truly incarnate spiritual life so our hearts will be joyously filled to overflowing with love for the Father, through the Holy Spirit. However, she cannot act without our consent and participation. And so, she repeats at Medjugorje, “I need you.” It is true that when a child refuses to go into its mother’s arms, the mother is no longer free to console the child.
Living in Mary has concrete implications, as much spiritual as psychological, sensory, and bodily, which need to be learned, experienced, taught. Liturgy, in its appeal to our senses, through insense, lighting, icons, bells, the Book of the Word, gestures and attitudes, is a path. Praying with one’s body through prostrations (great and small “metanies” according to the orthodox tradition) or by dance (in the Hassidic tradition) makes one more disposed to incarnate this healing.
Younger generations are less and less open to the influence of classic therapy, especially to cognitive techniques. They need to touch, see and hear, to taste an authentic spiritual experience, like the Apostle Thomas who demanded to touch Christ. The witness of a community which prays, sings, dances for God and in God is a powerful word of healing. Young people look forward to relearning receptivity to the concrete. The Vittoz method is a therapy technique which works perfectly with this vision, if it is integrated into the spiritual life and into a pertinent anthropological perspective. God was made flesh (John 1:14). So it is, then, in a most incarnate way that Mary helps us be reborn, since she has received in herself the Incarnation of the Word. Thanks to Mary, all those who seek healing can experience God in their whole being
It is by contemplating the Holy Trinity that we discover that God is family and He became incarnate in a family.
- God is family means three distinct Persons, with whom we can live in a preferential and unique relationship, as a child with his father and mother.
Yet, in therapeutic mentoring or spiritual direction, we frequently observe that it is difficult to enter into a simple and true relationship with each one of the Persons of the Holy Trinity. The relationship to God is generally rather immature: it prioritizes one of the Persons to the detriment of the other two, or else sometimes globalizes the relationship to God alone. If it is Christ who is the easiest for us to turn to, it is the Father who is most absent (as well as very often the Holy Spirit). As a result, we have difficulty in living harmoniously with each one of the divine Persons, in the flow of love.
- In order to live among men, God became incarnate in a family, taking the Virgin Mary as his birth mother and St. Joseph as his adoptive father. Wasn’t this to simplify things for us, and to live his relationship among us as a child with his father and his mother? I tell you solemnly, anyone who does not welcome the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it (Mark 10:15).
We are going to study the pedagogy of God who creates us in our mother’s womb, and allows us after that to have access to the father, and to live in this manner in a family. The transition from the mother to the father is a particularly delicate time, where numerous hurts arise. We will analyze why we are hurt and how God comes to heal us through the Holy Spirit.
There are many, many people today, especially younger people, who have lost their identity. They no longer know who they are, nor why they are living, nor where they are going. They have lost their direction and life goal, and they are searching for what Victor Frankl calls “existential meaning.”
When we wish to rediscover the purpose of our life, particulary when we are suffering a great deal, we have seen that it is necessary to come back to our origins and rediscover our roots. Such wisdom is taught in both Scripture and Creation: a seed contains, in its potential, the tree or the plant to come. Everything is maintained in the first principles, in the initial project of God at the start of Creation. All is already present, potentially, in the beginning.
A person is conceived in the womb by his parents’ will, in combination with divine will. This is where he has his origins. St. Irenee speaks about a divine dialogue before man’s conception: the Father unites the Son and the Holy Spirit. But God doesn’t say, “Let man exist,” rather,“Let us make man in our own image” (Gen.1:26). Each human being is therefore the fruit of a divine family consultation. He is molded in the image of the God of Love, meaning into a “likeness” of his Creator. This is why the infant child is a being of love and desire, a being in relationship, created to live in a family and to establish a privileged tie with his mother and then his father.
His desire is first and foremost a desire to be loved, which disposes him to be open to everything from his surroundings. He is in an almost total state of receptivity. He is “capacity” to receive fullness of love. He is “capable of God” (St. Augustine, Trin. 14: 11). His aptitude to receive and welcome is by means of his sensibility (the five senses) and his sensitivity, through his relationship to his mother.
The child wants to be loved by his mother, but his search will have its fulfillment only in infinity. Beyond the maternal caresses, he is in fact looking for God’s love. That is why he continuously “compares” the ontological inscription of full happiness which he carries within himself in the divine image, with what he receives from the outside world through the senses and in what he knows of maternal love. This point is crucially important. From the moment of his conception, the child lives in expectation of a limitless love that he is not yet receiving. He knows this vaguely, not with his powers of reasoning, which are not sufficiently developed at this age, but with his awareness of love that is contained in the image.
Therapy with little children (in games or drawings) has shown, empirically, that the foetus is “conscious” and fully receptive as to how it is welcomed and loved. The foetus can perceive maternal emotions which transmit either peace or aggression (deep distress of the mother, for example, is experienced by the embryo as a form of aggression). The realism of the Incarnation is expressed in Scripture when John writes, He came to his own domain and his own people did not accept him (Jn1:11). The child feels happy being loved when he is desired and cherished and he will be in distress when he feels suffering and anguish, rejection or sadness in his immediate surroundings. He is hurt emotionally, then, from the time he was in the womb, and, as a result, he reacts to protect himself. That is why David proclaims, You know I was born guilty, a sinner from the moment of conception (Ps51:5). The maternal nest most often does give love and life, but it is also marked early on by sin, by evil, and by death.
St. Irenee clearly differentiates origin from goal, situating them in a linear development going from image to likeness of God. Along the way a person fulfills his calling as son. There is an old saying which goes, “Like father, like son,” testifying to familial imprinting. Our origins lie with our mother, but maturity comes through our father.
The mother carries within her a being made in the image of God. It is absolutely necessary that she give it life, then offer it to the father, so that he can help it grow harmoniously toward divine likeness.
God puts us at first (just as he wanted for himself) inside our mother’s womb, and leads us afterwards into our father’s arms. Social sciences confirm this, detailing the steps of the psychological growth of the child and stressing the intervention of the father as the third party who separates the child from its mother. This step is not only an important psychological reality but also a fundamental spiritual truth, for the familial imprint is also a divine marking. The evangelist Luke declares, we are the children of God (Acts17:29).
God as Christ was born of the Virgin. However, those who center their spiritual life around the duo of Mary-Jesus abbreviate the Holy Family, making the Incarnation impossible in their life. Certainly we must say “yes” to Mary, but we must do the same to Joseph, in order to accomplish the divine will. The Son of God wanted to be born into a human family, and he did his utmost to live to the very end in filial relationship to his parents. Following the incident in the Temple, he stayed close to his adoptive father for the next eighteen years, in silence, because he truly wanted to be the son of Joseph (Lk4:22; Jn1:45; 6:42), the carpenter. He grew up as a son perfectly obedient to his father, so he might know in the flesh loving obedience to the heavenly Father. On Sabbath evenings, he would receive the blessing of St. Joseph, like he later publicly received his Father’s love for him the day he was baptised in the Jordan River: You are my Son, the Beloved; my favour rests on you (Mat3:17; Mk1:11).
Discovering God as the Father of Mercy is a progressive development, an education in sonship. The Gospel of St. John is the story of the Son of God looking toward his Father. He begins with these words: And the Word was with God (Jn1:1). Jesus will say his Father’s words and will do his Father’s works. He is, from all eternity, the most perfect Son, perfectly loving his Father. His human development is also that of Eternal Son, submissive to Mary and inclined toward his father Joseph. It is easy to contemplate this mystery by rereading the Apostle John and substituting the name Joseph for that of the Father. Because Jesus, true God and true man, lived with his adoptive father in Nazareth for thirty years, he can say: My Father goes on working, and so do I (Jn5:17). He speaks with authority. He uses paraboles because he says nothing that he hasn’t heard from his father Joseph. He incarnated in his humanity shared with St. Joseph (and the Virgin Mary), what he was living in his divinity with his Father.
The example of the life of Christ confirms that the highest spiritual realities are lived out in the simplest daily events.
For our part, we are born to the Life on high in Mary, meaning also in the Church, to develop spiritually there, and thanks to Christ, make the transition into the Father’s embrace.
This is the powerful teaching of the mystery of the Incarnation. Jesus is the most perfect Son, who brings everything together in himself, from the beginning to the final realization, taking the pathway from the mother to the Father, both in human reality and in the spiritual life. One cannot disassociate completely in mankind the psychological level from the spiritual level. For while we are born of a mother who directs us as children toward their father, we are born into eternal Life in the Church, in Mary, in order to become sons and daughters of the Most High. If we accept being sons and daughters, we will become in our turn, fathers and mothers, for God is son, God is spouse, God is Father. We are marked with the trinitarian seal, with the Spirit of the divine family.
When we consider the whole picture from origin to completion, we can better understand the importance of the little way of childhood so highly favored by St. Teresa, doctor of little ones. Nothing is more difficult for us than to accept becoming the Father’s sons and daughters, for from the beginning, the BREAK WITH SONSHIP is everyone’s great injury, resulting in a negation of one’s origins and an impossibility of turning toward the Father. When man is no longer tied to his roots, he loses the meaning of life and becomes incapable of making a memorial of his past.
All of this begins early in childhood with relationship problems we experience with our own parents, continuing today with paternal and maternal equivalents, and expressing itself spiritually in our relationship with the Holy Family and the three divine Persons. We will take two examples to illustrate this point: love of life and paternal obedience.
It is a rare person who gets up in the morning full of energy, thinking: “Terrific! Another new day is here!” Unfortunately, we can be rather grumpy when we face a new day, or we even try to go back to sleep just to forget the work we are facing. This is a sign of maternal hurt that we frequently see occurring. Getting up in the morning is a symbolic expression of a beginning, of our life in the womb, and also of our birth whose vigorous momentum was successfully thwarted by a lack of love. The stronger or the more repeated the break with love, the more our “yes” to life will be lessened.
It is also rare to find people who obey easily while remaining true to themselves, desirous of joyfully yielding to another’s authority. We see difficulty in obeying all the time, reflecting the disruption in the relationship to the father and the refusal of our identity as son or as daughter. Take you, for example. Do you like to listen to what the Pope says, or do you prefer to criticize (endlessly) what he says? Do you calmly accept the demands of your superior at work, or do you begin to sputter and protest?
These two examples taken from daily life offer a simple illustration of our difficulty in living (tied to our relationship with our mother), and in obeying (tied to our relationship with our father), indicating a break with sonship. Divine instruction aims to raise us, to heal us, and to put us back on the road leading from the mother to the Father by shaping us to the Son.
As we have said, the child discovers a painful lack of love, beginning already in his mother’s arms, when sensory intuition tells him he is receiving far less than he would like to. Because he is entirely in a state of receiving and welcoming, receptive in his senses and sensitivities, he intuits his mother’s affection, and also her distress, her guilt, her impatient reactions (especially toward those around her) and the tensions within her. He feels these negative emotions without being able to understand why as yet and to give them meaning. These emotions are translated into feelings of his being in the way, not as he should be, not being likeable. This lack of love, in which the child feels abandoned and rejected, defines the injury.
As adults, we often experience these emotions, for example when relationship conflict arises (fighting, divorce…), or a humiliating experience (rejection, unemployment…), or misfortune (accident, sickness…); we have the disagreeable impression of being alone and not being understood, as if “nobody is paying attention to me.” The feeling of isolation is so strong that questions surface sometimes, like a deadly poison: Where is your God? (Ps. 42:3) My God, my God, why have you deserted me? (Ps. 22:1) We are all, in our emotions and feelings, Fatherless orphins.
The initial injury doesn’t depend on us. It is independent of our willing it. What depends on us is what we will make of it. We often affirm, and correctly so, “it isn’t my fault that I’m hurt.” It’s true! But my responsibility comes in what I do about it. God himself is hurt by the rejection and ingratitude of mankind, but he never answered injury with injury. His response was to deliver himself into the hands of mankind. In the same way, the Virgin Mary was broken by the murder of her innocent son, but she continued at the foot of the Cross to love us tirelessly.
The infant child is thus wounded early on in his consciousness of love because he has had the painful experience of the lack of love. If he is truly desired by his parents and welcomed warmly by his mother with a lot of tenderness, the hurt will still be there, but of lesser intensity. Birth itself, as a matter of fact, though it is a natural happening that initiates the progressive separation with the mother, is a stressful event for the child, who aspires to complete happiness. Then follow the endless back and forth between cradle and mother’s arms, not to mention the boundaries that must be learned, along with impatient parents, all more injuries in the initial wound of abandonment. The love that the little one receives forms him, certainly, but his infinite yearning is not fulfilled, and in the vulnerability arise emotions for which the child is not at all prepared: pain and suffering.
The Creator didn’t want man to know suffering. But, ever since the original break with sonship, man has felt emotions contrary to his ontological nature. He doesn’t know how to react to them. No longer immerged in the divine Presence, he suffers from not being infinitely loved. Like a fish out of water, he painfully yearns to go back to his natural surroundings. Where he has been hurt (and only there), he is afraid of being abandoned, of being left to die, because he has the impression that he is in the way, that he is not “like he should be.”
Pain and suffering are the consequences of original sin, and of doubt in particular as related to love. Once hurt, an infant displays a dramatic flaw, for when love comes near him, he no longer totally trusts in it. His confidance is broken. Betrayed once, he doubts the words and gestures of his parents. In the extreme, he pushes them away, pouting, as if thinking, “I called you and you didn’t answer. I waited for you and you didn’t come. Don’t even bother trying to get near me anymore.”
When we become adults, it is easy in the spiritual battle to recognize what the inner hurt looks like. We see it in our temptation to doubt when it comes to love or truth. We must chose again, either to restore our confidance (based on our forgiving) or to go it alone.
A little child doesn’t yet assume responsibility for his guilt, either in the injury and its pain, or in the emerging doubt. From the time of the original sin of Adam and Eve, it has been like this for everyone since conception. The impact on the life and love dynamics within every person is considerable. In fact, his desire is torn between:
- his capacity to welcome his first experiences (sensory, then feelings) of maternal love, which make his confidance in it grow (as per the sequence: “I cried, you answered, I’m confidant in you”).
- and a tendancy to pull back and wall himself in, so he isn’t more hurt in the relationship. (Doctor Tomatis describes losses of hearing in this way during the first months of the child’s life.) Once an adult, the person doubts the affection people show him. Such behavior is frequently seen in therapeutic mentoring and in our spiritual life. There remains so much suffering from abandonment that a person refuses to believe in love, even though he wants to.
The quest for infinite love is torn between wanting completion, as contained in the image, striving tirelessly toward its goal, and a shortsighted desire which deviates toward immediatey satisfaction. From early on, man is destructured, between what he was intended for – the fulness of love - and his own aggressive acts. He is afraid of love since love can make him suffer. He is afraid of losing his compensations for love, what he possesses and in what he seeks consolation. He feels shame to be himself and he no longer feels worthy of being loved.
Man pushes away what he doesn’t like and he becomes aggressive. Being without something arouses in him frustration and jealousy. When he sees other people love, he would like to be like them, but he no longer knows how. He prefers to take or to push away. He becomes incapable of letting himself be loved and of loving calmly.
His aggression has become the expression of his desire for mastery and domination. His jealousy reveals his willingness to take from another what he himself lacks.
He really does desire to be fully loved. However, when love comes close, he is afraid and resists it. Then, he sinks into despair, because he cannot drink the living water just when he finds himself at the edge of the well.
Being pulled two ways gives rise to two types of behavior in the relationship of the child with its mother: turning back in a search for dependence or its opposite, breaking with the relationship in a spirit of independence.
From conception until about age two, the child lives in a symbiotic relationship with its mother. If one were to ask a newborn, “Who are you?” the answer would probably be, “I am momma,” because it cannot differentiate yet between itself and its mother. The child hasn’t realized any distance yet, that will help it discover its own personal identity. This is a necessity of human growth and the Creator’s will: until age two, the child identifies with its mother, in a normal dependent relationship.
But, because of early hurts, he has already experienced fear, shame, aggressiveness and even jealousy!… The deviation of desire engenders jealousy and guilt in him. Even while he is discovering the joy of being loved, of being consoled and caressed by his mother, he clings to her, trying to possess her for himself. He doesn’t want to leave her when he goes off to school, and he exhibits a fierce jealousy towards his baby brother. These are the first signs of a dependent relationship. They manifest a problem in the growth of the child who refuses to leave his mother in order to go toward the father. The ultimate consequences will be serious: loss of identity, loss of liberty, immature emotional development.
An independent spirit is the second result of an upset in the relationship. The child decides within himself to leave his mother before it is time, meaning before he has access to the father, because he “wants to do it on his own.” He becomes an orphan.
The parable of the prodigal son illustrates this point. The older brother stays faithfully home but he is incapable of becoming who he should be because of his relationship with his father. He doesn’t dare ask for a young animal to have with his friends for a party because he cannot personally express his wishes, afraid of disappointing his father and of no longer being loved. He stays in a dependent relationship since he is not in an open, face to face relationship with him. By way of contrast, his younger brother prefers to gather his belongings and leave for a far away country. He leaves the maternal context before having access to the father and he is going to experience the consequences of his independence.
These two directions to the relationship have a positive and a negative side; in fact, they allow the child to experience great suffering (in the dependent relationship) and to become self-sufficient (thanks to the independent spirit), but in addition they cause the rupture of son ship and the true family spirit.
Scripture clearly indicates that independence is preferable to dependence in order to come to the Father. Natural science also confirms that a stage of independence is necessary for psychological growth, in order to leave the state of symbiosis (and/or merging) and establish a better identity in a relationship of communion.
Such a psychological injury also has considerable spiritual impact: by refusing to be totally the son of his parents, man becomes incapable of attaining the paternity of God. His behavior toward God is that of an orphan. We can observe this today, for example, in the unbelief of people living without God.
We see a similar shortcoming in the perfectionist attitude of the believer who seeks God so fervently as if he were hiding, whereas the Judeo-Christian Revelation shows just the opposite. It is not first of all man who is seeking God, but rather God seeking him. The Savior is The One who loved us first (I Jn 4:19), the good shepherd who leaves all his sheep in order to search for and find the one who is lost (Lk 15:4). He goes so far as to live with man and die for him in order to save him from hatred, from jealousy and from death by his Resurrection. God is a Father of Mercy: This has taught us love—that he gave up his life for us (I Jn 3:16).
The table below summarizes the main psychological problems of a child who does not stay in a balanced relationship with his mother and father. He vacillates toward one or the other, and the consequences vary for males and for females. In certain situations where the child is not able to live in a constructive emotional relationship with one of his two parents, he will be without a family. This is an open door to marginalization in society and delinquence.
I. Dependent relationship with the mother, inassessible father
In Boys
- Problems identifying with the father: feminisation, masturbation, homosexuality
- Immature emotional make-up, retarded growth
- Escape into imagination and dependencies (alcohol, drugs…)
- Difficulty getting involved, instability, refusal of responsibility
In Girls
- Possible homosexuality
- Immature emotional make-up
- Fear of men (staying celibate)
- Merging with the mother
II Dependent relationship with the father, rejection of the mother
In Boys
- Domination of women (“macho” attitude, “Don Juan”)
- Paternalism, authoritarianism
- Escape into work and responsibility
- Tendency towards depression possible
In Girls
- Trouble identifying with the mother: masculinisation, masturbation, homosexuality
- Excessive submission toward men or overly seductive
- Mental anorexia – Bulimia
- Tendency toward depression possible
The Savior want to enter into a covenant with us. He comes looking for us to make us his sons and daughters and to invite us to collaborate with him in Creation. The more that we stay close to the Father, the more we will become in turn mothers who give life and fathers who enable life to thrive.
The work of covenanting is called, in psychological terms, “the work of mourning.” It has a spiritual dimension that goes beyond us. God says: I will establish my Covenant with you (Gen 6:18). I will be a father to him and he a son to me (I Sam 7:14). Come and join in your master’s happiness (Mat 25:21), which means enter into the divine Family. There you will find happiness, healing and rest. For our part, let us be visible signs of the love of God, learning from him (Mat 11:29). God has depth of mercy and a mother’s heart. He is truly a Father for me and he teaches me to become his child by giving me his beloved Son.
We find it painful to discover our own resistance to love. For years and years we having been telling whoever would listen that we are suffering, strongly affirming, “I can’t do this, it’s too difficult for me, I’ll never make it!…” Now we can understand that we aren’t asked to “be able to” on our own, but rather to willingly surrender ourselves. The action is given by Christ, who simply asks, “Do you want to?” We realize that behind our “of course, certainly, I want to, but I can’t!” there is, in fact, a “no, I don’t want to rely on Another.” I don’t want to let myself be loved where I hurt, and I don’t want to move from justice to mercy and to forgiveness in the injury itself.
The pathway to healing offers the truth in the hurt sensitivity, for it brings to light the event or the familial atmosphere which pained the person from his earliest childhood. It lays open emotions which could not be expressed, and helps the mind understand the elaborate system of defenses that it has set up. Lastly, it mobilizes the spiritual powers, which are located deeper within, in order to offer the possibility of a new choice, with prayer allowing the individual to stay centered on God and to express his confidence in him.
From the time when we were babes in our mother’s arms, we have longed for a God who will console only our psychological pain. We need some time to realize that God is consolation on the Cross, meaning to the depths of our pain. During his Passion, Christ knew the greatest joy and at the same time the greatest suffering.
Each time that the Savior comes to our pain, many emotions surface as we confront our suffering and anguish: fear, sadness, aggression, denial… In order to heal, it is essential that I welcome the truth in order to dare see what is living in me. And the truth is, I am most like the son who answers his father, No, I will not go work in your vineyard (Mt 21:28-31). For while the vineyard may be the place of feasting and rejoicing, it is also the place of the winepress and the cross. The son refuses because he knows he will have to suffer there, and he only wants consolation.
To accept being vulnerable in the place where we have not been loved is to accept opening up again to the desire to be loved, in a dual experience of pain and of pleasure, of anguish and of peace, of suffering and of joy.
How great must be the suffering of an unborn child who is not wanted! It experiences a night of total blackness, a hell. Not capable of bearing such a burden of pain, it protects itself by closing its heart right where it is being hurt, whereas it was created for love. Growing up, and when the Savior comes to knock at his door, either directly in prayer, or indirectly through a person, he will progressively experience conscious memories of this terrible hurt. And he will revolt, because he absolutely DOES NOT WANT anyone entering into his tomb.
If we understand what is happening and let God work freely within us, we can retrace the way of sonship back toward the Father. This idea throws us into a panic, because we fear the unbearable suffering it brings with it, but spiritual direction needs us to act with confidence and to learn to let go. Our intellect does not understand, but deeper than that, our spiritual intelligence and our wish for love say, “Lord, you have the words of eternal Life (Jn 6:68). I don’t understand, but I have confidence in you. Go ahead.”
Often, when we are newly converted, we want to be in relationship only with Jesus. But He has a passion in his Heart and it is his Father. He teaches us to look toward his Father, also our Father. And encountering the Father rests on a solid base: the experience of our relationship with our father. That is why our childhood fears of our father’s big, heavy voice, the severity of his punishments or, on the contrary, his absence, reappear more or less consciously in us and hinder this movement. Towering before us is the image of the father who frightened us. Similarly, maternal injuries rise to the surface and become progressively more conscious, calling for a reconciliation with our mother.
However, we can never go back, to rest, as it were, in the loving embrace of our mother, for it is time to know consolation in the heart of our pain. The child leaves his mother to walk toward an unknown: his father. Spiritually, it is a question of going from Mary’s embrace into the Father’s loving arms, with our friend and brother, Christ Jesus, at our side.
Through Jesus the Father responds to human distress by coming to save that which was lost, meaning by restoring sonship. This is why the Son becomes flesh in a family, between a man and a woman, Joseph and Mary. Jesus is submissive to Mary, who gives him life and draws his attention to Joseph. Jesus listens to his father and lets himself be taught by him for thirty years.
Suffering in agony on the cross, he gives two great cries:
- A cry of abandonment: My God, why have you deserted me? (Mat 27:46) because he is suffering in his body and in his heart from all of our injuries from earliest childhood. He feels abandoned even by his Father, because he carries the pain of the littlest one who is not welcomed among his own and who is crying because he is not loved like he was expecting. How can we not think about the millions of little ones who did not even have the possibility of being born!
- A cry of confidence in the deepest distress: Father, into your hands I commit my spirit (Lk 23:46). Feeling all the pain of our rejection of him, Jesus testifies of his willingness to put his confidence in his Father. In this way he is showing us that what is essential is to be his child, by accepting to visit, with Him, our wounded emotions and senses, in order to purify, console, and heal them.
Jesus takes unto himself, therefore, all of our brokenness, in our humanity marked by doubt, forgetfulness, fear, greed, shame, aggressiveness, jealousy. And it was necessary that Christ, the alpha and the omega (Rev1:8), summarize man’s vocation from its origin to its end, meaning from the image to the likeness. It was necessary, by his arms spread out on the Cross, that he unite earthly with heavenly. So it is that he reunites Mary, daughter of Israel and symbol of the Church, with the Eternal Father.
If we allow the Holy Spirit to work in us, we can go from independence to communion, from dependence and looking backwards to a forward march. Who is the Spirit? It is the Spirit of the Father. After much wrangling about filioque, the Eastern and Western churches today have reached consensus. The Holy Spirit procedes principaliter from the Father, who is the origin of all things, and it rests upon the Son, who in turn, sends it to us.
In the two theophanies (baptism and the transfiguration of Christ) we see the perfect Son receiving the love of the Father. He hears, This is my Son, the Beloved (Mat 4:17) and the Spirit of the Father descended on Him. In his heart, Jesus certainly rejoiced, “Abba! Father!” Here is the happiness of life in the Spirit. The more we let him live in us, the more we learn to let ourselves be loved. To let oneself be loved is to accept being a son or a daughter, being dependent on Another.
The Spirit orients us toward the Father and operates in our heart for a concrete reconciliation with our father (the end goal) and our mother (our origins). We feel a weight, a pain tied to the progressive healing of our senses, but we enjoy at the same time a peace, a stronger and stronger joy: the happiness of being sons and daughters passionately loved, cherished and preferred.
God fashions us, as St. Irenee has written, between his hands: the Son and the Spirit. The pedagogical image is beautiful because two hands are needed to cradle a little one and to keep him from falling.
The hand of the Son is the model in which we are shaped, made to be as Christ. We become progressively “like the Son,” oriented toward the Father and perfectly reconciled with our origins.
The Holy Spirit rests on the Son. It gives us breath and growth, and allows us to hear the voice of the Father saying, You are my beloved son, my beloved daughter. By ourselves, we cannot hear this. But in our heart of hearts there arises a cry from the Spirit which cannot be uttered. “Father! My Father!” We learn that we are passionately loved by a God of mercy who does not leave us orphins, but who tirelessly wishes to take us in his two hands to rock us and console us. When we are in sorrowful, like the Apostles were at the Last Supper when they learned that Jesus was to leave them, the Father comes to show us his love by giving us his two Advocates (Jn 14:16): the Son, who learned from what he suffered (Heb 5:8) how to be our intercessor with the Father; and the Spirit (Jn 14:26,27) who strengthens us.
When the Father asks the Word to become incarnate in order to save humanity, he offers him as well, through his parents Mary and Joseph, two human hands to see him through. The Child Jesus liked to be rocked by his mother, then by his father. If we accept entering into the Holy Family, we will participate in the tenderness of their love and we will feel the “parental rocking” from Mary to Joseph, from Joseph to Mary. It is an unfailing move of healing. For the mother leads us to the father who makes us go toward our destiny, and the father makes a memorial of the origins, reminding the child where he comes from, saying to him, “Look at your beautiful mother!”
That is the way the path goes, from the image to the likeness of God, from the beginning to the end, between these two hands which conform us to the Son. If we live each of these stages, we will be oriented toward the Father and reconciled with our origins, in love with life, and peacefully obedient sons and daughters: in sum, we will be happy! Teresa of Lisieux affirmed: “Life is not sad! On the contrary, it is very happy. If you were to say, ‘exile is sad,’ I would understand you. We err by giving the name of life to all that has an end. It is only heavenly things, which never end, that must receive this true name; so, life is not sad, but happy, very happy!... (St. Mary of the Trinity, Red Notebook, NEC, Cerf/DDB 1992 p. 781.2). Yes, the loneliness of our abandonment and the pain of our hurts is indeed sad, but the life for which we are eternally made is magnificent!
This path asks us to relive the many catastophic experiences which have marked our life: the child that we were will have at times refused to come to life, to be a son (daughter), to accept his mother just as she is, her father just as he is. He or she will have refused to totally belong to the family, living estranged from the Father’s will. However, the more we enter intimately into this teaching, the more the Savior fashions us in a spirit of family. Created as an “image of God,” we will come to resemble him, meaning “as gods,” (Ps 82:6) as the Son, as the Father, by personally receiving this paternity (maternity) from the Father of Mercies.
Bossuet writes: “Jesus was born of Mary so that she can give him to us, was revealed to the Apostles so that they could proclaim him and to St. Joseph so he could quiet and hide him.” (Bossuet, Premier panegyrique de saint Joseph, 1656,3e point.) To give, to proclaim and to hide are three different but complementary missions: in a few short words, Bossuet indicates the specific role of the mother (the Virgin Mary), who brings her child into the world in order to give him to the world, and of the father (St. Joseph), who hides and protects him.
In this chapter, we will spend time with St. Joseph, a model for today of man, of spouse, and of father. We will discover him in the Holy Family, living in a fascinating interrelationship with Mary, wife, spouse, and mother. Three main reasons lead us today to be better acquainted with the mystery of St. Joseph:
To discover Jesus,
To confront the crisis of paternity
And to take St. Joseph as our adoptive father.
Loving Joseph, his father, means knowing Jesus also, for, as the saying goes, “Like father, like son” or in Jesus’ own words, To have seen me is to have seen the Father (cf. Jn 14:9), meaning To have seen me is to have seen my father Joseph. For Jesus, the son who perfectly resembles the Father, must have strongly resembled Joseph. Everyone designated him thus: Surely this is Jesus son of Joseph. We know his father and mother (Jn 6:42;cf. Lc 4:22).
This crisis of paternity is profounding affecting the western world. It is the source of confusion in young people, of the break-up of families, of losses: of meaning to life, of responsibility and of commitment. In fact, the crisis of paternity comes second after a deeper disruption of maternity. The Savior responds to this through his Church by giving us Mary as a mother and in progressively revealing St. Joseph, model of paternity.
St. Joseph is, with the Virgin Mary, the treasure that the Savior gives us. Jesus has two hands to cradle us. One offers the consoling tenderness of a mother, Mary, and the other the kind protection of a father, Joseph. The saints have walked in the same way. For example, little Bernadette didn’t hesitate to take St. Joseph as her adoptive father at the death of Francis Soubirous, when she was admitted to the sisters at Nevers. Who taught her this spiritual vision? Who gave her this father? The Virgin Mary did! In fact, we are guided by Mary when we enter into intimacy with St. Joseph.
We do not encounter St. Joseph by listening to lovely homelies: we enter into his mystery by experiencing him. When the Apostles began to discover Christ, they passed the word along, saying, We have found the Messiah (Jn 1:41). He is Jesus, son of Joseph, from Nazareth. From Nazareth? said Nathanael, Can anything good come from that place?--Come and see (Jn 1:45,45). One can only know St. Joseph in Jesus. No need for long discussions. All we have to do is come near him and look at him the way Jesus does.
It is easy to be content with a superficial knowledge of St. Joseph as long as we haven’t had a close relationship with him. Isn’t he pictured as an old man with white hair, whose job it is to watch over his young spouse, after he himself has had many children... or again as a dejected man in a corner of Nativity scene, wondering what is happening to him! No, the mystery of St. Joseph is something else indeed! Come and see! If you come, you will see and you will experience who Joseph is. For centuries, the Church has been slowly unfolding St. Joseph’s role and identity. His coming to light is mysteriously tied to the revelation of the eternal Father.
To help us want to know the happiness of having St. Joseph as our adoptive father, we are going to think think carefully together about intimacy with him from several different angles.
St. Joseph is a patriarch “such as none other in the Old Testament” (A. Buttet, Saint Joseph l’ami des mauvais quarts d’heure, Schoechli, Sierre, Switzerland, 1990, p. 2). There is no greater example of paternity in the whole history of humanity than that of the adoptive father of Jesus. For him to accept this paternity and become this unique father, St. Joseph first had to experience the dignity of the son. Man, in fact, cannot develop outside of a relationship of filial love. He needs to live in a circulation of love whose origin is trinitarian love, and whose daily earthly experience is in the family, between a mother and a father. Before becoming the adoptive father of Jesus, St. Joseph is Joseph, son of Jacob, son of Matthan (cf. Mt 1:15,16).
Scripture seems to give few details about his life. However, it does so in a hidden manner. No doubt he probably had a life close to that of his illustrious predecessor Joseph the patriarch, who is, like him, son of Jacob-Israel. We see here an analogy between the two men. Joseph the patriarch is son of Israel, and his life is an impressive prefiguration of the one who is to come after him, St. Joseph. The one will save his people from famine, and, far beyond his own people, Egypt and other countries of the ancient world, and the other will save his Son from Herod’s persecution, protecting Him by whom Salvation comes to all nations. The first will leave home for exile in Egypt, as will the second with Mary and Jesus. To the one and to the other will be given dreams and their interpretations. The one will respect chastity by not touching the wife of Potiphar the Egyptian, in spite of her advances, while the other will live in purity with his very chaste spouse.
St. Joseph did not stop developing during the thirty years of their life together in Nazareth in order to became one hundred per cent capable of fulfilling his double mission as spouse of the Virgin and as father of the Child Jesus. We dare believe that he was completely sanctified by his contact with the God Child and with his mother. Like every man, he was born marked by the brokenness of original sin, but he was progressively purified by his spouse who gave him Jesus, the Sinless One. He therefore became a father like no other, a true icon of the eternal Father for Christ Jesus his child, as he will also for each of us who receive him in turn as our adoptive father.
What qualities belong to paternity? We can find them by contemplating St. Joseph, for it is through him that Jesus came to know human paternity. We are invited to follow him in this discovery, because Jesus tells us, I am the Way, the Truth and the Life (Jn 14:6). If the holiness of Joseph comes from Jesus and Mary, that of Jesus passes through Joseph, for he is the obedient son of his father. It is Jesus’ obedience toward his Father that saved us. In his humanity, he expresses indirectly toward St. Joseph the filial love that he bears in his divinity toward his Father in Heaven.
Mr. Olier has perceived the mysterious tie that binds Joseph and the eternal Father: “The admirable St. Joseph was given to the earth to express in an earthly way the perfections that we adore in God the Father. In his person alone, he carried God’s beauty, his purity, his love, his wisdom and prudence, his mercy and compassion. One only saint is destined to represent God the Father, whereas it will take an infinity of creatures, a multitude of saints to represent Jesus Christ, for the whole Church works only to outwardly manifest the virtues and perfections of its head whom we adore and only St. Joseph represents the eternal Father...So we must consider the great St. Joseph as the greatest thing in the world, the best known and the most incomprehensible...(the Father) having chosen for himself this saint to make his image known on the earth, he gives him a likeness to his invisible and hidden nature, and, in my understanding, this saint is beyond being understood by the minds of men...” (J.J. Olier, La journée chrétienne, Roger et Chernoviz, 1906).
Paternity is received from on high: This, then, is what I pray, kneeling before the Father, from whom every family, whether spiritual or natural, takes its name (Ep 3:14). Between Our Father and St. Joseph there is a special passive cooperation, which is that of paternity. God gives him a unique paternity. “The Son of God being made visible by taking on human flesh, he conversed and dealt visibly with God his Father, hidden in the person of St. Joseph, through whom the Father made himself visible to him” (J.J. Olier, ibid.). Our Father was made visible to the Word of God made flesh through the humanity of the man Joseph! “Jesus saw in Joseph the heavenly Father as his Father and the Holy Virgin saw in his person the same heavenly Father as her spouse” (Olier, ibid.). These words are gripping: Mary is the spouse of the heavenly Father in St. Joseph. Jesus is the son of the heavenly Father in Joseph. When Mary asks the angel how this will be, the angel replies, The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will cover you with its shadow (Lc 1:35). The Holy Spirit comes upon Mary who becomes thus the shadow of the Spirit and the virtue of the Father descends on St. Joseph who becomes the shadow of the Father. There is a personal communion just as strong between the Spirit and Mary as between the Father and Joseph.
“At the end of the world, the glories of St. Joseph will magnificently appear... God himself will draw back the curtain and will tear the veil that stops us until now from seeing with our eyes wide open the marvels of the sanctuary of the soul of St. Joseph; the Holy Spirit will act ceaselessly in the heart of the faithful to move them to exalt the glory of this divine person” (cf. P. Jacquinot, les Gloires de Joseph, Mgr Villepeler, Dijon 1645. Les plus beaux textes sur saint Joseph, p. 100). Bossuet writes, “What the Church has, which is her most illustrious, is what is her most hidden.” This is a constant in the pedagogy of God: the more a treasure is precious in his eyes, the more it is hidden. St. Joseph is hidden, kept like an excellent treasure guarded until the end of time by the One who is wise and wonderful in all his ways!
What are the qualities that belong to a father according to the heart of God? We are going to look at them in broad daylight by contemplating St. Joseph, model for fathers and path of healing for paternity. We will see that the father is protector, he makes us develop, he initiates the struggle, he is the guardian of time, he is silent, he gives identity, he makes a memorial, he gives bread, he draws together in unity, he lays down his life.
When you think of the qualities that you would like to find in a mother, what are the first words which pop into your head? Sweetness, tenderness, consolation...These qualities are all found in Mary.
When you list the qualities that you would like to find in a father, what are those that you would put at the top of the list? Generally strength, authority, protection.
Certainly a great quality of St. Joseph is protection. Just as the mother consoles and soothes, the father protects and offers strength. The patriarch Joseph, intendant of Pharaoh, will save his people from famine. St. Joseph, the intendant of God and head of the Holy Family, will lead them into Egypt to protect the Child Jesus from the hand of Herod. From this point on, he is charged with “gladdening and feeding the Church in heavenly gifts, watching over her and defending her” (Concile de Bordeaux, Acta conciliorum, T.VI, col 847, collectio Lacensis, 1868). The father is the one who removes the stone from the road so that the son won’t risk falling when he bumps up against it (cf. Ps 91:12).
When it is a question of strength, it is also a question of security. We need a strong father who can offer us security. St. Joseph is the expression of the strength of God which is security. We affirm that in the Credo: “I believe in God the Father Almighty,” but often we do not live it. We have an important need to find our security in God through Joseph. Numerous daily anxieties manifest the lack of a father within us.
In general, strength has a negative connotation in our experience of paternity; it can be crushing and brutal, for example, when a mother promises a strong punishment with a “Just you wait and see what your father’s going to do when he gets home!” We are often afraid when faced with paternal force. That is why today we are afraid of God, afraid of the Father, afraid of punishment. We have been hurt by parodies of true paternity. We still need to discover that neither the Father nor St. Joseph are like that.
“Joseph is the tender side of man, the expression of the strength of God” said the blessed Mary of the Incarnation. Paternal strength should protect us tenderly instead of assaulting and frightening us. Let us go to St. Joseph and we will never be afraid. The strength of God in St. Joseph is tenderness. The apparitions at Cotignac in Provence confirm this. Joseph appeared there having a great stature which radiated great strength. But this strength is tenderness. It is not there to step on or punish, but to surround God’s child like the walls of Jerusalem which form an impenetrable fortress: I love you, Yahweh, my strength. I will take shelter in him, my rock, my shield, my horn of salvation, my stronghold and my refuge. From violence you rescue me (Ps 18:1,2). We have a great need of rediscovering a paternity which is strength and tenderness, of learning how to seek shelter in the arms of the Almighty Father, refuge in all our distress, so we can feel this protection in his paternal security.
The Father often protects, and further, he always delivers through his power. He is certainly able to remove obstacles from our way, but sometimes he leaves it! Then comes the hour of trial, of accident, of sickness. We will see how Joseph teaches us to struggle in spiritual combat in order to be delivered. He protected his Son from assassination and pulled him from the hands of the fox Herod. Though absent from the foot of the Cross, the Father is however there (cf. Jn 16:32). André Doze pictures good Joseph of Arimathaea, signifying by analogy that St. Joseph would be there also, mysteriously and invisibly present, near his son who died on the wooden Cross. By taking care of the body of the Lord, along with Nicodemus, he again manifests the love of the Father watching over his Son to lead him to the Resurrection.
Another aspect of the father’s role consists of covering, hiding and removing. The mother has the opposite role of unmasking, showing and giving. The father hides precisely because he has a mission to protect. The name “Joseph” is the Hebraic present participle of the Hebraic verb which means “to remove.” It is he who removes. Removes means “to set apart,” “to separate.” Joseph is hidden and he hides, he is made to recede and at the same time he recedes. Joseph, “terror of demons,” protects us from all that targets the unity of man. Thus, he covers, he protects the virginity of Mary (in the eyes of all, Mary is the spouse of Joseph, who has given him a son Jesus, and in this way her virginity is not known). Also, he hides Jesus’ divinity from the world (so that everyone will know him as the carpenter’s son). Joseph brings entry into the shadow in a very special way: he brings entry into the luminous shadow, into the cloud of the Father. That is why he is the shadow of the Father.
There is another function of the father that we will study in the following pages. He protects by separating, by drawing apart. He especially teaches the spiritual warfare against illusion. He intervenes in human and spiritual development, and helps us in our search for personal identity and in all the events of separation. For thirty years, he drew the Child Jesus apart and protected him by pulling him back from a hostile and immature world, which, in less than three years, would set itself against him and kill him.
If Joseph hides, it is because he himself is hidden. It takes stubborn perseverance to discover him and know him intimately. The Church has uncovered Mary’s role as woman, spouse and mother, but Joseph still remains in the shadow. We cannot take hold of him because he is always, just like Our Father, beyond the spot where we are looking for him. It takes a burning desire of sonship to discover him.
The unmasking of St. Joseph is being kept for the last days and it will be progressive. As the Holy Father prophesies, two saints will mark the twenty-first century and the third millenium: St. Teresa of the Child Jesus and St. Joseph. Today’s world lacks a father. The paternity of St. Joseph is given to it to be the icon of the Eternal Father whom we need so much.
God’s paternity expresses itself wonderfully through the couple of Mary and Joseph. We can see in them divine Mercy, tender and strict, which at the same time consoles and protects, covers and uncovers.
The second fundamental grace of the father is to make us grow. The mother receives, welcomes and gives life but it is the father who gives the growth. The name “Joseph” also means “to increase.” He is literally “increasing,” or according to certain translations, “the one who adds and makes to grow.” Jesus is going “to increase” in his hands in an impressive way: And Jesus increased in wisdom, in stature, and in favour with God and men (Lk 2:52). To the father is granted the irreplaceable role of making the child grow. St. Paul claims, in the same way, I did the planting, Apollos did the watering, but God made things grow (cf. I Cor 3:6-7). And as the psalmist sings, If Yahweh does not build the house, in vain the masons toil (Ps 127:1).
In Latin the word “authority” comes from the verb augere, “to make grow.” To have authority over someone means precisely to make grow. Joseph is responsible for the growth in love. He then has a key role in education, and particularly with young people who have no father. These people have a serious lack of interior structure, of decision making ability and of autonomy, of the meaning of truth and goodness, of effort; they are lacking in sexual identity, in support and in paternal security. With Joseph, they will be able to discover all of that: the father gives the sense of values, of the cost of things. For, in order to grow, young people need guide posts, limits, requirements and interdictions, along with confidence, support and experience. They need the true peace which calms their revolt, and they need authority and security.
Today, we have an educational system which has done away with guideposts. A child grows like a neglected weed, - hence a procession of insecurities, loss of meaning, lack of involvement-, whereas what would structure him in his core is a certain paternal strictness which gives security and protects at the same time.
The authority that the father exercises over his son is ordained for his growth. It is not a question of compelling. This point is extremely important. The foundation of authority is not in power but rather in the gift of the self. If it is true that the father has authority over his son, if the husband has authority over his wife, this is not to exercise power or domination, but to allow him to give himself entirely. The husband gives himself over to the wife. By means of this, he has authority over her. In the same way, the father gives himself to his child and it is this gift alone which grants him authority over his son. In this way, St. Joseph is the shepherd of his family.
Jesus is an exemplary model of a shepherd: I am the good shepherd; I know my own and my own know me (...), I lay down my life for my sheep (Jn 10:14,15). Like every man, even if he is also the Son of God, he has learned this knowledge from his earthly father. He did not cling to his equality with God (Ph 2:6,7), but was made man. By becoming the son of Joseph, he learned how to be a shepherd.
For Joseph is also the good shepherd who lays down his life. Like the best of spouses, he loved Mary to death. This is what he certainly learned in Bethlehem, when he contemplated his Son and his God, who had emptied himself completely to become this newborn babe, lying in a manger. The Son of the Father, God of the gods, the Lord of lords, accepts becoming a little baby who delivers himself into the hands of men! Joseph understood in contemplating this mystery that the true shepherd is a sheep, a child. The shepherd, like the father, establishes his authority not by compelling but in giving himself. Isaiah prophesied that the shepherd at the end of time would be a child, a little lamb: The wolf lives with the lamb, the panther lies down with the kid, calf and lion cub feed together with a little boy to lead them (Is 11:6). In Hebrew the terms that signify “lamb” or “little child” have the same root. The true shepherd is therefore a child. For there is a child born for us, a son given to us (Is 9:5). He is the one who is to save his people from their sins (Mat 1:21). Here is the sign given to the shepherds: a baby (...) lying in a manger (Lk 2:12). Joseph grasped deep within himself what his paternity was going to be: that of leading this Child-Lamb to his full stature of shepherd of all of humanity. He was called to become a model for his son, an icon of the authority of the Father over his Son.
Shepherd of the Holy Family, and also patron of the universal Church, as Pious IX named Joseph on December 8, 1870.
As we have already said, limits are necessary for the growth and development of the child. With a force full of tenderness, the father shows his son firm yet kind limits. In this way the child is able to come up against them, but, if he chooses not to respect them, he must be able to step around them. It is never good to impose a law which breaks, no more than leaving in place a law which is too soft, which offers no resistance to the pressure the child puts on it. If the father keeps an equilibrium in the limits he imposes, the child will be able to experience transgression.
Joseph possesses the consummate art of balancing the law. He sets limits for his son but he lets him test the limits. Isn’t this the attitude of Our Father who gives us his law without however constraining us? If I want to do evil and disobey, I can.
Let’s take an example. The father might say to his son, “Don’t put your finger in the candle because if you do, you’ll get burned.” The child is free to follow or not to follow the truth of what he has just heard from his father. If he chooses to believe, in spite of the warning he received, that the beautiful, hot flame does not burn, he disagrees with his father. Acting in this way, he is refusing to be a son because he is not listening to his father’s words. He puts his finger in the candle, and he gets burned. Now he knows, through the experience of transgression and the ensuing pain, that his father’s word is truth, and that it is a law of love. His father said something that he took as an intolerable limitation or as an irritation. But he discovers, through his pain, that the warning was for his protection, so he would not hurt himself. He had to experience the transgression and its consequences in order to discover in the end his father’s love.
So that this experience can bear the most fruit, let’s not add such classic comments like, “I warned you! If you had listened to me, that wouldn’t have happened! Too bad for you!” If we do this, we fail in our duty, because the father normally possesses another very important quality: he knows how to be quiet. He keeps silent in order to leave a space for his son to live this experience himself. The son burns himself by disobeying. That is enough as a correction: he’ll be able to understand and draw the consequences for this himself. There is nothing more to add.
The third quality which characterises paternity is that of initiating in spiritual warfare. We were reminded that the woman is consolation: she is close to her child, takes him in her arms, covers him with kisses and caresses. She holds him tight, she washes him, she gives him all the care that means being a tender mother.
The father occupies a very different place. He is not in the same proximity with his child. And so, he can teach the child something new: he initiates the child into separation, which will be the source of a painful battle for the child. The father is the third party who comes into the dual mother-child relationship in order to open it up. He pulls them apart from a dependent relationship which leads to death and thus instigates a distancing between the two of them. The experience of separation is not a happy one. Quite the opposite, in fact. It inevitably entails some degree of suffering and a painful, yet healthy, combat for the child. The father’s role is to teach his child how to face difficulties, how to leave the sweetness and consolation of the mother in order to confront life with its indispensable rules of growth and autonomy. If the child does not separate, he doesn’t turn from the mother to the father. In time he will develop symptoms of death such as identity troubles, problems in getting involved, stiffling distress and emotional immaturity...
Separation (not to be confused with division) is a necessity of life, a teaching of the Heavenly Father. Let us reread the beginning of the book of Genesis (Gen 1:3 and following). Each time that God pronounces a word, he creates then separates, the light from the darkness, the waters from the heavens and the waters from the earth. The sixth day, he created the human Adamah (Gen 2:7), then he separated ish and ishah (Gen 2:22-25), the man and the woman.
The father instigates, therefore, by this distancing and maternal separation, a work of mourning. The child must leave country and parents. Abraham became the father of all believers because he accepted and obeyed this command of God who charged him with leaving country and family to go to a land that the Lord would show him (cf. Gen 1, 3 and following).
The father is the master of separation and of the work of mourning. We have a remarkable illustration of this in the life of little Teresa. Who invites her to leave her childishness, to break with the state of emotional immaturity in which she had been living for several years? Who provokes such a radical change in this young adolescent girl on Christmas day? Why, her father, Louis Martin! He sighs seeing that she still wants to celebrate Christmas just like a child. His reaction – “Well, fortunately, it’s the last year!...”– pierces Teresa’s heart and pushes her forward. This will be the beginning of her “giant walk.” Mr. Martin accomplished his fatherly role. He instigated the separation.
The father, following after Joseph, is the guardian of the Incarnation. That should be the role of every father. St. Joseph is the guardian of sense of what is real, of the sense of concrete detail associated with close union to God. It is striking to see how the sense of detail is present in religious families who have taken St. Joseph for protector, as, for example, in the Little Sisters of the Poor. One notes a great precision in the act of charity, in the way in which they accompany old people, and at the same time show a delicate attention to the Presence of God.
St. Joseph teaches us to think less and to act more, to feel less and to love more. Too often, we think that love consists in feeling. We limit love to a superficial sensation. The father teaches his son to go much further: he leads him to make an offering of love.
To love is not to feel, but to wish to love. On can feel desolation and continue to love. On can feel agressiveness toward a person and pardon him. To love one’s enemy does not mean feel tenderly disposed toward him. To love one’s enemy is to want to give him the best of oneself when he himself is the cause of the pain that we are feeling.
St. Joseph teaches us to justify ourselves less, to talk less in order to grow in interior silence. He teaches us the art of thinking less in order to become more intelligent, the art of imagining less in order to become more attentive. He helps us dispel distractions, becoming present in the moment. Isn’t that today’s great hurt? Our imagination is wounded to the point where we are incapable of being present to what is real, preferring to escape into flights of imagination and dreaming. This, among others, is a characteristic hurt of the lack of paternity. The person who enters into the world of St. Joseph suspects how his mind is distracted and wanders. He no longer listens in the same way to his sensitivity because St. Joseph works as a filter for him. He lets enter what should enter and he puts aside, he takes away, what should not.
Where did little Teresa learn that it was not necessary to look temptation in the face but to pass underneath the obstacle? Once again, from her father, Louis Martin. This is a paternal ruse which consists of descending and removing. St. John writes: Something that has existed since the beginning, that we have heard and we have seen with our own eyes; that we have watched and touched with our hands, (...) this is our subject (I Jn 1:1). Who taught him such a language? This simple and incarnate way of talking was learned from the mouth of Christ, who himself learned it from his father. St. Joseph helps us discover Christ’s humanity. It is he who taught Jesus to speak in parables in order to reach his audience.
Joseph helps us live what is real by eliminating useless thoughts, without having to do battle with them face to face. The principle consists in replacing our mental reasoning with a physical sensation, what I touch, what I hear. Joseph is the patron in the art of ceasing, eliminating, dying... to keep what is good. He eliminates so he can assimilate. Mary is the inspired woman, fully receptive to the gift of God, and inhabited by the Holy Spirit. She is the source of all “inspiration.” St. Joseph removes the distraction to begin attention. Mary allows us to enter into inspiration and Joseph in expiration. Mary is the totally attentive woman, perfectly centered on the Father. She never turned from looking at the Father. St. Joseph helps us to find our way again by leading us from distraction to attention. These are the foundations of the dialogue between Joseph and Mary, where the husband prepares the way for the wife, where the walls of Jerusalem protect and open us to her palaces (cf. Ps 122:7), where the night prepares the dawn.
We are at the heart of the irreplaceable support of St. Joseph. The more we pray to him, the more we will take him for father, the more we will enter into his intimacy, and the less we will be distracted: we will be present in the moment and attentive to the real world. He will open the way for us to interior silence.
The technique of Dr. Vittoz is close to the way we should act with St. Joseph. It is based on the Incarnation and the consciousness of the real, of sensation, of receptivity and elimination. Every father should teach this knowledge to his children that they may experience true sensation before intellectualizing. Let go of logic and the cerebral in favor of receptivity and true sensory experience. We will then better understand how St. Joseph is the guardian of the Incarnation, the guardian of the Word of God made flesh.
In continuing this same theme, it is St. Joseph who also helps develop the sense of the body. We meet so many young people who are uncomfortable with their body, whose body weighs on them. That comes across in their way of walking or of dancing. They lack weight, a foundation, and they don’t have a solid base or equilibrium with the ground. They remain in their head and in their imagination, and they often dance by jumping.
The father helps us reach down to our center of gravity by giving us a realization of our weight, in a better adhesion to what is real. There again, St. Joseph is the master of descent.
Why does the father develop the sense of the body? Why does he help his son accept his body just as it is? Because the body is the place of the gift (for example, in lovemaking). But the body is also the place of pain. When a person suffers, he tries to escape the present moment, the place of painful sensation, and there is a risk of leaving the real altogether. This can be seen today in philosophies of disincarnation or of reincarnation which accept everything.... except precisely the mystery of God’s incarnation. The New Age affirms that all religions are good, however, it stumbles against the cornerstone of the Church. It proclaims the end of Christianity and announces the birth of a universal religion. It recognizes neither the coming of the Word of God in the flesh of Christ Jesus, son of Joseph, nor his death on the Cross and his Resurrection (R. Bastian, Le New-Age:d’ou vient-il? Que dit-il? Ed. Oeil, Paris 1991).
It is difficult to stay present in the body, especially in suffering. It is written: You...prepared a body for me. Then I said, ‘God, here I am! I am coming to obey your will (Heb 10:5).This is the word of the Son of Joseph to his Father: it is a prophesy of the offering of Jesus on the Cross. Yet, how did Christ learn the way of letting go? He was instructed by his father St. Joseph. And it is true, that to be able to stay present in the body in spite of intense pain, we must stay living in the arms of a father who surrounds, who protects, who offers security. Father, into your hands I commit my spirit (Ps 31:5 and Lk 23:46). Jesus entrusts himself to the arms of his Father just like he did when he was little, in the arms of St. Joseph. Only confidence in the Father’s love allows us to stay present in the body and to live victoriously in spite of suffering. Where does Mary find the strength to stay at the foot of the Cross, in all her suffering? In this intimacy with the Father, enfolded in his arms like his little daughter.
Our body, which is connected to the mystery of suffering, can become so painful that we cannot put up with it any longer and we want to leave it and die one way or another. For it is impossible to go through any suffering without giving it a reason. The most enlightening meaning is offered by faith, renewed confidence in a Father who cares for me because he is love and only love. Confidence teaches me to love and to count on Another even in the depths of my suffering.
What is our faith when we face suffering? Our Father is All Powerful and we believe him so little! However, nothing is impossible to God (Lk 1:37). If I had faith in my Father, I would give a meaning to what I am experiencing and would accept going through emotional pain while present in my body. The best refuge consists in staying close to Mary, in the arms of St. Joseph. There, we receive a new outlook on life. We no longer judge Our Father when we suffer, but we learn to have confidence in him. The answer to distress and fear is only this: to let oneself be enfolded in the arms of our Father. This is why we always affirm that St. Joseph is the guardian of the faith in the love of the Father and the guardian of the Incarnation. The loss of faith leads to disincarnation (or to belief in reincarnation, which eventually comes down to the same thing).
The Desert Fathers of Scete in Egypt, disciples of St. Antony the Great in Egypt, defined a spiritual father as someone who took on himself the son’s own suffering. Capable of consoling and protecting, of taking on himself the suffering of his son, of making him feel secure even if he himself is not. Such a father is able to absorb the suffering of his son because he himself is son of a Father, giving evidence once again to the truth that one cannot be a father if one is not himself a son.
St. Joseph is man of the night as well, since he hides and is hidden. The Church has traditionally consecrated Wednesdays to him, the fourth day of the week, day of the creation of the luminary bodies, of the sun, the moon and the stars (Gen 1:14-19). In this way God marks time (Ps 103:19) and he establishes the moon and the stars to serve as guides in the night. The father is therefore the one who initiates in the spiritual combat of the night.
In the Jewish tradition, the mother teaches the small child the basics of first prayers, until the age of four or five. Then the father takes over religious instruction. He teaches his son the basics of the fundamentals of the Torah. When he brings him for the first time to the Yeshiva, he puts his best clothes on him and offers him a tablet of spice bread with the letters hollowed out and filled with honey. The child licks the letters and discovers – in a very incarnate way! – that the commandments of God are better than honey (Ps 19:10, 119:103). The father of the family teaches the Word to his son: at age five the rudiments of the Torah, at age eight the Michna, at age twelve the commandments and beginning at age thirteen, the Talmud.
In the West, the father for the most part no longer teaches the catechism. This is a serious deficiency for the child, especially after age four or five: for as the child grows and develops, he need the father’s word in order to do battle. The Word of God is an excellent arm for combat, as is learning obedience to one’s parents. Where does the peace of the Holy Family originate? From the obedience to St. Joseph. Obedience is connected to protection and to authority. A father who doesn’t protect and who doesn’t have authority will not have a strong word. He will not be obeyed.
This is why, conversely, St. Joseph is the spiritual father of our lives: he has an eminent role in “calming hatred and revolt, in giving back true peace” (Concile de Bordeaux, Acta conciliorum, T. VI, col 847, collectio Lacensis, 1868). He is charged with getting the soul what it first and foremost needs: peace of heart.
We have seen that St. Joseph is the shepherd who lays down his life. That explains why he is the patron of good death. He teaches us to die unto ourselves like he taught it to his son. This is another aspect of Joseph, man of the night.
Our Father taught St. Joseph the extraordinary stratagem of his divine Wisdom so he could in turn pass it on to Christ in his humanity: this knowledge consists in voluntarily submitting himself into the hands of evil in order to vanquish it for good exactly where it is the strongest. Let us look at how Jesus is going to face the powers of darkness for three years. He does not choose direct combat, nor an exterior show of his divine might. He prefers to invite man to conversion, to such an extent that he does not seem to be directly confronting evil. Encountering a growing resistance, he gives himself over in the end to his enemy through the hands of men. When all is said and done Satan, by crushing Jesus on the Cross, was hoping to make him cry out in hatred, like he had been able to make every man do before. But the reverse happened: there came a cry of love and confidence from the depths of abandonment. Father, into your hands I commit my spirit (Lk 23:46). The stratagem of the descent into humility is the awesome knowledge that the Savior learned in his divinity from his Father and in his humanity through the mediation of St. Joseph. (He then went down with them and came to Nazareth and lived under their authority Lk 2:51.)
When he was an adult Jesus taught: When someone invites you to a wedding feast, do not take your seat in the place of honour (....) make your way to the lowest place and sit there (cf. Lk 14:8). Imagine Jesus now as a child, when Joseph taught him this way of humility, the experience of the descent. Joseph enables us to pass from emotional immaturity to spiritual childhood. Little Teresa lived this passage, making her a model for each of us today, and a sign of the times for us now. This time again, it is Louis Martin, a veritable icon of St. Joseph, who taught it to her. He showed her all his life long how to die for love. For love of his wife Zélie he accepted losing his job, selling his store in exchange for lace products from Alençon. He lost his spouse and gave his five daughters to the Lord. In the end he accepted offering his intelligence and his life through a great trial, a humiliating disfigurement. What a descent, what an emptying of self he who was called the “St. Joseph of Carmel” gives us to contemplate.
We are now going to study a particular aspect of the father’s calling entirely complementary to the woman’s calling. The woman is interior and is naturally spiritual. That is why she is prophetic: the Spirit of God rests on her. She receives intuitions from the Holy Spirit but alone she cannot make use of them in time. For that, she needs the advice of the man, of her spouse, who will judge when the time has come. One of the characteristics of the father, and consequently of St. Joseph, is to teach us the art of enduring and the art of waiting for the right moment.
Experience seems to confirm that man is more patient than woman. The art of being patient and enduring is one of the divinely inspired gifts belonging to the man and St. Joseph teaches it beautifully. He teaches us effort, the art of giving oneself without exhausting oneself, in seeing things through to their conclusion, in perseverence and constancy. Learning from him, we can be tested but never destroyed, as St. Paul reminds us (cf. 2 Cor 4:8,9). To lay down one’s life doesn’t mean to burn out. The art of fatherhood consists in teaching the child to give himself while still managing himself, because he must be able to go far by correctly using his strength: Your endurance will win your your lives (Lk 21:19). We hear Jesus often say these words. He learned from St. Joseph how to experience salvation. To see things through to the end, by taking the time necessary, by giving himself in a measured way.
To spend time with Joseph does not mean to grow old, to get hardened, but on the contrary to become younger, more supple, to unburden, to simplify. Indeed there is a very precise art here for the spiritual man and in particular for the monk: the art of enduring, the twin of the art of waiting for the right moment. “It is one of the marvels in our relationship with God that maturity and the spirit of childhood grow together in the same measure,” writes Urs Von Balthazar (H. Urs Von Balthasar, De l’intégration, aspect d’une théologie de l’histoire, Ed. DDB 1970, p. 108).
What wonderful knowledge this is! It is St. Joseph’s specialty. His tactic consists in waiting, like a hunter for his prey, for the right moment. When it comes, he leaps upon his prey and it is his. The right time for me has not come yet, but any time is the right time for you, says Jesus (Jn 7:6). His father Joseph taught him the extraordinary spiritual richness which consists in living in the present moment that is always new, still to be written, necessitating strength, which is the Father’s time.
Let us recall in passing that this time is rigorous, that it casts aside all daydreaming or distraction, all unchecked imagination, any non-serviceable memory. It refuses the self-dialogue which consists in addressing oneself like “you” or “I” as in “Then, I said to myself, ‘You’re a big nothing today...You could make it if you just made a little effort.’” Talking to ourselves like this by turning on ourselves, we stray from the paternal dynamic and spirit of St. Joseph. Jesus’ father teaches us rejection of this argument. We should address God directly without talking to ourselves, if only to encourage ourselves to look to God as the psalmist says: Why so downcast, my soul, why do you sigh within me? (Ps 42:5): Put your hope in Yahweh, be strong, let your heart be bold, put your hope in Yahweh (Ps 27:14). If we talk to ourselves, we cut ourselves off from the life in the Holy Spirit. The Spirit of the Father recoils from a navel gazing dialogue which translates into a withdrawal into the self and an egocenteredness. Let us think about God, let us address him without fail and leave behind once and for all auto-dialogue. If we do not, the Holy Spirit will not be present in our acts and we will see the enemy of man appear, insinuating himself into this type of thought only to feed our self condemnation, self criticism and judgment, a condemnation of ourselves which keeps us in a false sense of guilt, a feeling of shame about ourselves.
Intuitions are often feminine but it is the man who knows the moment of their fruition. The angels obey Mary but speak in a dream to Joseph. Only Joseph knows the hour: Now is the favorable time; this is the day of salvation (2 Cor 6:2). At the time of the miracle at Cana, Mary has the prophetic intuition that the time has come, but she cannot make use of this. Jesus answers her: Woman, why turn to me? My hour has not come yet (Jn 2:4). However, this is indeed the time of the first miracle.
St. John shows in his Gospel just how much Christ is attentive to his Father’s Hour (Jn 2:4; 4:21,23; 5:25,28; 7:30; 8:20; 12:23,27; 13:1; 16:2,4,21,25,32; 17:1). As his hour is not yet come, he escapes from the Nazareens who want to throw him down a cliff (Lk 4:29), as well as from the Pharisees who try to lay their hands on him to kill him (cf. Jn 8:59 and Jn 10:31; 12,36). Why? The Father’s hour will soon come which will coincide with the time of the Prince of darkness. Then, on the Cross, Jesus will say: It is accomplished (Jn 19:30).
We have a tendency, because of our sinfulness, to want “everything right away.” Our eagerness for immediate satisfaction cuts us off from sonship and dependency in love. The father teaches his child how to progressively enter into a filial relationship by accepting not to be satisfied right away: “You aren’t ready today to get what you are asking for. You wouldn’t be able to bear it. Wait a little while.” Educational teaching that consists of answering each whim of a child and systematically granting him what he wants is contrary to the Father’s teaching. How many child today get what they want right away from their mothers in a store, hollering out loud if need be.
The Father on the other hand promises us everything, and progressively gives it to us. He developes his Promise and realizes his Word according to our capacity to receive it. Holiness, the Kingdom, eternal communion with God, immortality and incorruptibility, all is for us, but we are not capable of receiving it all just now. We must take the time to grow in the Father’s hands, to become confident and capable of giving ourselves totally to the Wisdom of his Love. This teaching of the Father who makes things grow in his time and who fulfills his promise when the hour is right marks the whole of spiritual life.
That is what Joseph taught Jesus. Living with Joseph helps us know a very special climate of patience, suppleness, confidence and humility.
Jewish tradition postulates that God created the world in ten words and he gave nine of them to the woman and one to the man. It is in the nature of man and of the Father to say only one word when the woman says nine of them. In a certain way, Mary speaks abundantly in Scripture: we hear her at the Annunciation, in the Magnificat, and also at Cana... St. Joseph, however, says only one word in Scripture. He pronounces the name of his son Jesus, as the angel told him: “you must name him Jesus” (Mt 1:21). At the time of the nativity in Bethlehem, Joseph was the first to call his son Yeshoua, “God saves.”
Joseph is silent as a picture of our Father in heaven. The mother communicates with her child by touch and word. The father makes his presence known to the son or daughter not by touch but by his protective presence and authority, by his look which encourages, and finally by his word which corrects, teaches, and exhorts.
Why is the father silent whereas the mother speaks more? Because it is the mother’s mission to awaken her little one through her word: she sings nursery rhymes to him, speaks to him endlessly and helps him to develop, whereas the father is quiet in order to let the child talk. If he talks too much, the child will not be able to express himself and to truly be what he should be. The father speaks very little in order to leave space for his son or daughter’s words. For silence is the greatest separation. Thus, the child will dare to be, to think, to express what he desires in front of his father, without being stifled by his word or stopped from saying what he likes, what he doesn’t like... The son will leave the dependent relationship with his mother to take his place opposite his parents, as an adult.
Our Heavenly Father himself does not speak, except by his Son. Every father worthy of St. Joseph should be aware of this: it is important to leave space so the child can express himself, eventually opposite him. If the child discovers that he can oppose without being condemned by his father, he will become fully adult, capable of finding things out on his own without worrying about losing the love of his parents. He will be able to be fully himself and find a balance in his relationship with his parents.
The father’s silence also underlines the importance of the look. This is another thing Jesus learned from his adoptive father. Jesus looked steadily at him and loved him (Mk 10:21). The look of Joseph on the woman is very chaste: he offers a true liberation to the little girl who grows up under his watchfulness. He makes us experience the Father’s look falling on the Virgin Mary.
Another characteristic is essential too: because he is the man of the night, St. Joseph is also the master of prayer, helping us go from distraction to attention. Most of the great masters of prayer in the Church are the sons and daughters of St. Joseph. Think of John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Francis de Sales... “Let he who has no master in prayer take this glorious saint as a guide, for he will not risk straying” assures St. Teresa of Avila (S. Thérère d’Avila, Vie 6, 8). He is the master of vigilance, of the present moment, of the struggle against darkness. “When you don’t know how to pray, address yourself to St. Joseph” affirms likewise St. Bernadette. Joseph was the master to whom the Queen of angels and the Son of man prayed. He has been mysteriously established by God to be for Mary and Jesus himself a passage toward the Father.
He teaches us how to descend from our head into our heart. “To come into holy contemplation, one doesn’t come by taking in but by putting away” writes St. John of the Cross (S. Jean de la Crois, Opuscules et maximes 6070). To enter into the interior silence of the divine Presence, it is not necessary to add thoughts but, on the contrary, to withdraw them in discernment. And that is the specificity of St. Joseph the silent, to eliminate, to take way all that is of no use.
If we state that the father plays a very special role in the discovery of personal identity, that certainly doesn’t mean that the wife has none. She contributes by giving life and being. Identity is dependent on being, for it is like the sharpened tip of it. But one can “be” without having an identity. A little foetus in its mother’s womb is indeed living, but it doesn’t know that it is. The young people of today are deeply hurt at this level. They are in search of an identity because they are lacking paternity.
In the Jewish tradition, it is the duty of the father to name. It is so for Joseph, also for Zachariah: when the angel Gabriel appears to him to announce the birth of a son, he declares: You must name him John (Lk 1:13). In general we ourselves have the family name of our father. This is a social tradition which expresses this profound reality.
As we have already said, the father of Jesus is called Yosseph ben Yaacov, son of Matthan, son of David. By naming his son Yeshoua, he ties him into a human lineage, to the clan of David and of the people of Israel, to the Jewish religion and all of its history... He assures his inclusion into the family of the Kings of Judah; it is through him that Jesus descends from David.
A name has considerable importance in the Biblical tradition because it confers identity: that is why the Name of God (the sacred tetragram YHVH) was only pronounced once a year, by the one High Priest, when he entered into the Holy of Holies, during the feast of Yom Kippur. During the Second Coming of Christ, as written in the Book of Revelation, we will receive a new name inscribed on a white stone known only to the man who receives it (Rev 2:17). And who will give each of us this name? Our Father in heaven.
Another remarkable grace of the father is to help his son discover the gift which is his alone. According to Jean Vanier (J. Vanier, La Communauté, lieu du pardon et de la fête, Ed. Fleurus-Bellarmin), each person has a particular gift, a unique grace which belongs to his own identity. In a family, each child has something unique. The father knows how to find and help this gift to develop. He mentors his child so he can become aware of it and then bear fruit from the talents.
The life of Teresa of the Child Jesus shows us this in a sublime way. Teresa was scarred by a deep identity crisis. The reasons for it are many: for one thing she carries the name of an older sister, who had died at two months of age, some three years earlier. Also, early on she suffered from being separated from her mother, at long and repeated intervals: this wound would progressively close after the age of fifteen months, thanks to the family atmosphere at Alençon, but would open terribly wide again at age four and a half, when her mother would die from cancer. In the night of her suffering, Teresa looked for a mother: she identified first with her sister Pauline, “Well, it’s Pauline that will be Momma!” and then it was another sister, Marie.
When Pauline left the Buissonnets for Carmel, there came another wound of maternal abandonment, because Pauline had promised to wait for her before joining the Carmel. The life of little Teresa is written in words of suffering and exile. Three years later it was her sister Marie’s turn, the one to whom she could tell all her troubles to and her misgivings. This third separation would strengthen her relationship with Céline, in whom she sought a sister soul to identify with and mirror. Thus until the end of her life, we see Teresa searching for a deep calling, identifying successively with St. Cecilia, with Joan of Arc... Fortunately, the love she received from her father, whom she called “my dear king,” then her intimacy with the Father progressively led her down the road of filial confidence. It was only two years before her death that she gave a great shout of victory: My vocation, FINALLY I have found it (...) in the heart of the Church, my Mother, I will be Love” (S. Thérèse de l’Enfant-Jésus, DE 20.7.6, MsB/NEC, 3v,24-28,pp.299-300). This time her unique identity is revealed to her: Teresa has intuited her new name. She has grasped, in the Holy Spirit, what her mission in heaven will be: to lead a multitude of little souls to God and she will be their mother, by teaching them a child’s confidence and surrender into the Father’s arms.
The more we desire, with our whole being, becoming sons and daughters of the Father, adoptive sons and daughters of St. Joseph, the more we will discover that we are unique. Personal identity is received from the Other, in an attitude of filial confidence. The wound of today’s youth is an identity crisis which comes from not having a father: young people are so thirsty to discover who they are in the Heart of God. This lack causes great existential distress in them, translated into jealousy toward others. St. Joseph can help us discover who we are in God, to welcome this royal place that the Father is preparing for each of us, and to rejoice in the happiness of others.
In the perspective of helping us discover the gift which is meant just for us, the father plays an important role in listening to a call, in receiving a vocation – and in the involvement which follows the response to the call. The decision to marry or to enter the consecrated celibacy can be paralyzing when no father is present. Young people who have suffered through their parents’ divorce or who have been raised by a single mother have, on the whole, great problems in committing themselves. They do not know that they are irreplaceable, like Jesus, the “only Son of the Father.” If we want to experience such a relationship with God, becoming the preferred one of our Father, let us let ourselves be loved by Him, let us become his son, his daughter, by following Christ, by taking the hand of the little Teresa.
Sadly, we too often limit St. Joseph to the role of sustaining father, going to him only when we have material difficulties. This is certainly a wonderful fatherly role, but the goodness he exercises toward us is much more vast. St. Joseph offered Jesus a two-fold nourishment which helped him grow: both the bread we eat and the bread which is the Word of God (cf. Deut 8:3 and Lk 4:4) that the father is charged with transmitting in the Jewish family.
Joseph watched over Christ, he manifested the love of the Almighty for his Son by rescuing him from death, which was threatening him. Providence is the expression of God’s Paternity over us, through what we could call the bread of events. It intervenes through encounters, the joys and sorrows of life, under the guise of protection (by removing the stone from the road), or under the guise of deliverance (by making all things work together for our good, and by the victory over evil in our heart). Tradition has always seen in Joseph a strong intercessor for both material and spiritual affairs.
It is he who will initiate the Child Jesus in manual labor, in the shock of the concrete, in the realism that will mark his life in Nazareth. Christ became a carpenter like his father. One quality that the father would carefully work to develop is teaching his son to become good with his hands, in order to develop in him a feel for what is real, teaching him how to manipulate tools and fashion materials. Thus, intellectual apprenticehip (through studying the Torah) as well as initiation into the realism of life (through manual labor) are the mission of the father toward his son.
St. Joseph will show Jesus how to give himself in his work. Thus he could say: My Father goes on working and so do I (Jn 5:17). He teaches him to make a eucharist, to offer with thanksgiving, to use the divine plan which consists in giving oneself in everything to the point of dying for love. Isn’t that astounding! He who is the true Bread come down from heaven delivers himself into the hands of men through Joseph. That brings us to two other great qualities of Joseph: he makes a memorial and he is the “specialist” in dying to himself.
The mother is like the good earth which receives life. She gives roots to her child. For growth to happen in the right direction, it is necessary for the father to make a memorial of origins. He will then help his son to grow, planted in the maternal soil. To his child, the father points out the mother as source of life, and the woman as the marvel of man. “Look how beautiful your mother is!” “I picked out the prettiest mommy for you!” These remarks are essential, especially for little girls. Hearing these words of her father, she is confirmed in her femininity and will want to become “just like mommy.”
During the liturgy for the coming of Shabbat, in Jewish families, after the hymn to the perfect woman “Eshet Hayil,” the husband turns toward his wife to thank her for being a “perfect woman” (Prov 31:10). Rabbi Isaac Louria, in the sixteenth century, recommended that his followers kiss their mother’s hand at this moment to thank her for all that she had brought to them. Through the mother, it is also the Virgin Mary that we can honor, she through whom Salvation entered into the world. Joseph loved his spouse: and the Child Jesus understood certainly, in his gestures, from the tone of his voice, the respect and admiration that he had for her.
St. Joseph teaches how to love one’s wife, how to honor one’s mother and welcome one’s origins. By becoming his adopted son or daughter, we reconcile ourselves with our roots, we will discover the happiness of living and belonging to a family. He teaches us to love our childhood, he heals us of our depression and our death wishes. For the father’s look allows the child to better discover himself. The child who says, “I am no good,” because he was so hurt when he was little, or who pretends to want to go it alone by stating just the opposite, “I am the best, and I don’t need anybody,” is going to discover his rightful place thanks to this reconciliation with life. There, again, we see how Joseph is the support of families, for he builds family unity.
The third meaning of the name Joseph in Hebrew could be translated as “the unifier” (cf. Deut 4:33 and Lev 5:16). Joseph is the one who gathers his children in unity. The mother has a different role: she has the vocation to be the soul, the flame, the light of the house. Her presence gives light and warms those who live there.
In the Holy Trinity, each Person has an irreplaceable place, at the same time that he reigns in indivisible unity. We have been created in the image of this inexpressible Trinity, and our pilgrimage on earth has as its goal to make us get back the part blighted by sin. If the father is he who reveals identity, that does not mean he dismisses togetherness. Just the opposite. The father is called to be the visible sign of family unity. He creates the tie that binds families and communities. The holy patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are a visible sign of the unity of Israel. The Church is united behind its head, the Pope. A community is together around its shepherd. That is why Satan first attacks the shepherd when he wants to scatter the sheep in a community. He sows doubt and lack of confidence toward the person most responsible. Then he stirs up murmuring and criticism which lead to division so that he can scatter the sheep who belong to the one who is the sign and guarantee of unity.
In John 17, Jesus addresses his Father and asks the favor that they all be one, as he and his Father are one (cf. Jn 17:21,22). Jesus, as perfectly obedient son, knows that only his Father is the source of unity. This is another grace that he knew in his humanity, from St. Joseph, in the course of the years spent in Nazareth. The Pope John Paul II is an outstanding figure of a great unifier. We sense that it is his intimacy with the Holy Family that led him in his task as shepherd of the Church universal.
Joseph fulfills a particular mission that is being progressively revealed to us. He is responsible for the unity between the root of the olive tree rich in sap (Rom 11:17) and the wild olive that has been grafted on to it: he works for the unity of Israel and the Church. Joseph, “patron of the Church universal,” prepares the way so that the Church can make a memorial and come back toward the synagogue like toward its mother. The more the Church will discover the figure and stature of the adoptive father of Jesus, the more she will love him and pray to him, and the more she will find her origins and come back to Israel. Then, the full measure of the sap will run in the root of the olive tree and in all her branches. The Church will be the consolation of Israel and Israel will be the healing of the Church. But this reconciliation will not be realized outside of the Holy Family, for Mary is the figure of the Church and Joseph the face of Israel.
As a true spouse and true father, St. Joseph gives his life for Mary and he teaches his son to do the same. He is the shepherd of the Holy Family laying down his life for them. Like a little lamb, he doesn’t claim power for himself, and he doesn’t lust after any power; on the contrary, he exercises an authority of service and offers an example of this to his son who will be able to say, The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many (Mat 20:28). He makes himself vulnerable to protect his sheep. He diminishes before his son. He dies for love of Mary. He is truly the shadow of the Father.
Recognition has been given, and rightly so, to the fiat of Mary, but too often we have unfortunately forgotten that the “yes” of Joseph was also indispensable in order for the Incarnation to take place. St. Joseph offers Jesus a family. By taking Mary to his home, to Nazareth, and he saved his spouse from death. For without that, Mary would probably have been stoned or would have remained “a single mother.” In a certain way, the paternity of Joseph operates like the condition for the maternity of Mary.
For Jesus in his humanity, St. Joseph represents the way toward the Father. We too are invited to heed the invitation of M. Olier and “let us love with tenderness God the Father in St. Joseph” (J.J. Olier, ibid.). The cloud, because it is shadow on one side and light on the other (Ex 14:20) characterises the paternal presence of God with his Son, with all his children: St. Joseph perfectly fulfilled his role for thirty years of hidden life as this shadow of love, of invincible power in apparent weakness, and of inequaled tenderness.
Mary is the one in whom the Spirit brings forth the Body of Christ – who encompasses the whole Church -- at the heart of our humanity. Joseph is the one in whom the Father is hidden in order to welcome his child, and to hide him in turn, to surround him with tenderness, protect him, help him to grow in every way. The angel had said to Mary, The power of the Most High will cover you with its shadow (Lk 1:35). Joseph has earned the right to be called the shadow of the Father. At age twelve, Jesus will understand when he is found again in the Temple, that “to be with his Father” is precisely “to be with Joseph.” The divine shadow is living and requires much. It requires effort, testing, privation, sometimes paternal correction that can be severe. It faces the demands of a love that proves to be true, humble, perfectly soft at times, and perfectly strict at others. Can we find any other man like this, possessing the spirit of God? (Gen 41:37) This gift of the Spirit came at great cost to both Josephs.
Let us follow the example of the saints who discovered intimacy with St. Joseph and welcomed him as their adoptive father. Teresa of Avila states in the book of her Life: “I saw clearly that it is he, my father and my protector, who cured me from this infirmity, like he had also rescued me from very great dangers where my honor and my salvation were at stake. His help procured greater help for me than what I knew how to ask of him” (S. Thérèse d’Avila, Vie écrite par elle-même, Œuvres complètes, Seuil 1949, chap. VI, p. 57). Similarly, St. Alphonse of Liguori declared, “Since a God wanted to obey you, I also want to become your servant, to honor you and love you like my Lord and Master” (S. Alphonse de Liguori, Une Année de méditations, Avon, 1887, p. 581).
We have stressed that Mary could not be the mother of Jesus with the presence of St. Joseph. Since the shadow of Joseph is the condition for the fathering of Jesus, it is also the conditon for our spiritual fathering. The Holy Family is the privileged place for the descent of the Spirit on humanity. The Holy Spirit loves to come between Joseph and Mary, as the Son of God made man himself experienced. Joseph and Mary are like the oratory where Jesus finds the Father in the Spirit.
Mary and Joseph are the two hands of Jesus in which the Eternal Father wants to rock us, console us, heal us and give us his Spirit. He introduces us into his Kingdom between Mary and Joseph. “Nazareth, it is there where one works, where one is submissive...it is a house that one builds in his heart, or rather that one lets be built in himself by the hands of Jesus”(Ch. De Foucauld, letter from Aug. 2, 96).
To live in the Holy Family is to progressively learn who is the Father, and, through the same progression, struggle against evil, meaning against what hinders us from seeing the Father, what deforms or even perverts his image. The word of Christ, Shoulder my yoke and learn from me (...) and you will find rest for your souls (...) Yes, my yoke is easy and my burden light (Mt 11:29,30) takes on a concrete significance, as if Jesus were saying, “Take my parents as your own, learn from them what I have learned from them, since all that is mine now belongs to you.”
Joseph of Nazareth,
You, just and holy in the faith of Abraham,
You carried in your arms the spouse of the covenant.
Silent father, picture of the Father in heaven,
You nourrished with earthly bread he who is heavenly Bread,
Joseph who protected the immaculate Virgin,
Protect in these days the immaculate Church,
Intercede today for your people Israel,
Stay the guardian of our communities and their shepherds,
You who were shepherd of the Lamb.
In this chapter we will focus all our attention, our heart and spirit on the childhood of Jesus. M. Olier, devoted to the Child Jesus and to the Holy Family, spiritual leader of the seventeenth century, contemporary of Agnes of Langeac, of St. Vincent de Paul and of St. Francis de Sales said: “Take the Child Jesus as leader.” A leader is someone who leads his favored one. The Child Jesus wishes to reign in our heart. What riches there are to discovering this! Isn’t this the condition for entering into the Kingdom of God? To come near to God like a little child (Mt 18:3), to be led by a child (Is 111:6). The best way to enter into the spirit of spiritual childhood is to contemplate the Child Jesus and to learn from him. Nothing is easier, and yet it is difficult for us to apply this because the heart of man is complicated and sick (cf. Jer 17:9). If we do so, we will soon see spiritual fruits as a result and we will discover in practical terms the meaning of “circulation of love.”
Living in the Holy Family and in the Trinity requires only that we let ourselves be carried along in a circular motion of love. We generally center our inner actions and our thoughts on trivialities which by definition are of no use. We fill our minds with images from television, violent movies, novels or pointless daydreams, useless thoughts or continuous talk with only ourselves. We are wasting our time and we are surprised to suffer endlessly from a haunting sense of unease. If we want to change and to come at last to the true happiness found in the Kingdom of God, let us make a courageous choice, beginning by the work of mourning. Let us stop doing these useless things with which we are filling our minds and tiring our souls, let us leave behind the mindset of the world and the whirlwind of the media, let us abandon all desire for insatiable consumption (all these “must haves” which are causing us so much worry!), and let us resolutely do battle with our own self will.
All these vain things, like the chaff blown away by the wind (Ps 1:4), serve as major obstacles to intimacy with the Holy Family, for in it there is no inside movie, no polluting publicity, no spirit of this world. St. Joseph, the protector of the Child Jesus and of his mother, is the “champion” of the battle against darkness. He accompanies us in our choices and teaches us how to retreat and put aside that which is futile, even opposed to union with God. If we want to enter into the Holy Family, let us be ready to choose what is essential, by centering our attention on one important thing. The Lord teaches it to Martha. Martha, you worry and fret about so many things, and yet few are needed, indeed only one. It is Mary who has chosen the better part; it is not to be taken from her (Lk 10:41).
The better part consists in concentrating our thoughts and the impulses of our heart on the same things that Jesus did. St. Paul urges us to do that in his letter to the Philippians: In your minds you must be the same as Christ Jesus (Phil 2:5). Toward whom and what did he turn all of his mental and physical energy? What thoughts of humility continually caused him to descend to what is little?
The Child Jesus will instruct us if we accept being taught by him, as he invites us to do. Shoulder my yoke and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart (Mt 11:29). He will show us the compelling love which lives in his heart. It is a murmur, an impulse of the heart which springs endlessly from the depths of his being: “Father,” “my Father.” When you pray, say “Abba! Father” (cf. Lk 11:2 and Mk 14:36). That is the goal of our life! Our happiness is found in the arms of our Father. That is where Jesus wants to lead us. That is his passion. In the Gospels, especially in the Gospel of John, Father is one of the words most often spoken by Jesus. For example: I bless you, Father, Lord of heaven and of earth... (Mt 11:25). Yes, Father, for that is what it pleased you to do (Mt 11:26). Come, you whom my Father has blessed... (Mt 25:34). My Father, if it is possible... (Mt 26:39). Father, may your name be held holy... (Lk 11:2). Father, forgive them... (Lk 23:34). The Father and I are one (Jn 10:30). My Father goes on working... (Jn 5:17). You do not know me, nor do you know my Father... (Jn 8:19). Father, I thank you for hearing my prayer (Jn 11:41). Father, save me from this hour... (Jn 12:27). Father, glorify your name! (Jn 12:28). I am in the Father and the Father is in me... (Jn 14:11). Father, the hour has come... (Jn 17:1). Now, Father, it is time for you to glorify me... (Jn 17:5). Holy Father, keep those you have given me true to your name... (Jn 17:11). Father, may they be one in us, as you are in me and I am in you... (Jn 17:21). Father, I want those whom you have given me to be with me where I am... (Jn 17:24).The passion of the Son of God is his Father, in his divinity as it is written,The Word was with God (Jn 1:1), and in his humanity as it is also written, I must be busy with my Father’s affairs (Lk 2:49).
We have only one important thing to learn in this life to prepare ourselves for eternity: learning how to enter into the compelling love of the Heart of Jesus. Some people think, perhaps hastily, that the contemplatives are are the sidelines of this world. Certainly, they are not of the world but they are none the less at the center of spiritual warfare. Others have trouble understanding that it is not necessary to watch television or read the newspapers every day in order to be up to date on what is happening in the world! That, however, is what St. Silouane of Athos affirmed. In prayer, we stay at the heart of the battle which is played out between love and hate, between the desire of the Father and the refusal of all sonship. And Jesus is the only one who is able to take us once again back into sonship.
We came into the world in a family, through the love of a father and a mother. We called them “Momma” and “Daddy.” During the first years of our life, they were for each one of us, in spite of their failures, the face of God the Eternal Father.
Since Jesus is truly human, he calls his mother Mary “Momma” and his adoptive father Joseph “Abba, Daddy.” For Jesus in his humanity, his two parents were both pictures of God the Father. We have here the pathway that the Child Jesus points out to us. He helps us discover his Father by inviting us to dwell in the Holy Family: he teaches us to live in Mary, at home with Joseph. He invites us to take Mary as our mother, Joseph as our father. Thanks to them, we can experience a deep reconciliation with our origins, meaning with our own parents.
We are going to contemplate what the Child Jesus experienced when he was with the Virgin Mary and St. Joseph in his private life, through the different stages of his human growth, in order to receive a rich teaching for our own progressive integration into the Holy Family.
From the moment that he came to live among us, Christ experienced in his divinity the fullness of the Spirit, calling forth from him a song of love: “Abba! My Father.” Through Mary, he knew in his humanity how the Eternal Father is life, tenderness, mildness... All of this is given him by Mary who possesses these qualities in abundance (for she is, according to the expression of the Archangel Gabriel, full of grace). At his birth, she caresses him, rocks him, covers him with kisses, passing on to him in this way the good odor of the Holy Spirit who lives in her.
As a little child, Jesus begins calling Mary, “Momma,” and behind this name, he is seeking his Father. This first very important stage, where the Christ is oriented toward Mary, extends over about four years, from conception (the moment of the Incarnation) until the age of three. By looking at his mother, Jesus is turned toward the Father; for the Virgin Mary is for him the face of God the Father communicating to him the Father’s life, tenderness and mildness....
Let us continue following Christ. Thirty years later, on the Cross, during another birth, entirely spiritual this time, Jesus just before his death looks at Mary to tell the disciple that he loved, This is your mother (Jn 19:27). He invites him to take her as Mother because he knows from experience that she offers no obstacle to our knowing the Father, in fact, just the opposite. She is there, the mother of sorrows who offers her Son to the Father. She allows us to discover Our Father, she facilitates the way to him (by giving her Son). Let us, then, not have any fear and let us welcome Mary into our heart.
The Child Jesus teaches us to live in Mary, to murmur her name. We do not call our own mother by her first name. Why then call the Virgin by her first name when she is our mother? Certain liturgical obligations are incompatible with more emotional expressions, certainly! But in our heart, what do we call Mary? “Mother Mary,” “Myriam,” “Momma”... Let us give her a name which speaks to our soul, and which is not necessarily the name “Momma.” As a matter of fact, it can be difficult to give a name so full of meaning to any other person besides our earthly mother. But it is important to discover deep in our heart that Mary is truly our mother, that we can call her that and consider her as such because she is continually in the mind of Jesus.
To live in Mary is to breathe, eat, sleep, walk, act with and near her. It is to consecrate everything to her, which means to give her everything so she can offer it to the Lord and make it holy. The least gesture, the most insignificant event can evoke an ardent impulse of the heart toward Our Lady, the way that the Child Jesus did so. As an infant, when he wandered off to play, he knew that she was keeping an eye on him. Let this model guide our spiritual life: let us stay with Mary, and let us not wander too far so that we can be reborn in her.
It is not so much turning our thoughts to her in order to recite a prayer or to visit her from time to time in a sort of sentimental devotion, unfortunately too common. It is not the number of rosaries or pilgrimages which will change our heart, but the quality of our love for the Virgin. Teresa of the Child Jesus did not have devotion to Mary strictly speaking, but she lived in mystical union with her. She admits that she had so much trouble reciting the rosary that, sometimes, she did finish with a “Hail Mary.” It is more a question of an ardent impulse of the heart in filial tenderness, of an inclination of the soul which affectionately murmurs her name. These feelings of love, renewed thousands of times during the day, keep us in her presence and under her watchful eye.
Let us be led, then, by the Child Jesus and let us learn from him how to live under Mary’s watchful care. In this way, we will discover in addition fidelity to the Holy Spirit. We will live in her more and we will become more sensitive and attentive to the murmurings of the Spirit. We will become, as explained by Father Liberman, like a feather carried by a puff of wind. Offering no resistance it lets itself be carried with the will of the wind. In Mary, we will become very receptive and open to the breath of the Holy Spirit which leads us where it will, without our knowing what will happen in the next moment.
Allowing ourselves to be guided in this way, we will encounter some subjectivity, it is true. Nevertheless, it is essential to let ourselves be carried along in this movement of filial abandon. The Child Jesus will teach it to us in the present moment if we keep open to the Virgin Mary. He will show us how to let go, to let ourselves be loved and consoled by her.
Such a language can appear childish. We are ready, like the Apostles, to put up intellectual roadblocks to stop little ones from coming to Jesus (Mk 10:13). The warning of the Savior is however without ambiguity: Anyone who does not welcome the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it (Mk 10:15). It is not a question of regressing, but of entering into the emotional maturity of the mindset of spiritual childhood.
If the Heart of Jesus, beginning with the first months of his human life, is where his Mother’s presence is always felt, we must nevertheless realize that the eternal Word is seeking the Father in Mary and that it cannot stop with a created being, however holy she may be. Also, we will not stop with Mary, because she is not the goal of our life. She gives us her Son because she wants us to continue on our way toward the Father. This is an important spiritual truth we must understand. Some people refuse to recognize the unique place of Mary and do not know mystical union with her, while others remain closeted for years in a one track marion devotion. Such an attitude does not originate with Mary but with our refusal to let ourselves be led further along in an inner reconciliation with our past.
With Mary, we are not keeping company with a single mother, but entering into a real family: we discover Jesus, her child, and we meet a father, Joseph. Each member of a family has a part to play in relation to the others. In the same way that Mary leads us to the Father thanks to Jesus, the Child Jesus teaches us to look at the Virgin in a whole new way. He transforms the way we look at our own mother. We learn from this to look at our mother in Mary. We discover her truthfully, as she is in the eyes of God, and not like we see her through our hurts and our bruised emotional expectations, the result of our childhood experiences.
Many people, really, do not know their mother well. They may idealize her, as is frequently the case for men, or they may scorn her. In Mary, we enter into the truth of what is. We find in our mother qualities that we did not know she had, riches which, belonging to the woman, spouse and mother, are present in Mary. We also realize in a much more lucid manner what was missing that hurt us, and how our heart protected itself as a result. Often at the beginning we are scarcely aware of the defences that have blocked us from having negative emotions toward our mother (like guilt, shame, violence, fear...). Deep hurts can surface, sometimes with anguish, even with hatred, but we can now recognize them for what they are, make them ours without needing to make ourselves feel guilty or estranged from our mother, since in Mary, we enter into a process of reconciliation. What my mother is not able to give me, Mary offers me. I can no longer hold a grudge against her, and I cannot reproach her. From now on, I possess everything in Mary because, as little Teresa said, “the treasure of the mother belongs to the child.”
Mary nourishes us with her spiritual milk, weaning us progressively of all that we have missed in our childhood. That is the first step in the spiritual life within the Holy Family. It passes through Mary and is lived in her, from the conception of Jesus in us (meaning our spiritual rebirth) until the time of weaning, at about age three.
The language of icons clearly illustrates the transition from the mother to the father. Certain icons like Vladimir’s Virgin of Tenderness show the Child Jesus looking at Mary, his arms tenderly embracing her, cheek to cheek. Others show the opposite, with the Child facing out to us, his back turned to his mother. What meaning does this change have?
The icons show Jesus turned toward his mother before he has been weaned, and turned toward us after he has passed the age of being weaned (at about three years). Just before reaching this age, the child has experienced an oppositional crisis in which he has seized upon his right to say his first “no” and discovered his own existence by saying “I.” One or two years later, by his own will he will enter the paternal universe, walking the delicate path from the mother to the father. That is the normal path psychological growth takes in a little child, and it is a time when we can observe numerous hurts.
With the Child Jesus, we will progressively learn not to stay with our arms wrapped around our mother, wanting her caresses, but to turn around in order to look ahead, and toward our father. Still safe in Mary’s arms, Jesus contemplates the one who is opposite the Virgin: his father Joseph. In his Heart already, as he gradually becomes aware of his presence, arises the murmur of the Holy Spirit: Abba, “Papa,” “my father!” This song never ceases growing louder in him. His father is Joseph. He seeks his eternal Father in Joseph. He experiences in his flesh what psychology teaches today. The little boy needs to proudly identify with his father thinking, “When I’m grown up, I’m going to be just like my dad. Like my father Joseph, I’m going to be a carpenter!” In little Jesus’ Heart lives the names of “momma” and “daddy.” However, behind the real, human search of the Child God, the Word prays in silence: “Father!”
We encounter people who, shocked by this language that they judge too worldly, refuse to consider Joseph as the father of Jesus and then of course to follow the pathway to taking him as their adoptive father. They readily apply Christ’s words: You must call no one on earth your father, since you have only one Father, and he is in heaven (Mat 23:9). How did Jesus call his adoptive father? By his first name “Joseph?” Certainly not, for the Virgin Mary tells him when they found him in the Temple of Jerusalem, See how worried your father and I have been, looking for you (Lk 2:48). It is certain that the Christ called his adoptive father Joseph by the affectionate word Abba (dear papa) used in Aramaic and Arabic.
This is what the Child Jesus is teaching us. St. Joseph can truly be my adoptive father. It is difficult to call him “dad” because this word is full of emotional meaning from the past. We have an earthly father, and to give the same name to St. Joseph is sometimes troubling. So we must find an affectionate name for him that expresses our filial tenderness (for example “father,” “my father”) and welcome him as the adoptive father that Jesus offers us.
There are two sweet names that live fixed in the heart of Christ and come into his thoughts like waves that endlessly wash up on the shore: “Momma! Daddy!” Wrapped in the arms of Mary, Jesus turns toward St. Joseph, meaning toward his father, toward the Father. Likewise, we can seek the eternal Father in Joseph, even as we stay in Mary. Mary says to each one of us, Your father and I, we are looking for you, meaning “your adoptive father Joseph and I are looking for you.” If we wish to live schooled by the Child Jesus, let us enter into this circling love and we will partake of heavenly joys here on earth.
Between ages three and twelve, Jesus deliberately turns more and more toward his father Joseph. He begins to work with him. At age four or five, he hears the Torah recited by him and is guided by him in understanding the sacred texts. He works in the workshop and he discovers with him how to manipulate tools... We should not underestimate the paternity of St. Joseph toward Jesus. An adoptive father knows clearly that paternity does not come cheap. Jewish wisdom has always recognized this. “The father of a child is he who raises him, not he who engendered him.” If the Virgin gave the Word of God a body, it is St. Joseph who is the true educator of his soul.
Jesus works with his papa and thus the relationship to his Father intensifies. The fire of the Holy Spirit grows in him and cries, Father! The more this relationship strengthens, the more he grows in his love for his Heavenly Father, in his home with Joseph and Mary, and the more he opens himself to his divine calling and to his mission. He discovers in his humanity that he is the Son of God while his divinity learns to know his condition as the Son of man. He hears the voice of God and prepares himself to do the work of his Father. During his Barmitzva, he, like all the male children of Israel, becomes a man at age twelve and enters into the adult world.
In the Temple of Jerusalem, surrounded by learned men of the law, Jesus is at work for his Father, with all the passionate enthousiasm of an adolescent who loves God, who desires to spend his life doing the will of the Father and making that his spiritual food. But an important event is going to radically change his orientation. It is the silent shock of two powerful words which collide and penetrate in a fascinating way for one contemplating the scene. Jesus knows that his Father is calling him to accomplish his will and that is why he stays in the Temple so he can work with him. But his mother Mary, full of the Holy Spirit, tells him, Your father and I have been looking for you. Jesus answers right away, Did you not know that I must be busy with my Father’s affairs? (Lk 2:48,4)
To his parents hearing this, these are not understandable words. But for Jesus, his mother’s words resonate in him and inspire him, Your father... my Father. After the annunciation by Archangel Gabriel, the Incarnation was powerfully accomplished within Mary, thanks to the work of the Spirit and the gift of the Word in the hands of the Father. But Jesus had not yet expressed his fiat to the Father in his humanity. Twelve years later, while in the Temple, hearing his mother designate Joseph as the face of the Father, he willingly and lovingly accomplishes in his humanity the mystery of the Incarnation (at precisely the moment when he enters into religious maturity). He carefully receives this burning light which will radically change his life. On the mount of Sion, when he gives himself totally over to the work of his Father, he suddenly understands, thanks to his mother, what the Lord is asking of him: “Seek Me and love me in your father Joseph and your mother Mary. Let Me guide you through them.”
Jesus’ reaction is immediate. After going to Jerusalem, not only does he leave, but he goes back to Nazareth, from where it is well known that hardly any good comes (Jn 1:46). And to finish off this burial, Scripture takes care to specify a third important point: he lived under their authority (Lk 2:51). To go down, back to Nazareth to his home, in the most radical filial obedience, produces impressive fruit. For the Gospel tells us right away that Jesus increased in wisdom, in stature, and in favour with God and men (Lk 2:52). Jesus will grow in the shadow of his adoptive father, in silence. Eighteen years during which the passion in his soul for his Father will grow, coming ever deeper upon his parents (your father and I) and in particular on Joseph. It will take time for Jesus to learn from St. Joseph the art of being about the business of his Father, the art of leaving all and giving oneself entirely, the art of dying of love for the Church.
It takes a lot of time then for us to enter and grow up in the Holy Family. Jesus, son of God that he is, took thirty years to gather all its fruits. There is nothing more simple, but our poor human nature wounded in childhood and scarred by sin has some difficulty getting used to it. We run headlong into our many ways of resisting. We experience anguish, weariness, sometimes inexplicable weight and some bitter suffering.
If we look for the face of St. Joseph, we will also run up against the silence of the father and of the mystery of what is veiled. To discover St. Joseph required constancy and perseverance, but, then, what a treasure! Let us know how to come into this patience. Jesus took thirty years to know his father and we would like to do it in a few weeks! No, we’ll need a whole life. But the most important is to enter into the Heart of Jesus: there, we will find Salvation.
Knowing Jesus better allows us to enter into the circulation of love. From our heart let there be a song of love so that Jesus can murmur within us these sweet names of Momma! Papa! We can also make use of a very simple but useful device, which is that of going to one of the members of the Holy Family and speaking to this person about the two others. Staying close to Mary we can tell her all that we find wonderful about St. Joseph. “Blessed Mary, I love your husband. I especially love his kindness, his obedience, his strength, his humility....” After naming the qualities that we appreciate in him, we can ask Mary to talk to us about St. Joseph, to reveal to us what she loves in him; then we must be quiet so we can listen to her. Next we can go to the Child Jesus and ask him to teach us about his parents. “Jesus, what do you love the most in your mother? Lord, talk to me about your father.”
Near St. Joseph, we will feel a strong presence in silence. “My father, speak to me about the Virgin Mary, your spouse. What surprised you the most in Jesus during the thirty years that you lived with him?” Let us listen to him and we will have extraordinary things happen in our heart in the most ordinary way. We have here a tried and true way to grow rapidly in intimacy with the Holy Family. We will not hear any voice, but we will be drawn into the circulation of love and into a happiness that we have never known before. This happiness is already felt when we pray in front of the Holy Sacrament shown between the icons (or statues) of Mary and Joseph. Let us enter into this dialogue of love, looking for the face of our Eternal Father. It is never static: there we will find healing and the joy of loving.
We can also come to the Holy Family with our arms laden with all of our family cares and concerns, our problems in married life, our worries about our children, the difficulties we are encountering in the parish, our prayer group, our intercession for the sick, for the Church and the world.... Let us leave all of that with the Holy Family, let us talk about it and then quiet our heart in order to silently listen.
A deeper way still than using words for entering into a relationship happens by a look. Two people who love each other can speak volumes just by a single look! Let us contemplate Jesus and ask him, “Lord, help me enter into your look so that I might see your mother Mary as you see her.” With all of our heart, let us enter deep into the Savior's look. Let us contemplate the Child Jesus looking at Mary... then at St. Joseph, his father... Let us contemplate Joseph looking at Mary, his wife, ... or again Mary looking at Joseph, ... Joseph looking at his son Jesus... The more we contemplate on these exchanges within the Holy Family, the more we will be nourished from them. Joseph, looking at Jesus, murmurs in his heart, “Jesus, my son, my joy.” And in the Lord’s Heart there is a cry of “Abba, my father!” Let us contemplate them when they love each other like this in silence and implore them to associate us with their love. Then St. Joseph will turn to look at us and say, “My son, my daughter.” And we in turn can answer, “My father.”
Let us remember Jesus’ look as described by St. Mark: Jesus looked steadily at him and loved him (Mk 10:21). This is exactly how the members of the Holy Family look at each other. And we crave a pure and innocent look that loves us and tell us, You are my Son, my daughter, the Beloved, my favor rests on you (Mk 1:11). Such a love lies within the heart of the Virgin Mary when she looks at us, since this same love lives in the Heart of the Father. Jesus dwells in Nazareth in the trinitarian movement which will manifest itself to men on the day of his baptism on the banks of the Jordan River and during the transfiguration, at the top of Mount Tabor, in the presence of the Apostles Peter, James and John.
Let us live in the Holy Family, in this permanent theophany, this quiet visible appearance of God to man. It is a profound experience, infinitely delicate, sovereignly discreet. At the most, nothing spectacular happens and yet we are at the heights of the spiritual life. In the Holy Family, we are going to feel a perfectly ordinary extraordinariness. There are no visions, no ecstasies, no miracles. It is daily life composed of all manner of simple things but lived in a far from ordinary way. What a bother, what a shame that we are so attracted to the sensational, even though that is very human. It seems to us that nothing is happening. However, we are carried off almost imperceptibly by a tidal wave of unsuspected magnitude which brings us straight into the arms of the Father.
That is the heart of our life. That is what gives our days joy and happiness. That is why we have come into the world, that is why we know trials and hardships that push us to let go of our possessions, of our authority, of appearances that try to outdo each other, all of the sterile attachments to a world of darkness, because we are called to be united with the radically new universe of the life giving Trinity. One never comes by force: for the Kingdom belongs only to the children, - and if it is said that the violent are taking it by storm (Mt 11:12), it is the violence of this filial confidence. If we do not keep a child’s disposition within us, we will greatly suffer and we will make no progress. It is not a question of mastering something, but of having enough confidence in order to surrender ourselves quietly over to the work of the Father. Living in the Holy Family, we often feel a certain weariness, a painful incapacity. We are without strength, even having the impression of losing our strength. It is enough to let ourselves become like a little child for between “momma” and “papa,” in the arms of the Father, there is no longer anything to fear.
What if we were to receive this communion in the Holy Family? We do not usually think about it, unfortunately, and we turn only to Jesus. However, the poor stable of our heart is not very pretty. It is a dirty place and everything is turned upside down. Jesus is ready, he is so good, to come into our miserable dwelling place and to be content with the straw of our soul, there in the manger of our wounds. But wouldn’t he be more at home if he were welcomed in Mary through Joseph? This way he would find himself again in the stable at Bethlehem. The dwelling place of our heart can become the “house of bread” (the literal translation of the Hebrew bet-lehem) if we stay between Mary and Joseph. It is easy to do so. We simply have to turn to the Virgin Mary with a heartfelt cry, and call her, saying, “Mary, my mother!” then toward St. Joseph, calling, “Abba, my father.” And our heart will no longer be a poor, miserable stable full of distractions for the Lord to enter into, but it will be in Mary and at Joseph’s side. There he will be happy, as little Teresa teaches. For, our living in Mary when this communion takes place, means that when Jesus comes into our heart, he will feel like he is dwelling in Mary. This intuition from Teresa is very powerful. It is the fruit of her constant intimacy with the Holy Family. It is all so simple and so great because all of it is fully human and divine.
We enter into the Holy Family by welcoming the life of the Church. The Church continually offers us sensory help for we need to see, touch, hear, taste, and smell. Liturgy normally fulfills this role, provided that it doesn’t make its very meaningful signs become too sappy sweet. We can breathe the incense, hear the Word of God, contemplate the Savior in the Holy Sacrament, see him on the Icons, taste and touch in the Eucharist.
Praying before an icon is a powerful means of healing. You can pray while contemplating the Virgin of Vladimir holding the Child in her arms, or in front of the Consolata of Turin. Ask Mary if you can rest in her arms. In your thoughts put your head in her hands and give yourself over to her tenderness. Become like a little child who wants to feel consoled by a mother and give yourself up to the love of God. This is how St. Francis de Sales advised making oration. Make the presence of Mary real inside yourself and stay close to her, like her beloved child.... What is now happening in your heart?
- One person might feel indifferent, and have no reaction. Putting himself in this frame of mind is rather odd to him, even childish. The loss of sensitivity can result from an emotional difficulty, an unease or an impossibility of letting oneself be loved and consoled by one’s own mother. It shows the presence of a straitjacket of protection worn around the heart, put on as defense against feeling suffering and anguish. Because of that, the person always says: “This isn’t my problem! I don’t care! I don’t give a d--m!” But deep down, it isn’t at all like that.
In order to be healed and to escape this defense mechanism which has protected us from suffering, but which has also cut us off from consolation, we must just persevere, realizing that it takes time to heal, not get uptight about it, and continually come back to Mary, like Jesus did... for thirty years of private life!
- Another person soon feels a consolation, tenderness, and kindness, because Mary is tender and kind, but also maybe feelings of guilt and anguish. Here are two testimonies to this effect:
·
“For
several years, Mary was for me a tender, easily consoling mother. It was not
hard for me to be with her, and through her with the Savior. But after a
number of years, my feelings for the Virgin changed perceptibly, something
which completely threw me. Each time that I would turn to her, I was ill at
ease and felt some heavy anguish, some feelings of suffocation and even
painful contraction of my neck muscles. When I would pray to her, I was
uptight and fearful. Thanks to the advice of the person mentoring me, I
understood why I was encountering such resistance: I accepted being guided
by the Lord. The Holy Spirit made me be near to Mary and purified me of a
childhood hurt, right where my mother had kept me for herself; her affection
had stifled me.”
· “One day, while praying, I asked Mary: “Show me the Father, like you did for Jesus.” Near her, I was feeling a great thirst for God. Then little by little there came guilt feelings toward her, as if she was reproaching me for abandoning her and not taking care of her. I had the impression that Mary resented me for that. A meeting with a priest totally freed me. He told me, “No! Mary wants only that for you and it’s the opposite, she invites you to do that. Don’t be afraid to go to the Father.” I understood a little better how we project our own emotional experience of the past onto our spiritual life. During my childhood, I was always afraid of letting my mother down. Her health was fragile, and I didn’t dare go to my father, because I believed she needed me.”
We see here how important it is to be faithful to the reality of what we are experiencing with our emotions, without sugar coating them and without lying to ourselves, so that we simply recognize and own up to them. That is the art of St. Joseph, then, to teach us to stay truthful to what we are experiencing.
The Virgin Mary holds a little boy in her arms. What relationship do you have with him? Devotion to Jesus as a child was still very widespread in the 1800’s, as one can notice in the life of St. Teresa. Today, it is practically obsolete. Why is that? Isn’t it because we carry within us a wounded child, so much more so than in previous generations, because of the breakup of the family and the loss of numerous social and religious traditions? However, to pray with Jesus as a child is extremely healing, provided one never does himself willful harm, but perseveres with constancy, in kindliness.
Seek intimacy with the Child Jesus in prayer. But if taking him into your arms burdens you and stresses you too much, then stop the exercise and go to Mary his mother or to St. Joseph his father, and ask for their help. Then come back with them to the Child: they will indicate to you how to go about it, to help you discover and love him. If the way is painful for some, for others it is easy. They have no difficulty because they are at peace with their inner child.
During Vespers at the Community of the Beatitudes, the office centered on childhood and the Cross, the little Jesus Child was resting on a beautiful cushion, next to the Cross. All those who desired so went forward to the altar to tell him of their love by taking him in their arms, rocking him, covering him with kisses. Each person had his or her own personal way of expressing this. There were those who took him easily and pressed him against their heart with much tenderness. Others took him in both hands but kept him at a distance as if they didn’t know how to go about it, while still looking at him affectionately. Still others didn’t even dare touch him.
We see from such behavior different and sometimes painful experiences from childhood. That is why we never constrain anyone to do this activity. We simply invite the person not to betray his or her feelings, to dare to listen and see what is inside of himself or herself. That is because this attitude tells something about the heart and about the inner child.
To enter into the liberty of the Kingdom, it is necessary to be reconciled with one’s past. That is why the Savior said to Sister Faustine: I am appearing to you like a child “because I want to teach your soul how to be a child.” Today’s generations carry within themselves an inner child so broken and suffering that it is often necessary to associate the meditation of the mysteries of childhood with those of the Cross. St. Teresa is a model of that. Her name in fact is Teresa “of the Child Jesus and of the Holy Face.” Marked from before she was born by deep wounds of abandonment having their origin in her mother’s deep-seated fear of not being able to nurse her, placed with a wet nurse for almost thirteen months because her mother did indeed lack enough milk to feed her, she then suffered the death of her mother at age four, separation with Pauline her second mother at age nine, with Marie her big sister at age thirteen. Childhood and the Cross were what she leaned on, especially when she entered the Carmel. It was there that she discovered a true road to sanctification.
Here is another easy thing you can do. You can ask the Child Jesus, when he is three or four years old, to bless you. Tell him all that you want to be but cannot. If you have trouble imaging this, ask a little child to bless you. Or better still, ask your children to bless you after the evening prayer. You will discover the blessing of the spirit of childhood and the joy of being a child of the Father.
Take an icon of St. Joseph which is meaningful to you and pray in front of it for a length of time. We have seen how Jesus contemplated the face of the Father in his adoptive father. Bury yourself in his arms, or put your head against his shoulder. Contemplate him. He is gentle as a lamb and powerful as a king of Israel. Then pay attention to what you are feeling, in the presence of the Lord. Be honest, especially if you feel disagreeable and guilty emotions welling up inside you!
When the Sabbath comes, the father of the family blesses his children. It is always deeply moving to see how eagerly the children come to be blessed by their father. And we adults? Are we burning with desire to say with Jesus, “Father, bless me.” I have come to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were blazing already! (Lk 12:49) Each Sunday, at the end of the Eucharist, the priest blesses the whole congregation “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” without our realizing exactly what is happening. Do we really want to become the beloved sons and daughters of the Father? If the answer is yes, let us come with passion in our hearts to be blessed by the Father so we can hear his voice: You are my son, my beloved... (Lk 3:22) and answer him, Abba! Father! (Mk 14:36) We will then know healing: we will not feel anything maybe, indeed, we may not even feel like being blessed..., or on the contrary we will feel peace, joy, and new happiness... In each and every case, such a step necessarily bears fruit.
There is a particular grace to take hold of when the father of the family blesses his children. That is also the privileged moment when Our Father approaches each one of us to show us his love, as he liked doing in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve (Gen 3:8). If we have lacked a paternal presence, we will not probably feel great joy and consolation, but rather a sweetness in a type of pain, the anguish of absence in the profound peace of the divine Presence.
A woman of fifty said in an interview, “I am just now discovering, at my age, that the Virgin Mary was a little girl!” For her it was revealing of an involuntary eclipse of her childhood, protecting her from the terrible sufferings of the past.
- Liturgical feast days dealing with the conception of a child (like the Annunciation and the Immaculate Conception), with the birth of a little boy (Christmas), of a little girl (Birth of Mary), the rejection of a child (Holy Innocents), the presentation of a child (Presentation of Jesus or of Mary in the Temple), tie us together into our human experience. Let us be attentive, there again, to the way in which we experience these feast days! Is it with a great joy or on the other hand an experience of contradictory emotions, of a certain resistance? In this case, it is because of a past experience of our childhood. Let us especially not censure these feelings, believing that some feelings are forbidden. That would be to lie to ourselves. Certainly we don’t for anything want to cultivate such a feeling, but to live it truthfully while learning to know it. Let us enter thus into the Holy Family. If we have been missing a father or a mother, we will find Mary, Joseph and the Child. Here, in Mary’s embrace, in Joseph’s arms, with the strong and delicate action of Jesus, we will discover happiness in living, and we will receive healing.
- Advent, for example, is a time of waiting. “Eric shared with me how painful the waiting at Advent was for him. During anamnesis, he recollected the initial cause. He was the second boy of the family; his brother was only eleven months older. His father was often gone because of military service; he came home only on weekends. His mother, expecting another child, was alone for the whole week, with a little baby of two months. It probably took her a few months to accept her baby and this waiting period, because of the absence of her husband, weighed on her. The waiting period was for her an uneasy time period. Eric understood why, as an adult, he lived through that time with a certain suffering. On the other hand, Christmas Day was for him a true liberation.”
Another example. “Marianne, little sister of Bethlehem, couldn’t stand the feast of the Nativity of Mary. She suffered identity troubles (homophilia). Anamnesis allowed her to trace back to the deciding event: her mother was expecting a baby boy!”
During anamnesis, it can be useful to note precisely the way in which one comes into relation with God. For example, one might ask, “For you, who is God?” The most frequent answer is invariably, “Jesus” or “Jesus and Mary.” More rarely, the Father or the Holy Spirit. Discrepancies and blockages soon appear. The circulation of love is cut off. There is no more than a dual relation of choice, with one or the other of the Persons of the Holy Trinity. Time is needed for the circulation of love to be started again, as one can observe in the blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity or St. Teresa of the Child Jesus.
- The relationship to Jesus in his humanity is also very significant. “What age is Jesus when you pray to him?” Is he about thirty, during his public ministry? “Do you see him during his Passion or after his Resurrection?” “Is he an adolescent, a child, or a baby?” “Who is Jesus for you?” “It he a man, a friend, a brother, a spouse, God?” Each answer is special and opens a window on the inner life of the person.
In this chapter we suggest going back to a study of the first years in the life of Teresa of the Child Jesus, to continue with what we have shown as a pathway of healing in the Holy Family. Teresa is a good illustration of this and another look at her life will identify above all where she was hurt, illustrate the force of grace at work in her life, and underscore the collaboration of Teresa with this divine work. From this, we will be able to establish guidelines for all those who want to commit to the way of confidence and love that she opened for us.
We must turn to what God’s teachings are in the life of St. Teresa of the Child Jesus, and find in her life a model of sanctification for our own life. Teresa is a sign of the times. Pious X thought of her as the greatest theologian of the twentieth century and even before October 19, 1997, Christians were eager to have her declared Doctor of the Church.
After a century of reflecting on the life and thought of Teresa, we still have not exhausted the treasures of her teaching. It contains immeasureable riches for healing and psycho-spiritual mentoring. In this chapter we will examine these riches closer still.
The pathway Teresa chose is simple, for she always went to the heart of the matter. As she herself said, “I like only what is simple. I detest anything that is affected.” Father Bro wrote, “Teresa found the simplest and surest evangelical shortcut that has ever been.” Her life reads like an open book, helping us to learn how to use our very weakness itself as a means of sanctification.
Let us remember that childhood growth is made up of two crucial periods and a good acquaintance with them will allow us to have a better understanding of Teresa’s life.
1. From conception to age three, before a child uses language to reason. This first period lays the foundations of the personality, due in large measure to the love showered on the child by the parents (in particular the mother). Later on, it misleads the child into certain unconscious relational behaviors, because of times when love was not present, times which cause the injury of abandonment. This injury may be defined as a lack of love, and the little one is certain to suffer from it, because he is marked by the consequences of original sin and brought up by parents who are themselves limited and sinners. Through this the child knows emotional hurt, then doubt about parental love. In addition, he experiences difficulty in staying open to love when he suffers or is afraid, as well as guilt (or shame about himself), the source of deep distress.
2. After age three, the child is theoretically weaned. He turns toward his father and progressively separates from his mother, walking the necessary but very delicate passage from the mother toward the father. The child also confronts parental law and authority; and if he does something wrong, he is able to discover his parents’ forgiveness.
This second stage is characterized by the use of language to reason; the child acts consciously and willfully in a relationship. He therefore is choosing whether or not to enter into the divine teaching of sonship and paternity. His freedom to choose is real, yet limited by the emerging doubt, guilt and distress coming from his initial hurts.
As we have briefly alluded to, some particularly stressful events were present in Teresa’s earliest existence: her mother’s anxieties, death of her brothers and sisters, and physical sickness followed by a period of separation. All of these events, present before her birth and soon thereafter, will put their mark on her, simultaneously with all the love and tender care surrounding her.
Four children died in infancy before Teresa was born on January 2, 1893. Joseph, six months, died in March of 1867; Jean-Baptiste, eight months, died in August of 1868; an earlier Teresa, two months, died three years later in August of 1870. These three children were undernourished due to insufficient milk from their mother, Zelie, and died as a result of gastro-enteritis.
The Martin family was especially shaken by the death of daughter Helen, age five and a half, on February 22, 1870. In less than five years, four children had left this earth, even before our little Teresa was born. These sad events all helped to create a familial context of suffering and disease. Zelie wrote, “I felt so sad about losing my two little boys and became sadder still when I lost my little Helen.”
These losses contributed to Zelie’s deep distress when she was pregnant with Teresa. She was anxious about not having enough milk to nourish her, as she feared earlier when she was pregnant with Celine. She wrote to her sister-in-law, “How will I feed it? I’ve been having nightmares about this every night. I have to hope that things will turn out better than I fear and that I won’t have to go through the pain of losing the child.” But by early January of 1873, Zelie had still not found a wetnurse.
Added to this ever present fear was the burden of too much work. Concerning her “Alencon lace,” she wrote, “It is sheer slavery. It’s not that I want to get rich, but I think it would be crazy for me to quit this work, with five children to bring up.” Zelie worked too much and did not sleep enough. She was thoroughly exhausted and after the birth of her fourth child, lacked enough milk to nourish her babies.
Finally, Teresa’s mother, at age 41, was probably seriously ill. Eight years earlier, she had been treated for a cyst in her breast. The diagnosis of cancer was official only the 17th of December, 1876, when she had only eight more months to live. Three years before Teresa’s birth, Zelie had become so exhausted that Louis Martin had sold his watch and jewelry store to his nephew Adolphe Leriche, so that he could personally oversee the patterns and sales of the Alencon Lace Bureau.
These facts confirm that Teresa was born under difficult circumstances. She perceived this most certainly from birth on, for, like every child, she possessed a conscience of love which allowed her to know without fail if she was loved or not, if she brought pain and suffering to her mother and if she was truly welcomed into the family. Every child aspires to a fullness of love because it has been created in the image of God. But from birth on, the child confronts the limitations present within the family and feels what the mother is experiencing internally. Though incapable of analyzing this, since it has not yet developed the language of reason, the child nonetheless feels all that the mother is experiencing and retains it in the depths of his emotional make-up in the form of painful scars which will subsequently surface in the relationship.
The in-utero experience that was outside of her control represents Teresa’s FIRST WOUND OF ABANDONMENT, and it caused great emotional pain, suffering from separation, fear and anxiety over being abandoned, as well as shame about herself (or guilt feelings). We find here the root of the subsequent difficulties that Teresa had, particularly her extreme weekness. But she will make use of this to discover, then teach, the little way of spiritual childhood.
Teresa was still a newborn and Zelie worried: “The little one is fine. She promises to be very strong, but I don’t dare count on it. I’m still afraid of enteritis.”
True to Zelie’s worries, at two weeks old Teresa became sick and showed all the symptoms which had preceded the death of her three brothers and sisters. “I am so worried. I scarcely sleep more than two hours, for I am almost always taking care of the baby, who, for some time now, has been very restless at night.” “The poor child is suffering terribly.” This is the SECOND SHOCK which is felt less in her emotional make-up this time than in her body with violent abdominal pains.
Dr. Gayral, professor at the Medical College of Toulouse, wrote: “It is extremely important to observe that the first months of Teresa’s life were marked by serious digestive troubles which put her life in danger, precisely because it is not unusual that these accidents will have later repercussions, not only on physical development but especially, though less apparent, on personality. The first ties with the world are made orally and when those are perturbed and unsatisfactory, it is frequently the case that the whole being bears their mark. These children are more sensitive and as a result tolerate emotional frustrations less well than do others.” We can now more clearly understand one of the main traits of Teresa’s personality: her hyperemotional sensitivity.
Around the eleventh of May, 1873, she was at death’s door. We must understand that she was dying of hunger, because her stressed and exhausted mother was unable to give her enough nourishment. A baby intuits this from its consciousness of love. Her mother certainly loved her with all her heart, and clearly wanted her, for she wrote, “I am utterly crazy about children. I was born to have them.” This helped her justify bringing a ninth child into such a difficult situation. Still, no matter how great her love, she could no longer give life.
There was another event we must note. Teresa was healed through the intervention of SAINT JOSEPH, human icon of the presence of the Father and patron of those who die in the Lord. He intervened thanks to Zelie’s prayers. It happened that Teresa had nursed her fill for the first time from her wetnurse, Rosalie Taillé. Suddenly, “she burped up some milk and collapsed as if dead on her wetnurse.... She showed no signs of breathing. We leaned over her in vain to try to discover some sign of life, but we could see nothing....” “I ran quickly to my bedroom, and I knelt at the feet of St. Joseph and I asked him to grant that my baby get well, yet I was resigned to God’s will if he wanted to take her to himself. I don’t often cry, but the tears were flowing when I was praying...” “Finally, a quarter of an hour later, my little Teresa opened her eyes and began to smile. From that moment on, she was completely healed. Her color came back and so did her cheerfulness.”
St. Joseph’s role here certainly goes beyond mere bodily healing. It is probably due to his care that Teresa was protected from the unhealthy context brought on by the heavenly departure of her four brothers and sisters. Louis Martin was a great figure of St. Joseph for Teresa, all throughout her childhood, watching over her to protect her in spite of successive maternal shortcomings.
By the age of two months, then, Teresa had suffered a double abandonment: this was a maternal lack which would grow considerably larger in spite of the delicate and strong paternal presence. Yet, already, by St. Joseph’s side, the Virgin Mary was watching. Born on Thursday, January 2, Teresa’s first name was Marie (Mary), like all her sisters. She was baptised in the Notre Dame church the following Saturday (the day traditionally consecrated to the Mother of God in the Church) and her older sister (named Marie) became her godmother.
Such watchfulness from the Virgin Mary is not reserved just for Teresa. Rather, she serves as an example for us of something much bigger. The Virgin Mary is quietly present in the life of abandoned infants, even before they are conscious of it. It is she, in fact, who has the mission of making up for all the maternal shortcomings of our childhood. In this way the Holy Family showed itself in Teresa’s life even before she knew the structuralizing experience of love. When she was older, Teresa deliberately chose St. Mary as mother and welcomed the paternity of St. Joseph, through that of her own father, because she had discovered that the Holy Family is the privileged place of healing and sanctification.
For our part, we should not be afraid to take the Virgin Mary in our heart so that she may fill all those emotional voids where we are missing maternal love. And let us welcome St. Joseph as protector and adoptive father, especially when the paternal presence is missing in our families (divided and broken up). We will then discover that they were loving and watching over us even before we knew it.
Although it nearly broke her heart to do so, Zelie confided her little Teresa to Rosalie Taillé for her to raise with care and affection at Samallé, five miles distant from Alençon. From March 16, 1873 to April 2, 1874, a period of twelve and one half months, Teresa lived separated from her mother and her family. She again felt, in a stronger and more prolonged manner, hurt from being abandoned. After the maternal anxiety and the physical pain which put her at death’s door, this is the THIRD EMOTIONAL SHOCK: the suffering of a long separation.
It is easier to understand the difficulties that Teresa encountered later, particularly her serious misgivings, her tendancy toward perfectionism, her fear of displeasing, and her strange psychic malady at age ten. The problems were rooted in the wound of abandonment from the first year of her life and its resultant guilt feelings. These are the marks of someone needing to be loved, of a painful lack of maternal love present even before she was born.
Teresa came back to her family on April 2, 1874, and this represented a new separation, from her wetnurse this time, to whom she had become strongly attached. This became Teresa’s FOURTH WOUND OF ABANDONMENT.
These events allow us to affirm that Teresa’s emotional makeup and unconscious memory were seriously injured. It is a well known fact in psychology that the stronger the emotional tie, the deeper the wound. That is why the maternal wound is always the first and deepest of all. All her life, Teresa would suffer from a deep injury related to a loss of maternal love, a true emotional abyss because it was a repeated aggression of a prolonged nature. She was scarred very early on in losing her desire to live.
Teresa spoke the truth about being small and weak, but too often we do not believe her! She was completely sincere when she wrote, “Oh my Jesus, I feel that if the impossible happens and you found a soul still weaker and smaller than mine, it would please you to bestow on it even greater favors...,” but we don’t take her seriously. Teresa really was a “very little soul,” her weakness was real, as she progressively discovered. She carried within herself a psychic fragility which makes her very near to us and which, far from being an obstacle, can become a privileged means of sanctification.
From the age of fifteen months, Teresa lived a quiet, calm life up until the death of her mother. She entered into what she called the first part of her life, where she began to do things consciously. This period extends from the beginning of the use of language to reason until age four and one half. She wrote, “Ah, how quickly the sunny years of my smallest childhood passed but what a gentle imprint they have left on my soul.”
After living through the emotional sadness of separation, Teresa experienced love for a little more than three years (from April, 1874 to August, 1877); a rare, special love because her family was full of tenderness and closeness. “All my life the good Lord saw fit to surround me with love. My first memories are full of smiles and the most tender caresses!... I loved my papa and mama very much and showed them my tenderness in a thousand ways, for I was very demonstrative.” She discovered as a little child already how much true love can heal the emotional pain of an injury resulting from having been abandoned.
Within her family, Teresa not only showed her kind heart but also manifested an obsessive need to be loved. She demanded a lot of attention and affection after she returned from Alençon. “This is no small burden, I assure you, for she is constantly with me and it is hard for me to work,” said Zelie Martin. Here is a wonderful illustration of this that she related to Pauline: “I hear Teresa calling me: Momma! She won’t go up the stairs by herself, unless she can call me on each step, Momma, Momma! For each step, there is a Momma! And, unfortunately, if I forget to answer only one time, ‘Yes, my child!’ there she stays, going neither up nor down.” This story or anecdote is important to our understanding of the grace which came to Teresa. Instead of “Momma,” substitute “Abba,” and you have the way of childhood. “Abba!” “Yes, my child!” and she was given grace to advance one step after the other. We are already in the center of the way of confidence and love, lived in the heart through what we could call the emotional liturgy of the family. It took a fully human initiation to open such a spiritual path: this is a striking illustration of the realism of the incarnation. It is indeed true that our experience with our parents is the physical medium of our encounter with God.
But at the same time, what unease lies behind the wait! Teresa felt the break between the anxiety of being abandoned on the one hand, and the confidence of a presence on the other. Imagine if her mother had gotten impatient! Teresa would have been flooded with doubt and would have probably closed herself up in the face of unbearable anxiety. But there was so much tenderness and mutual confidence present that the little Teresa was strong in her mother’s love and consoled in her pain of having been abandoned. She opened up to the maximum without letting doubt get the upper hand. We will see later how she chose to react confidently each time that she was confronted with this suffering from separation and the anxiety of being abandoned that lay beneath. As an adult, Teresa recommended that we do the same and advised us to “stay a little child before the good Lord, to recognize our nothingness, to wait on God for all, like a little child waits for everything from its father.”
Teresa’s attitude is noteworthy. The desire to be loved expressed itself strongly in her and stayed one of the secrets of the little way. Teresa had to know in her body the extreme weakness due to abandonment, in order to be initiated into confident love. Then she became capable of being aware of what she had lived through, verbalizing it and teaching it to her novices.
We will highlight another of her very significant behaviors, from when she was four years old. She chose to accept and welcome everything that was given to her. “One day, Leonie (...) came to find us (...) with a basket full of dresses (...). ‘Here, little sisters,’ she said to us, ‘pick something. I’m giving them all to you.’ (...) After a moment’s pause I put my hand in when my turn came, saying, ‘I want everything.’ (...) This little trait of my childhood sums up my whole life (Teresa was twenty-two when she wrote that) and later (...) I understood (...) that each soul was free to respond to the call of our Savior.” This means that each of us can let ourselves be loved by opening (or not) the door to the great lover that is our God, when he comes knocking, not when we are healthy and well, but right when we are hurt and sick, when we have great need of a doctor.
At age three, Teresa discovered the power of forgiveness from her parents to renew peace in her soul. This component is very important for us. “I could not stand the thought of having hurt my beloved parents. In an instant, I would recognize what I had done wrong.” Her mother said this: “She stands there like a criminal awaiting condemnation, but she has it in her head that we will forgive her quicker if she accuses herself.” Teresa joined the natural confidence of a child with the heavenly grace already growing in her. This happened in an instructive environment where admitting fault did not incur punishment, but instead a show of mercy. It is not a question of lightening the weight of moral evil. Rather, Teresa showed how she didn’t want to abuse mercy by relativising the seriousness of the sin. She was beginning to discover repentance, which is different from the strong feeling of guilt that she always carried in her wounded psychology.
Theresa was benefitting from the solid education in the Martin home. A simple admission re-established the relationship, and the truth never brought punishment. Too often, because admission of wrongdoing entails correction, children tend to hide the truth in order to be loved: this is the place where scruples originate, feelings of doubt or difficulty in deciding what is right. In Teresa, moral qualms did not originate from her shortcomings which served to teach her a lesson, but rather, as we have stated, in the wound of the initial separation.
Early on, and simply by grace, for she was scarcely three years old, Teresa was opening up, like a flower to the sun, in her desire to be loved. She knew the joy of forgiveness. It should come as no surprise, then, that she exclaimed later, as an adult: “If I had committed all the possible crimes, I would still have the same confidence. I feel that the whole multitude of offenses would be as a drop of water thrown into a burning fire.” We cannot explain everything through childhood, certainly, yet nothing can be explained without it. Teresa would always love the language of flowers to say very simply that holiness begins by being open to the gift of God, being open to the Holy Spirit, since God alone is holy.
In December, 1875, Zelie wrote that Teresa “has just kissed me and wishes my death. ‘Oh, I would like you to die, my dearest Mother!’ We scolded her and she said, ‘It’s so that you can go to Heaven, because you tell me that we have to die in order to go there.’ She also wishes for her father to die, when she gets carried away by her feelings of love.”
For Teresa, love also meant “death” and “heaven” because four of her brothers and sisters were already there. Without over analyzing, let us just say that can be painful to hear a little child of nearly three say to her father and mother, “I wish you would die.” It speaks of a context of death, separation and abandonment that we have previously discussed, and at the same time Teresa was already looking toward heaven. Grace is visibly at work. We see the evidence here of a tempetuous struggle between our wounded nature and grace. At the end of her life, this tie with death will be purified. “I am not dying, I am entering into life.” Her death would become a death of love.
Rereading the life of Teresa presents a major difficulty: how to keep a balance between the realism of the incarnation and the power of grace at work in the heart of a saint. Several studies done later have fallen into the trap of psychology at any price, cheapening the mystical reality that Teresa lived; others have idealised her and seen only her spiritual side, taking away from her all the human drama of weakness which she, however, continually cited.
We must not forget that Teresa lived from a very young age in a voluntary, permanent pull toward God. She consciously chose, at three years old, to turn her will to a “yes” to God. Thus, all that she experienced in her childhood is not able to be reduced to just a psychological dimension, but is necessarily written in a dynamic of purification. Ignoring this, psychologists and psychoanalyists who study her life carefully, trying to shed light on certain aspects of it, will not be able to understand her completely. On the other hand, certain theologians will do wrong to make Teresa inaccessible, even inimitable. She was certainly protected from serious dangers relating to sin, but remained, however, extremely hurt and marked by the consequences of original sin.
Another stumbling block challenges us when we study Teresa. We are sometimes hesitant to accept her teachings because we do not distinguish between what makes her exceptional, and pertains only to her, and what is addressed to everyone, that each of us can appropriate. We would like to distinguish those things here. We will highlight any unusual manifestations in her life that should be set aside, for they do not belong to the little way:
There are four particularities:
1. Exceptional precocity
Teresa’s precociousness and the protection which came to her are special graces of God’s Providence, helping her to accomplish her mission. However, they do not make up an integral part of her pathway to sanctification. In the history of the Church, saints who have received such a grace are rare. In that, Teresa is not our model. She herself recalled, “From the age of three, I began to say no to nothing that the Good Lord asked of me.” Such a precocious choice is highly unusual. However, it allows us a better understanding of one of the pillars in her sanctification, for we can see here her desire to refuse God nothing and to please him in everything.
2. Virtues in Abundance
Teresa can also discourage us by her faithfulness to virtue, which tends to make us believe that what she say about being weak is just talk, with no basis in reality. Already as a child, she counted her sacrifices on what was called rosaries of devotion, which came to impressive totals at day’s end. Celine, the first one to come to know the secrets of the little way, gave much value to all these sacrifices, big and little, offered to Jesus by Teresa, and she herself despaired of ever being capable of such an offering. It took time for her, as it does for us, to accept believing that all that was nothing, and especially was not what gave Teresa confidence. A superabundance of virtues is not necessary for the little way, and one can constantly fall and have access to the same sanctification as Teresa, who understood that she was protected from many falls by the considerate grace of the Father’s Mercy. Later, to underscore that for us, Celine explained that Teresa’s fidelity in virtue should be exemplary so that the little way might be established in the Church, - the superabundance of virtues crowning and sealing her teaching, so to speak,- but that we do not need to be capable of the same thing in order to practice it. And there again it is up to us to take seriously what Teresa never stopped repeating and stating in her writings.
3. A Sacred Calling
From the time when she could use language to reason, Teresa was aware of her calling. “Often I heard it said that of course Pauline would be a nun, so without knowing very much what that was, I was thinking, ‘I’m going to be a nun too.’ That is one of my first memories, and ever since, I have never changed my mind!....” The attraction toward Carmel and the detailing of the way of confidence and love grew side by side in Teresa’s life, and tempts us to believe that they are one and the same, that only those in religious orders or priests (one after another of her “spiritual brothers”) are concerned by her teaching. But this is not at all the case. Teresa, moreover, wrote letters shaped by the way of childhood to the Guerin family. While it is true that a consecrated life was part of Teresa’s calling, it does not belong, however, to the little way which is addressed to all states of life.
4. An exceptionally alert mind
In the same way, her keen intelligence allowed Teresa to remember events from her earliest childhood. She herself affirmed that it was a grace from God. “The Good Lord in his special grace opened my mind very early on, and written very deeply in my memory are souvenirs of my childhood so fresh that it seems to me that what I’m going to tell you happened only yesterday.” Why did God want this unusual precocity? Because he wants to tell us all about mankind by Revelation and by Church Tradition, by the life of the saints and knowledge of the social sciences, in his desire to make us understand how man grows and in what way grace shapes him. This is why he wanted to give Teresa’s life to us. He wants to instruct us by her teachings while we reflect on what he wants to accomplish in each one of us, and especially in the smallest of us. It is like there is a divine will present “ to uncover the little Teresa in its potential for the divine,” putting at our disposal an impressive body of documents, allowing us now to study her life methodically and discover that she is a doctor of the Church not only because of her teachings, but also and foremost because of her own life.
We have seen what should not be confused with the way of childhood. Now, we would like to point out an element that belongs to it. If Teresa’s intelligence and memory awakened, it is because her senses and emotions stayed totally receptive. “I still feel the deep and poetic impressions born in my soul at the sight of fields of wheat, dotted with cornflowers and field flowers.... The space and the gigantic pine trees whose branches were touching the ground left in my heart an impression similar to what I still feel today when I look at nature.” Welcoming life is indispensable for the way of confidence. In this, Teresa was privileged, like many children living at that time. Today, on the contrary, we have to teach young people how to live, meaning to feel, breathe, see, hear, touch, and to savor life with pleasure.
As we have seen, our being loved passes through feelings and emotions. The first emotional experience of love is one of the bases of spiritual experience and of confidence in God. We experience love in peace when there are no hurts, but we receive it with anxiety when there has been an injury from abandonment going back to early childhood. We should understand that it is therefore impossible to discover the way of childhood without developing simultaneously an inner disposition and an openness to outside surroundings, both of which belong to a child.
After the “first wounds” and “the structuralizing experience of love” which constitute “the sunny years of her childhood,” Teresa entered the second period of her life, “the saddest of the three” periods that she herself distinguished. Precociously and deeply stressed by having been repeatedly abandoned, Teresa healed slowly. The scar apparently had time to close since she lived in a family environment which was safe and full of heartfelt and warm love.
In order for us to understand the instruction that the Father wished to show future generations through Teresa, it was necessary that what was underlying in her had to resurface, so that she could teach us what we might do about it. This was realized in a FIFTH EVENT OF SEPARATION AND ABANDONMENT. Her mother’s death, like a knife wound, brutally re-opened the first wound, incompletely closed. She would have to wait for later purifications of a maternal nature to follow, beginning with her entrance into the Benedictines of the Abbey in October, 1881, through the fall of 1897, and living through the sanctification of Christmas, 1886, which washed and completely transfigured her suffering.
The night of August 27, 1877, just after midnight, Zelie Martin died. Two happenings shed light on what Teresa experienced. For one thing, she was not immediately told, and for another, she did not cry very much.
She was not present when her mother died, and was only told of it the following morning, upon awakening. She wrote some very important things related to this: “Papa took me in his arms and said, ‘ Come kiss your poor Mother for the last time.’” Louis Martin made a serious pedagogical error here, though understandable in this context. He did not ask Teresa if she wanted to come kiss her mother one last time. And what’s more, it seems, he did not prepare her for this first confrontation with death, touching a dead body! “And so, without saying anything, I placed a kiss on the forehead of my beloved Mother...” – a cold, cold forehead since Zelie had been dead for at least eight hours! What a terrible shock for such a sensitive little girl. Her emotions were so strong that they got completely blocked and couldn’t find a way to express themselves. Later, Teresa wrote, “I don’t remember crying very much.”
This is the second revealing symptom. When a little girl of four as demonstrative as Teresa loses her mother, she always cries with heaving sobs and tears. And how could it be otherwise? This is an absolute necessity, allowing us to begin to live normally again. In order for us to consent to the loss of someone near and dear we must first go through the period of mourning, through the liberation of sadness and pain, until they calm down completely. But Teresa, who remembered everything about this age, can hardly be wrong, and if she states that she did not cry much, this means that she indeed cried very little. The family distress was such that she chose not to burden anyone. She did not allow herself to express her emotions, and her personality was changed because of it. Through her attitude, she confirmed the feeling of being cast aside, and she again felt the pain of having been abandoned. “I looked and listened in silence... nobody had the time to bother with me and so it was that I saw many things they might have wished to shield from me.”
The day of the burial in Alençon, when she saw Celine choose Marie for a mother, Teresa ran headfirst to Pauline. “I threw myself in your arms, crying, ‘Well, then, Pauline will be my momma!’ ” She was then only four and one half, meaning that she had just entered the age of discovering her father.
The death of a mother is always traumatic for a child. For Teresa, the event came at a time when she was theoretically weaned from maternal tenderness and firmly oriented toward her father. But Zelie’s death re-opened all the old wounds, where, as we analyzed earlier, her being was not weaned at all, since it was not able ever to be satisfied. She demanded from her father and her sisters all the affection that her heart so desperately needed.
In her Autobiographical Writings, Teresa sang the praises of her father. For more than fifteen pages, this continued, whereas earlier she had hardly talked about him at all. Every day, Teresa showed her grades to her papa, calling him “my dear king,” and he calling her “my queen.” Together they would walk in the Star Garden and stop to enter a church. Without over-analyzing this, it is not hard to see the particularly strong and special relationship that developed between little Teresa and her father. The move to Louis Martin was a success.
“What can I say about the long winter evenings...? (...) Ah, how sweet it was after the game of checkers to come sit with Celine on papa’s lap.... With his beautiful voice, he would sing songs which filled the soul with deep thoughts... or (...) he would recite poetry uttering eternal truths... Then we would go upstairs for evening prayers together and the little queen was all alone with her King. (...) I had only to look at him to know how the saints must pray.”
Louis Martin played an incomparable role in the elaboration of the little way and the formation of little Teresa’s personality. Teresa did not go wrong here. Although the maternal wounds were immense, she had a father worthy of being called “the St. Joseph of the Carmel.” We find, in fact, a stunning similarity between St. Joseph and the venerable Louis Martin. The emotional universe of Teresa with regard to her parents was largely filled by her father, even if her true educator was Pauline, her mother during this time.
At this age a few rare aggressive reactions made their appearance. Teresa, who had managed to get a hold of an inkwell that the maid had refused her, insulted Victoire. “You’re a brat!” she said. She showed a violent temper, even going so far as kicking....
These events led her, at Pauline’s suggestion, to her first experience of confession. Teresa reacted in an amazing way: for her, confession was a privileged moment to experience that she was loved. “Coming out of the confessional, I was so happy and carefree that I had never felt as much joy in my soul. After that, I returned to confess every feast day and it was a true celebration for me each time that I went there.” Here is what confession should be for us also: a shining encounter with God who loves me and shows me this as much as I am open to receiving him.
Between the ages of eight and ten, Teresa went through four successive dramas. There were two new separations with the entry into the Benedictines of the Abbey (October 3, 1881) and Pauline’s departure for the Carmel (October 2, 1882), then the refusal of her first communion by Mgr Hugonin (at the end of 1882) and finally her mental illness (May, 1883). We must realize that these trials are the equivalent of spiritual purifications, for if we refuse to see them as such and reduce them to mere psychology, we will not understand anything at all about Teresa.
Teresa’s entry on the third of October as a boarder at Notre Dame du Pré, located a mile away from Buissonnets became the FIRST MATERNAL PURIFICATION. Teresa was once again separated from her family. “The five years that I spent there were the saddest of my life. If I had not had Celine with me, I would not have been able to stay one month without getting sick.” Why? Because once again she felt the suffering of separation and the anxiety of being abandonned. In addition, Teresa found it hard to live in a group setting due to her extreme sensitivity. At school, she was threatened by an older (girl) student. “Given my timid and delicate nature, I didn’t know how to defend myself and merely cried silently, not even complaining to Pauline.”
A SECOND PURIFICATION separated her from her second mother. This happened a year later, on October 2, 1882, when Teresa was nine and one half. The situation closely resembled her mother’s death in many respects. “What sadness I felt one day when I overheard Pauline talking with Marie about her upcoming entry into the Carmel.” But Pauline had carelessly promised Teresa that she would wait for her! So Teresa, who remembered everything and was carefully keeping her sister’s promise in her heart, learned by chance (in the summer of 1882) about Pauline’s plans to leave her soon. Similarly, she had been kept in the dark when her mother died and had only learned of it later, because her father had thought it good to hold off the news until the following morning. The analogous event was extremely painful because it revived the past hurt. Once again, Teresa had not been told, she was forgotten, she was abandonned! “I didn’t know what the Carmel was, but I understood that Pauline was going to leave me (...), that she was not going to wait for me and I was going to lose my second Mother!... Ah! How can I express my deep anxiety?...”
Teresa was reliving the anguish of her mother’s death. The shock was so brutal that the deep anxieties initially experienced at separation, meaning from her earliest existence through her first year, began to reappear. This became the first act of a terrible drama which would last a little more than four years. “In an instant I understood what life was. Until then, I hadn’t seen it so sad, but it appeared to me in all its reality, I saw that it was only a suffering and continual separation. (...) If I had learned in a more gentle way about dear Pauline’s departure, maybe I would not have suffered so much, but learning about it by surprise was as if a sword had pierced my heart. My soul was flooded with sadness.” Sadness, separation, suffering, anguish: that is what she was going to call earthly exile. From then on, assault after assault fell on the same wound: and their repetition split it open, bringing to light the pre-depression weakness that had been present in her before birth.
The wound of abandonment grew deeper, in successive stages. These sufferings “were nothing in comparison with those which followed... Every Thursday we would go as a family to the Carmel and I, who was used to heart to heart talks with Pauline, got scarcely two or three minutes with her at the end of the visit. I spent those minutes crying and I would leave broken hearted.... (...) I told myself, “Pauline is lost to me forever!!!”
The purification of the maternal injury of being abandoned plunged Teresa into deeper and deeper feelings of earthly exile, -- a feeling she kept all of her life, even if it took on different shades of meaning. On Sunday nights, she wrote, “I felt that I had to begin life all over, working, learning lessons, and my heart felt exiled on this earth... I yearned for the eternal rest of heaven....” To accept going forward, growing up, learning lessons and progressively taking on adult responsibilities means to begin life all over: but for the first time, Teresa mentioned some alarming symptoms (difficulty living, changing, growing up), caused by fear of suffering and anxiety over separation. The changes were closely aligned to separation.
It took many years for Teresa to regain true joy. In her Last Conversations she wrote, “Life isn’t sad! On the contrary, it is very happy. If you say ‘exile is sad,’ I would understand you. We are wrong to give the name life to what must end. It is only for heavenly things, for what never will end, that we should use this real name; and so, it follows that life is not sad, but happy, very happy! ...”
We often talk about “healing of our wounds.” Teresa shows us by her whole life that the deepest wounds do not always heal, in particular those from before age three. These belong in the last analysis to the mystery of persecuted innocence. Comparable or related to the mystery of the wickedness that killed the Holy Innocents, they can in their own way become a place of co-redemption. The suffering of exile haunted Teresa her whole life long, but she learned little by little to give it a rich meaning, source of peace and joy. If Teresa had been healed of all her wounds, she would no longer have felt the separation so painfully. Yet we know, on the contrary, that this feeling, source of sadness and bitterness, would dwell in her until her heavenly rebirth, but it would be purified.
We can therefore conclude by saying this: if one heals progressively from one’s reactions to hurts (aggressiveness, sadness, discouragement, guilt), the suffering from separation and the anxiety of being abandoned can persist. They become the chosen place where we feel the power of God in death. Lived in confidence, they become a fertile land where the fruits of the Holy Spirit can grow: patience, kindness, mercy, peace and joy, compassion, benevolence...
A new test: Teresa was ten when she underwent a THIRD PURIFICATION which accentuated even more the descent into the pain of isolation. This time, it was not separation from her family, nor from her second mother, but from God himself, her only hope. Teresa was supposed to take her first Communion but she was two days short of turning ten years old the first of January and Mgr Hugonin refused. The symptoms already described intensified, and there seemed to be nothing anymore to uphold Teresa. The internal void that we have analyzed in our first chapter surfaced. “Toward the end of the year I was having a continual headache but it did not make me suffer too much. I was able to continue my studies and nobody worried about me....” Teresa sincerely thought that. She experienced it in this way. However, family correspondance proves otherwise. We know from the Martin family letters that Teresa lost sleep, an indirect symptom of anxiety and warning sign of depression, and that she had lost her appetite, sign of lack of desire, and even more, an incapacity for living. She was nearing the root problem of her wound, for life and nourishment are given by the mother. To refuse both speaks unfailingly of suffering tied to the mother. Thus, an anorexic tendance is always a sign of non life, of a rupture with the maternal relationship.
If these affirmations are medically correct, we must not forget, however, that Teresa at this age was already living close to God. That is why it is important not to limit ourselves to a psychological approach, but to remember that Teresa is advanced in her intimate walk with God. What she was going through was certainly not a passive purification of the senses as described by St. John of the Cross, but a trial, a hardship which, lived confidently and in submission to God’s will, is able to work for the good of those who love God.
Teresa became more and more depressed around Marie and Celine. The symptoms grew more severe right up to Easter, 1883. Two things happened then which set in motion the FOURTH PURIFICATION. “Papa having left for Paris with Marie and Leonie” on March 23 for Holy Week ceremonies, “my aunt took me to her house with Celine. Easter night, my uncle (...) talked to me about Momma (...) with a goodness that touched me deeply and made me cry.” Not only was Teresa forlorn since her papa and her big sister Marie were gone, but added to that, her uncle was evoking the memory of her mother’s departure! Teresa faced a new abandonment which was at the same time familial, maternal and paternal, and even spiritual since she could still not take communion. The results were not long in coming. Little Teresa fell to her lowest point.
“Seeing that I was tired, my aunt put me to bed. I was seized by a strange trembling which lasted the whole night. (...) I don’t know how to describe such a strange sickness. I was saying and doing things that I wasn’t even thinking. I seemed delirious, however I was sure that I didn’t lose my mind even one instant. I seemed faint, however I was hearing everything. I had to keep Marie close to me, and I read and reread Pauline’s letters until I knew them by heart.”
Marie talked about her crises of extreme fear. “Certain nails looked to her like big charred fingers. Staring at her father’s hat, she exclaimed with a mournful cry, ‘Oh! What a big black beast!’ In her eyes there was a dreadful expression. She ran headfirst from her bed to the cobblestones. She hit her head violently against the wood of her bed. The doctor said there was nothing to help. Seeing her exhausted from this struggle, I wanted to give her a drink but she screamed in terror, “They want to poison me.”
The diagnostic was never correctly made, and with good reason! The sickness was unknown at the time. Dr. Notta said there was nothing to do about it, that it was a serious illness. He formally excluded hysteria. We know today that the diagnosis of hysteria is not correct in a child of ten, because the neurotic core is not yet formed at this age.
In 1959 Dr. Gayral gave a diagnosis of child neurosis, meaning an emotional regression that does not lose lucidity. Little Teresa retreated into sickness in order to be given attention and to become like a baby. Her extreme fragility coming from the first hurts was in conflict with her conscious will to grow up and do well.
We can now affirm that the strange sickness of Teresa was in fact a major depression. Struggling with all her might with spiritual arms, Teresa was not able to avoid an inside “break-up,” due to the maternal emotional void. She unconsciously accumulated suffering from separation, guilt, distress of being abandonned, and an enormous weight of self-aggression. The depression became an “bit of luck,” like a security valve permitting the incommunicable to manifest itself. For Teresa (as for every person who goes through a depression), it was an irreplaceable experience of just how weak she was, of discovering her absolute incapacity, in spite of her exceptional will power. She had just touched the deepest part of her wound, but she was not yet purified. She needed to pass through two more decisive stages, those from May 13, 1993, to December 25, 1886, to become more conscious of her radical powerlessness. There followed a path of sanctification which eradicated the impatience, aggressiveness, and spot of pride, permitting Teresa to live more and more in obedience to the Holy Spirit until her heavenly birth on September 30, 1897.
We have said that to stop here with only a medical diagnosis would be to misunderstand what Teresa was experiencing in her deepest self. She herself was not mistaken, and later voiced an opinion shared by those closest to her. “I think that the devil had received an exterior power over me.” We find in St. John of the Cross a description of a similar state. “When (the devil) sees that he cannot reach inside the soul, because of its deep refuge and intimate union with God, it tries at least to attack from the outside, on the sensory part. (...) It makes one tangibly feel anguish, pain, and terror.” Teresa uses and underlines in addition these words, exterior and dreadful fright, in her manuscript A, which makes us think back to this quote.
Her sister Marie felt that an extraordinary force took hold of Teresa and attempted to split her head against the cobblestones. Given the context of purification in which Teresa had been growing up for the past few years, and because of the spiritual stakes to come (the place of the Martin family in the Carmel of Lisieux, and further still, the role of Teresa in elaborating the little way and its diffusion throughout the entire world), we can certainly admit the hypothesis of a special evil influence during this sickness. The miraculous intervention of the Virgin Mary serves to further confirm this reading.
If the devil could act directly, he could also act indirectly, making use of the times when love was absent from her infancy and also through her internal de-structuralization, all of which weakened her. In Teresa’s life, her sickness found expression in depression. The sickness came from an aggression from her earliest childhood and it carried with it a host of secondary reactions, expecially feelings of guilt, fear, greed and violence. These manifestations surfaced because God was working deeply in Teresa’s heart, in answer to her own request and her repeated offerings.
“It took a miracle and it was Our Lady of Victories who did it,” on Pentecost, “during the Mass novena” requested by Mr. Martin from his beloved sanctuary in Paris. The date was May 13, 1883, and Teresa was ten years four months old.
“Marie went out into the garden: (another separation!) (...) I began to call (...): ‘Mama...Mama’ (....) This went on for a long time, so I called louder, and finally Marie came back. I saw her clearly enter, but I couldn’t say that I recognized her.” It was there, for the first time, at the depths of her wound of abandonment, that Teresa discovered that no living creature on earth could satisfy her expectations of motherly care: neither her mother, nor Pauline, nor her big sister Marie who, from all the evidence here, is no longer her momma. “I continued to call still louder: ‘Mama...’” The struggle was awful, and the suffering from feeling abandoned was extreme. “Then Marie got down on her knees and began to pray to the Virgin Mary.” At that moment, Teresa did the same. She turned toward the statue next to her bed. “All of a sudden the Holy Virgin appeared beautiful to me, so beautiful that I had never seen anything so beautiful. Her face was the image of goodness and unspeakable tenderness, but what went to the core of my soul was the radiant smile of the Holy Virign. Then all of my troubles vanished.”
It is important to pause and look at the expression, Mary’s smile. For Teresa uses an expression that is very characteristic for us. She tells us that she came back to life. And she adds: “The ray of light that had warmed me did not stop giving me its benefits. It wasn’t sudden, but slowly, calmly. It raised up its flower again and strengthened it so much that five years later the flower opened wide on the fertile mountain of the Carmel.”
This moment is a treasure for us. Teresa has just been REBORN IN MARY. She affirms that her life began here, at the precise moment when she chose to take Mary as her Mother. Teresa went down to the depths of her maternal wound, to the place where she was not able to be loved, and she found herself there, by the grace of God, safe in the arms of Mary.
Our experience with mentoring confirms this fact: like Teresa, the people most hurt in their relationship to their mother, because of this suffering of abandonment, are called to experience a special presence of Mary which becomes emotionally extremely healing. The deeper the abandonment, the more the Virgin Mary desires to give us back life in her embrace by consoling us, by smiling at us.... It is a question of being reborn to life in the very place where death and despair were found. We also see, and it is important to call attention to this, that it is not a question of a quick fix, but of a progressive strengthening, of a gentle, slow process, exactly what a baby experiences in the arms of its mother. Mary acted “slowly,” “soothingly,” Teresa tells us, like a mother warming her infant. Teresa realized it later. After five years of maturing and the grace of Christmas, she began taking “giant strides.”
One of the milestones in the process of healing was Teresa’s first communion. That day, her sister Celine gave her a little picture called “the little flower of the divine prisoner.” The design was that of a tabernacle enclosed by bars, and inside the bars was Jesus, as if in prison, whose only joy was looking at his little flower. Teresa lost herself completely in contemplating the picture. She was touched by the love that God had for her and she let herself be loved: her Creator had no other joy than to look at her, his little flower. In her heart Teresa was forever attuned to Jesus, praying, “Jesus, you love me” in order to become capable of loving him in return. We often reverse the phrase in our prayers, and instead of welcoming with all our heart the love that God first has for us, we choose to express our own will, saying, “Jesus, I love you.”
During her first Communion, Teresa let herself be loved, welcoming as much as she could God’s love for her. She herself said, “Ah! How sweet was the first kiss of Jesus to my soul!.... It was a kiss of love, and I felt loved.”
During her second communion on May 22 of that same year, on Ascension Day, Teresa underwent an important turning point in her life. She received what she was to call “one of the greatest graces of her life.”
Teresa felt her heart open up to embrace suffering. “The next morning after my communion, (...) I felt arise in my heart a great desire for suffering (....) Up until then I had suffered without loving suffering. Since that day I have felt a true love for it.” Shocking words for our time, but it is important to place them in the Jansenist context of the time.
In order for us to better understand this mystical experience, we must distinguish the personal calling of Teresa, to be a spiritual mother to a host of souls, from the way of childhood, properly speaking. The desire for suffering does not belong to the little way, but to Teresa’s own calling. Suffering lived in God is a privileged place of spiritual rebirth. For there is no life without the pain of giving birth. Teresa suffered a lot in order to give life to many. Didn’t she appear to Martha Robin to ask her to continue her mission?
There is another nuance here dealing with a lack of clarification in the terminology of the period. In face, it was not the desire to suffer as such that attracted Teresa, but the desire to love in suffering. Love is expressed in joy, but it is shown still more through suffering. The anguish of separation, sadness, the suffering of exile which consituted her initial wound of abandonment would become for Teresa, from the time of her two first communions, the seat of love. She understood at that moment that she could use her suffering from abandonment and her sadness as a means to love more, and so give meaning to suffering exile. Teresa did not desire to suffer just to suffer, let us understand well. What she desired was to love. One can certainly love in joy. That is very sweet, very constructive. But we know that it is suffering which tests and verifies the quality of love. Teresa discovered the joy of loving in suffering and her wound took on a joyous connotation. She had to wait until she entered the Carmel, several years later, to truly experience the joy of the smallest one, as she become lost in the mystery of the Holy Face, meaning the Cross, of suffering in love which leads to true happiness.
The soul searching pain that Teresa went through afterwards (the fear of having faked her sickness and having lied), as well as serious misgivings, represent the FIFTH PURIFICATION of the maternal wound. “For a long time after my healing, I believed that I had gotten sick on purpose and that became a real martyrdom for my soul.” Teresa was full of self accusations, due to latent feelings of guilt present since her birth, that would surface in much soul searching as the years went by, at ages ten, eleven and twelve. Fortunately, Father Pichon delivered Teresa from all of her doubts. Still, the illness from her serious misgivings would be the clearest expression of her guilt feelings, of the hurt within her arising from her desire to be loved.
For Teresa, the malady of misgivings lasted fifteen months, from the end of May, 1885 to mid October, 1886. On this subject, Teresa wrote, “It is necessary to have passed through martyrdom in order to understand it well. It would be impossible for me to explain what I suffered for a year and a half.... All my simplest thoughts and actions became problematic for me.” What was this all about exactly?
Reflections and documents on the topic allow us to know about it indirectly. The onset of serious qualms began with a shock after the retreat of the renewed, preached from the 17th to the 21st of May, 1885, by the Abbot Domin, on sin, death, salvation, right confession, judgment, heaven and hell, sacreligious communion. In this type of Jansenist atmosphere, the anguish of separation that was always latent in Teresa came to the surface: how could she not fear being separated from God for all eternity in such a context? Her qualms were probably of a sexual nature, for Teresa had just turned twelve, and she feared being exposed to evil. “I was at a young woman’s most dangerous age,” she wrote. Moreover, she admitted, “Nobody had ever taught me about the things of life,” neither her father nor her sisters. She got her instruction from nature, by observing the flowers and the birds.
On May 29, 1889, Marie Guérin wrote to Teresa at the Carmel. “Paris isn’t helpful in curing our qualms. I don’t know where to look; if I turn away from one sort of nudity, I come upon another.... Everywhere I look, it seems that all I see in evil... The devil doesn’t fail to remind me of all the nasty things that I saw during the day and this is another means of torment. How can I ever take Holy Communion...?” And Teresa answered right back, “I understood all... all all all !.... You did not do the least wrong. I am so well acquainted with these sorts of temptations, that I can assure you of this without fear.” Such a straightforward answer means that Teresa was speaking from experience. Her own scruples appeared with the onset of adolescence, in a personal context of extreme sensitivity and fragility. Because sexuality was a tabou subject in those days, serious misgivings could easily arise in a context of silence. We know today that besides Marie Guérin, the other Martin sisters, Marie, Celine and Leonie all experienced serious qualms about this subject.
Carrying such a wound from her earliest childhood, Teresa did realise what she might have become. Father Molinié dared to write in his book about Teresa entitled, I Choose All: “If I weren’t afraid to be disrespectful, I would say that she had a prostitute’s heart.”
This surprising affirmation opens up extraordinary horizons for us. That Teresa could have a prostitute’s heart! Yes, it is a fact, and Teresa herself knew it well. She wrote, “I recognize that without Him I could have fallen as low as St. Mary Magdelene. Jesus delivered me more than he did St. Mary Magdelene, since He delivered me beforehand, stopping me from falling.”
Why did the Savior “deliver her beforehand?” Because at age eight, Teresa had lived this spiritual rebirth in Mary, in the heart of the Immaculate. Safe in the Virgin’s embrace, between ages eight and thirteen, she was progressively purified, “virginised.” Teresa was certainly one of the people nearest to the purity of Mary. She, then, teaches us to let ourselves be approached and loved by the Lord so we may be sanctified by the only Holy One. Prostitutes themselves made no mistake: when Edith Piaf brought them one after another to Lisieux, they perceived that Teresa was one of their own.
When we descend into our wounds of abandonment, we encounter the roots of prostitution, and we discover that our heart is profoundly untrue. We have such a need to be loved that we would be capable of selling ourselves to get just a little affection in this abyss of solitude and distress! Teresa, although safeguarded from a fall, knew perfectly well that she could have surrended herself to love of the flesh in a totally out-of-hand way, thanks to her extreme need to be loved. “Ah, I feel it, Jesus knew I was too weak to be exposed to temptation. Maybe I would have let myself get entirely burned up by a deceitful light if I had seen it shine before my eyes. It didn’t go this way, and I tasted only bitterness where stronger souls found joy. So I don’t have any merit in not having given myself up to earthly love since I was safeguarded from that by the great mercy of the Good Lord. He didn’t wait until I loved him dearly, like Mary Magdelene, but He wanted me to know how much He loved me, with an infinite love.”
How did Teresa receive healing from her qualms? For the first time and in a very spectacular way, she consciously worked to travel the path of the little way. Since she was so little, she exploited her weakness, to help her obtain and attrack the help she desired. Weakness, great desire, confidence, openness: little by little, the faint tracks forged a pathway. Teresa would not be healed from her sickness of scruples by opening her heart to her sister Marie (she was gone to the Carmel), nor in begging the Lord to cure her. She was cured on her saints day, October 15, 1886, by calling on all of her little brothers and sisters in Heaven. She called out to them, begging, “Save me!” “I understood that if I was loved on earth, I was also loved in Heaven....”
In this, Teresa has given us a marvelous key. As she simultaneously was renewed with her origins by making a memorial of her brothers and sisters in order to pray to them, she was reconciled with the “small Teresa” who lived quietly with her, abandonned. This was the initial wound of abandonment which was the source of the guilt feelings and the sickness of the scruples. Teresa’s healing went through this reconciliation with herself, with the child within her, and that is possible only in Mary. Here is one of the secrets of the spirit of childhood: to be helped, she chose to ask for help from children, from the little ones (she did not even address her dead mother!), and not from the great saints. She reached back to join the evolution of her incarnation. At this point grace touched her “inner child” and Teresa was healed from the false impulse of perfectionism. Peace came back, flooding her soul. She felt for the first time the difference between holiness and perfection, and she knew that the way of childhood was in some way a “humble perfectionism.”
The great healing at Christmas opened up the third period in Teresa’s life, as she has written: “the most beautiful of all, the most full of heavenly graces. It was on December 25, 1886, that I received the grace to leave childhood...a time when I rediscovered my childlike nature, and at the same time entered into the seriousness of life. In this luminous night (...) Jesus, the sweet little newborn Infant, changed the night of my soul into torrents of light... in that night when He made himself so weak (...), He made me strong and courageous (...) and since that blessed night, I have not been vanquished in any battle... The source of my tears dried up.”
All which was too fused in Teresa, that was focused on looking back, received healing thanks to the little baby Jesus. Teresa of the Child Jesus was not healed on just any day, but precisely on Christmas Day. She received a grace in the arms of Mary, through the Child Jesus. And this grace came to touch her wound of origin. Teresa came out of it purified from the hurtful way she saw herself. It had taken ten years of struggle, ten years of radical incapacity, which, from all appearances, were producing nothing.
The benefits of numerous therapies are no longer in question. But we must recognize that, in general, they scarcely succeed in calming the hurts of the littlest childhood. For that, a spiritual rebirth in Mary turns out to be indispensable. This remark has considerable importance, for youth of today are more and more wounded by the culture of death in which they live (culture of death due to contraception, abortion, artificial insemination, euthanasia...). We should be aware of the spiritual means the Savior puts at our disposal, which help us overcome this insufficiency in the social sciences.
It is therefore the Child Jesus who healed Teresa. A year later she would choose to be called “Teresa of the Child Jesus.” The childhood of Jesus and his Passion are the two moments in the Savior’s life when he showed himself to be the weakest. And weakness, accepted, is one of the characteristics of spiritual childhood.
When this moment of grace came at Christmas, Teresa also saw something else surface which was very important: the expression of her choice. Teresa was looking back and living in a quest for close bonding: “I was still an infant who didn’t appear to have a mind of her own.” About her first communion, she wrote: “It was no longer a look, but a fusion; they were no longer two. Teresa had disappeared like a drop of water lost in the depths of the ocean. Jesus alone remained.” At eleven, this was still an intensely close relationship with God that she was describing. At age twenty-three, she no longer talked like that. Here again we see how the spiritual life is influenced by psychological reality. Teresa was openly torn between her deep desire to grow up and the total impossibility of doing so, because of a tendancy to turn back to her wounded maternal origins, a consequence of original sin. It was up to her to choose to break with this tendancy.
Teresa received a grace of strength and of light: until then she liked to please others, but within a chosen and restricted circle. From then on she would open herself to others and particularly to sinners. She confronted the fear of growing up in order to go beyond it. She left childishness in order to gain true access to the spirit of childhood. She would give it as an example to her novices. “Many people say: But I’m not strong enough to make such a sacrifice. Let them do then what I did: make a big effort. The Good Lord never refuses this first grace which gives the courage to act; after that the heart is fortified and we can continue from victory to victory.” It is an act of the will (“I want to” and not, “I can”) which counts for opening up the heart to being loved.
Our study stops here when Teresa was fifteen years old. The way of childhood was slowly elaborated in her body and in her life. We have seen how the wound of abandonment became the place of her encounter with God: Teresa collaborated activity in letting herself be loved by Love. Experiencing God’s power in her weakness enabled her to make giant strides, that came to fruition in her teaching of the little way to her novices, and in the offering to merciful love.
This sketch of Teresa’s journey shows us how she came back into the way of healing and of sanctification within the Holy Family. Each one of the members of this “little Trinity on earth” played a role in the heart and life of Teresa, who let herself be reunited with them in her extreme vulnerability, and put herself in their hands for her healing. St. Joseph, the Virgin Mary, the Child Jesus would accompany Teresa until her heavenly birth.
We should also note the dynamic at work here, helping Teresa stand up tall in order to “run to the sweet perfume of her Beloved.” Painfully conscious of her radical powerlessness, she opted nevertheless for the only choice which allowed grace to flow. Teresa turned toward Mary and her little brothers and sisters in Heaven to receive what she could not get from anyone on earth. And it was then that grace overflowed. Teresa, mortified by the reaction of her father, made a choice to leave childhood behind and face the deep anguish that was making her heart sick. She left all that was her security, and made room for this grace of Christmas, a grace which would put its seal on her whole life. With her, we touch the reality of our imbedded hurts and we learn the necessity of a right relationship with Love, whose help we seek.
Johnny and St. Joseph
Testimony of Christine-Elisabeth Capdeville
A single mother witnesses to the presence of St. Joseph, whom she chose as head of her family.
To witness is to testify to God’s workings. Often this work needed time and perseverance, and came after much struggle. It is not a question of waving a magic wand. For me, God revealed himself through St. Joseph. St. Joseph did not reveal himself in a striking manner. He did not impose himself. His way of acting is very discreet. We find him in prayer and thanksgiving; we must seek him. Besides, there are few appearances of St. Joseph. He himself was sanctified daily, under the watchfulness of Mary and Jesus.
Getting out from under
My parents were divorced. So to escape from my possessive mother who criticized me for whatever I did and was teaching me to hate men, I decided at age sixteen to get free. I was living a double life. As soon as I could escape from her clutches, I ran with my brother in the streets, in hangouts, with friends, I would change clothes... I consoled myself with the songs of Johnny Halliday: “I was born in the street,” was a model for me. His friends were his family and I wanted to be part of a gang. One day, I was assaulted by a girl and I fought back violently, so well that others respected me: the gang became my family. That was the beginning of a slide into delinquency and violence. At seventeen, in 1978, I began to work. There too, I was playing a double game. On every occasion, I used work as a pretext to stay away from home, sometimes for entire weekends... My brother was always a willing accomplice.
The end of a dream
At eighteen I wanted to meet my father whom I had never seen and whom I loved through a little photo that I had taken from my mother. He was young, handsome, and blond with blue eyes. This was the man that I was going to meet. My disappointment was as great as my expectations. The man who came to get me as I got off the train had lost his youth, had just moved, was in soiled work clothes... and had nothing in common with my father, the handsome blond man of the picture! He could think of nothing to say, except, “Girl, how you have grown!” On my part, the answer burst forth with an implacable truth: “Thank goodness for that! Because you haven’t seen me in over sixteen years.”
I had imagined bringing my father to the house so that my mother wouldn’t be alone any more and we would be one happy family. But after two days with him I saw the hard reality of it all. It was a world completely opposite to ours. He had married a woman much prettier than my mother, and had four sons he was very proud of. Added to that was his professional success of two businesses which took care of the family needs, and a beautiful house. Nothing in common with the narrow life my mother, my brother, and I shared in our housing project, our little sordid universe of the inner city. The reality was even more brutal and more destructive the day that he took me into a bar frequented by prostitutes, and left me to spend time with one of them, and invited me to get whatever I needed to satisfy myself as I pleased.
This invitation to debauchery, coming from my father, triggered an enormous sexual disorder in me. I was seeking to give myself but was never satisfied. I picked up again with all kinds of experiences. In 1980, I went through a great heartbreak, I felt totally rejected and scorned by every man and by myself, for sure! I continued to live with the gang, and I listened to the words of Johnny, which had their echo in my heart “We are badly loved; what matters is to give ourselves through love,” and I gave myself through love, each time. Johnny led us to the edges of death but never to death itself.
In 1982, my brother died. For me, it was the end of the world. After my nights of debauchery, he was the one who would bring me back to life, who gave me courage. I got this by way of consolation from my mother: “You’re the one who should be in the casket!”
A fight for life
In 1987, at age 27, I was pregnant and through various circumstances, I had been abandoned by everyone I knew, leaving my heart singing in unison with Johnny who sang, “The abandoned singer.” “To live is to share. To live is to give everything; it is not to be abandoned.”
Abandoned by everyone, I was taken in by an emergency shelter. And God revealed himself to me, through the child that I was carrying. God let me be reborn. However, I was completely full of Johnny. He was an integral part of my life, and without him I wasn’t myself. There really was a battle in me between him and God. I saw myself in this song, “I am standing tall in spite of the hard knocks and insults.” It was through the sacrament of reconciliation that I understood everything and became a free woman again. But don’t think that the battle ceased. It was still raging on all fronts: slang, vulgarity in my language against the Word of God, rock music as opposed to the dances of Israel that I was discovering in the Community of the Beatitudes; the black jacket and all that that represents as opposed to purity; cursing as opposed to blessing... And besides all that, the continual battle for chastity! In prayer, the Eucharist, and adoration, the images of my past life came back to me. I had not yet given them to God.
St. Joseph enters my life
The Lord granted me a great grace: in 1993, I left for Canada with my daughter who was six. It was a way of separating from all that I had known. It was like the flight into Egypt: “Take the child and his mother....” (Mt 2:13).
I reconnected over there with the sister who had mentored me when I was first converted. She assured me that the Savior was inviting me to follow him and was inviting me to take up my cross, not to reject it.
The presence of St. Joseph is very strong in Montreal, where he is the patron saint. One day during an evening of reconciliation, the priest was passing by with the Holy Sacrament in the middle of the crowd and he stopped by me and said, “The Savior is thanking you for saying yes to life. He is telling you, “Thank you for being her mother. I am the father of your child.”
What I felt then was indescribable! I was totally transformed. For forty days I bled, whereas I hadn’t had my period for a long time. I even felt contractions. I lay this all before the sister who was mentoring me. I was becoming a mother and no longer just a girl. On March 18, in adoration, I distinctly heard, “Take St. Joseph as father and as spouse.”
What happened which transformed my life
It’s very simple. To begin with, on March 19, I consecrated myself to St. Joseph, so he would be my spouse and father of my little Nadège. I repeat this act every day. Then, I chose an icon of St. Joseph that I loved and lit a candle in front of it, sign of his presence. Finally, I prayed in front of the icon, in silence, in his presence. In times when I was feeling so full of sin and unworthy of communion, he accompanied me as a spouse.
I lived in the presence of St. Joseph. I offered him all that I was. And as the days went on, he taught me to rediscover my body, to protect it, to rebuild it after all the rough shocks it had gone through.
St. Joseph, who had protected the body of Mary and the Child Jesus, taught me chastity. That was not easy: after each failure, I would receive the sacrament of forgiveness, and I put myself back in Joseph’s care; I was never discouraged, I stumbled often, but I never despaired. It is when I am no longer under St. Joseph’s care that I slip into wrongdoing and say evil instead of good, blame myself and talk myself down. I had quite a road to travel to learn to love myself as God loves me, fully human, a female, in St. Joseph’s care.
I learned to treat my child tenderly, to put a blessing on her, to give her all that I had missed. Each evening, before she comes home from school, I light a candle in front of the icon and I come into his beneficial presence. It is in the name of St. Joseph that I bless my daughter.
St. Joseph taught me how to rethink my relationship with my parents, to forgive them, to become a daughter of God and to obey the commandment, “Honor your father and your mother.” The one who received everything from Mary and Jesus even taught me to give what I had never received in tenderness, words of blessing, and so on.
Early on, I thought that I had to reject everything I still was clinging to about Johnny, but I don’t deny what I experienced, and I understood that I had to present my life to God, present in each moment of my existence, even in my worst downfalls. There again, it’s St. Joseph who brought my hurts to the surface in order to clean them and bandage them. The sacrament of forgiveness, each time that I received it, healed me also. I can say that, in giving myself to St. Joseph, God was giving me what I had missed the most and what I was always searching for: a father who could lead me to the Father. The Holy Virgin, on the other hand, was an obstacle for me: she was too beautiful! If in prayer, I would find myself in Mary’s arms, I would not stay there. I would run toward St. Joseph. It is only recently, while I was on a pilgrimage to Fatima, that he led me to Mary.
A Good Father
I chose the head of the Holy Family as head of my family and he has always seen to it that I lack nothing. I could go on and on with examples of this. And I can say that even before I knew him he was taking care of me. When I was pregnant I found work, which I had to have in order to get the welfare benefits. On the day of her baptism I wanted my child to be presented to the parish community, but the priest was opposed to it. The day came, the parish priest was gone, and the priest in charge did it as naturally as possible and the whole parish welcomed Nadège with open arms. Every day I received gifts and would find at my door everything that I needed for our daily life.
St. Joseph taught me to keep to a budget, to postpone a purchase (several times I would receive it as a gift a few days later!), to let myself be led. I often asked him to help me chose what he would like me to wear and I would find exactly what was right for me to wear at just the right price. It was the same for the gifts that I wanted to give Nadège. I should say as an aside that he refuses her nothing. For her it’s natural to ask him for everything she needs or even wants. And also, if she sees me upset when I’m helping her in her work, she tells me, “Come on, let’s light the candle!” We know that in St. Joseph’s care everything is going to get better.
He broke the chain of evil that was weighing on my family. My daughter has not been touched by all the bad that she might have received as a heritage. These children are truly in a special way the children of mercy! I dedicate this testimony to St. Joseph, whom we will celebrate on March 19.
