St Therese and the sword - meditation from Arbp Fulton Sheen

Lent is approaching fast and we may need to think about our spiritual needs, imperfections, wants etc. What is the better way than to enjoy a crush course in the Little Way of our beloved Carmelite Saint, St Therese, the Little Flower, given by her disciple and third Order Carmelite, Archbishop Fulton Sheen? Let us see what he has to say....

The new way of St Therese is not to start thinking about how wicked you are, how sinful, but to begin looking at our Lord. And from that, you will see that you are not as good as you ought tobe, but yo will try to please the one you love. Let me give you some of her words along these lines. She said:

Jesus! i would so love Him, love Him as he has never been loved in the history of the world.

And one of the novices - for she was the Mistress of Novices - came to her one day, and she said, "Oh, I have so many virtues to aquire."

The Little Flower said, "No, you've got a lot of things to lose!"

That's the trouble. Our spiritual books tell us how to acquire humility. I told you about the 12 ways of St Bernard. Well now, you'll go crazy trying to develop those 12 ways. One of them is to love to be stomped on and trampled on. The Little Flower says, no, start loving the Lord, and then you'll no longer be proud. You cannot start acquiring, for example, the virtue of humility or fortitude. You can never fall in love with abstraction. You can only love a person. No one in the world ever fell in love with a theorem of geometry.

This is the trouble with secular humanism and materialism: There's no person to love. So then the new way of the Little Flower is....fall in love. Love the Good Lord, and then you will strive to please Him. And because you see that there are imperfections in you, you will love Him more so that they may washed away. This is not a little way, it's the new way because we've forgotten it. It's buried in Scripture. It's buried in Isaiah, buried in Psalms, buried in Zechariah, and she digs it out for us.

Now we come to the second point. What effect did it have on her? Now when we look at the picture of this frail little French girl, we think of her, yes, as the little Therese, frail, meek, humble. But does love make one that way? Real lovers are courageous.

Do you know what she wanted to be? She wanted to be a soldier. She used to dream about it. In one of her dreams, someone was conscripting soldiers for an army. And she heard a voice saying, "Maybe we ought to ask for Therese." And she said, "Well, I'm ready." She said, "I'm sorry it's not a holy war, but I'm ready to fight anyway."

Now we never think of the Little Flower as having a saint whom she wanted to be like more than anyone else, but she did. Do you know who that was? Joan of Arc. Can you imagine her seated on a horse clad in armour? And she said: "If I were Joan of Arc, it would not be voices from heaven. It would be only the voice of my Beloved."

One of her favourite texts of Scriptures, therefore, was "I came not to bring peace, but the sword." (Matt 10:34)...And then St Therese said: "A sister showed me a photograph representing Joan of Arc, consoled by an interior voice. The saints encourage me from above, and they say to me, "So long as you are in fetters, you cannot fulfill your mission. But after your death, then will be the time of your conquest."

In other words, she said, "I'm going to be a warrior and a soldier after my death, I am in no battlefields, now except the battle of the spiritual life."

This figure gives you some idea of, for example, her powerful intercession. This, too, accounts for her love of missions. She is the patroness of the Propagation of the Faith, though she was never in mission lands. The reason she is the patroness of the Propagation of the Faith was because she loved missions, and she corresponded all her life with two missionary priests and offered up her sufferings for them.

Yes, that is true, but there is a deeper reason still. This woman was in love, and she wanted her Beloved known all over the world. That's why she loved the missions! As she put it:

"Like the prophets and the doctors, I would enlighten souls, I would travel the whole world to preach Your name and set up Your glorious cross in pagan lands. But one mission could never suffice for me. Would that I could, at one and the same time, proclaim the gospel to the world, even to the remotest of its islands. I  would desire to be a missionary not only for a few years but to have been one from the creation of the world and to continue to the end of time."

Love makes one a missionary. When we cease to love, we cease to be a missionary. Now it is sometimes asked, for example, why is there a decline of conversions today? It is  due to ecumenism? No, it's not due to ecumenism. It's due to the fact that we're not making Christ the center of our lives. And if we were deeply in love with Christ instead of with social programs and the like (all which have their place, but here I am speaking of primacy), if we gave the primacy to Christ, then we would be on fire to save souls. After all, the reason we are tired in body is because we are already tired in mind. We have no love. The fires have gone out. We are cinders, burnt out cinders floating in the immensity of space and time. And here is a young girl. It is almost as if she is locked up in a gilded cage, absolutely straining at the leash in order to become a missionary. Why? Simply because she loved!

As I told you, love does not mean just simply to have and to own and to possess. It's not sitting on the throne waiting for others to serve. It's the going out, the spending of oneself. Love is not the circle circumscribed bt self. It's like a cross outstreched to embrace the whole world.

Love isn't Buddha, fat, sleek, a well-oiled body, hands folded across the breast intently looking inward, thinking only of self. It's the picture of thin saints looking out for the mission to the world, as Therese looks out in many of her photos. And therefore, she loved this text, the sword. And she says many times in her writings that "I am entering Carmel to bring the sword to the monastery of Carmel." In other words, it needed a little fire. She entered it to change it. And her reason for doing so was right.

We are fond of talking peace today, but all we mean by peace is lack of disturbance. Our Lord said, "I came not to bring peace." God HATES PEACE in those who are destined for war! And we are destined for war, spiritual war. We've forgotten that we're in a combat. We are in genuine combat. When our first parents were driven out of the garden of Paradise, God stationed an angel with a flaming sword, a two-edged sword that turned this way and that. Why? To keep our first parents from going back to eat of the Tree of Life and thus immortalize their evil. And the only way we can ever get back again into paradise is by having that sword run into us. It's flaming because it's love. It's two-edged because it cuts, and it penetrates. It's not the sword that's thrust outward to hack off the ear of the servant of the high  priest as Peter did. It's the sword that's thrust inward to cut out all of our seven pallbearers of the soul, the pride and covetousness, lust, anger, envy, gluttony, and sloth.

This was the sword she loved. And this sword is what we've forgotten in our modern world with the dripping away of discipline, the ascetic principle. The disciplinary principle of the Christian world had moved to the totalitarian countries. And concerning the sword, I quoted the sword in relationship to the Garden of Eden, but in the prophecy of Zechariah, we read this:

"This is the very word of the Lord of Hosts: Oh sword, awake against my shepherd." (Zech 13:7)

Who is the shepherd? Our Lord. So Zechariah is having the heavenly Father say, "Sword awake! Awake against My shepherd, against My Son, against Him who works with Me." So when our Blessed Lord came to this earth, the sword of Herod was raised against Him. Did anyone ever raise a sword against a two-year-old Caesar? Or a six-month-old Stalin? Why the sword against Him? because He plays a role in salvation. It belongs to warriors. And as the heavenly Father ran the sword into His own Son, the Son ran the into His own Mother. Simeon said to Mary, "You, too, shall be pierced to the heart." (Luke 2:35) So the Father ran a sword into His Son, the Son into His own Mother, and Our Lord into us.

"I have come not to bring peace, but the sword." This , then, is the way of the warrior and the little girl who wanted to be a soldier. And there was not much difference in her mind between a soldier and a missionary.

to be continued...

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Apostolate of suffering part I - click to read

"Though He slay me, yet will I trust him" (Job 13:15)

"Happy is the man whom God correcteth. Therefore despise not thou the chastening of the Almighty: For He maketh sore, and bindeth up; he woundeth, and his hand make whole" (Job 5: 17-18)

Good Lenten thoughts about value of suffering - often suffering bore with patience and trust in God is associated and followed by great blessings. Let us think about St Paul's words to Phillipians (2: 2-16): "Fulfil ye my joy, that you may be of one mind, having the same charity, being of one accord, agreeing in sentiment. Let nothing be done through contention, neither by vain glory: but in humility, let each esteem others better than themselves: Each one not considering the things that are his own, but those that are other men's. For let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: Who being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: He humbled himself, becoming obedient unto death, even to the death of the cross. For which cause God also hath exalted him, and hath given him a name which is above all names: That in the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those that are in heaven, on earth, and under the earth: And that every tongue should confess that the Lord Jesus Christ is in the glory of God the Father. Wherefore, my dearly beloved, (as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but much more now in my absence,) with fear and trembling work out your salvation. For it is God who worketh in you, both to will and to accomplish, according to his good will. And do ye all things without murmurings and hesitations; That you may be blameless, and sincere children of God, without reproof, in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation; among whom you shine as lights in the world. But emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men, and in habit found as a man. Holding forth the word of life to my glory in the day of Christ, because I have not run in vain, nor laboured in vain."

To the Apostles Jesus said: "Amen I say to you that you who have followed me, in the regeneration, when the Son of Man shall sit on the throne of his glory, shall also sit on twelve thrones , judging the twelve tribes of Israel." (Matt 19:28).

Followers of Christ are in truth to imitate Him in some way and to follow Him - as St Paul says (2 Cor 6:4-10) - "in much patience; in tribulations, in hardships, in distress; in stripes, in imprisonments, in tumults; in labours, in sleepless nights, in fastings"; but they could also declare with the same author that they existed as "chastised but not killed, as sorrowful yet always rejoicing."

(after "The Life of Christ" by Giuseppe Ricciotti)

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Meditation for Lent with St Thomas Aquinas - click to read

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On recollection and necessity of prayer - click to read

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Meditation on sin

PRESENCE OF GOD - O Jesus Crucified, give me the grace to understand the great malice of sin.

1. The essence of Christian perfection consists in union with God by charity. While charity, by conforming our wills to God's, unites us to Him, grave sin, which directly opposes His will, produces the opposite effect. In other words, charity is the force uniting man to God, and sin the force drawing him away. Serious sin is therefore the greatest enemy of the spiritual life, since it not only injures, it but destroys it in its constituent elements: charity and grace.



This destruction, this spiritual death, is the inevitable result of sin, the act by which man voluntarily detaches himself from God, the one source of life, charity, and grace. As the branch cannot live if it is separated from the trunk, neither can the soul live if separated from God. God, the cause of every being, is always present in the soul of the sinner in the same way in which He is present in all creatures; yet He is not there as a Father, as a Guest, as the Trinity which offers Itself to the soul to be known and loved. Hence, the sinner, though created to be the temple of the Blessed Trinity, has voluntarily made himself incapable of dwelling with the three divine Persons and has barred his own road to union with God. He has, so to speak, obliged God to break all ties of friendship with him because he has preferred the temporal, fleeting good of a miserable creature - a selfish satisfaction, an earthly pleasure - instead of the sovereign good. This is the malice of sin which rejects the divine gift and betrays its Creator, Father, and Friend. "Oh! Why can we not realize that sin is a pitched battle against God with all our senses and the faculties of the soul; the stronger the soul is, the more ways it invents to betray its King" (T.J.Exc,14).
2. If we wish to have a better understanding of the evil of mortal sin, we must consider its disastrous effects. One single sin instantly changed Lucifer, the angel of light, into an angel of darkness, into the eternal enemy of God. A single sin deprived Adam and Eve of the state of grace and friendship with God, taking away all their supernatural gifts and condemning them to death together with the rest of mankind. One single sin was enough to make an abyss between God and man, to deprive the whole human race of any possibility of union with God.
The Passion of Jesus is a further proof of the great malice and the destructive power of sin. The lacerated members of Christ, His sorrowful death on the Cross, proclaim that sin is a form of deicide. Jesus, the most beautiful of the sons of men, through sin, become the "despised and the most abject of men, a man of sorrows.... He was bruised for our sins," so that "from the sole of His foot unto the top of His head, there is no soundness therein" (Isa 53, 3-5 - 1-6), for by means of it, He wished to vanquish death and restore friendship to man.
Jesus, our Head, invites us, His members, to unite with Him in His work of destroying sin: to destroy it in ourselves down to the very roots, that is, in our evil inclinations, and to destroy it likewise in His other members by allowing Him to work in us. This is the law of solidarity, for the misfortune of the others; each sin is a burden on the whole world and disturbs the equilibrium of God's plan. Therefore, every Christian, and more especially, every soul consecrated to God, must throw himself ardently into the battle against sin and fight it with the proper weapons: penance, expiatory prayer, and most of all, love. When the love of charity is perfect, it destroys sin more efficaciously than the fire of purgatory. In this we see why the saints were able to convert so many souls. God used the fire of their charity to do away with sin in sinners.

COLLOQUY
"O my God and my true Strength! How is it, Lord, that we are cowards in everything save in opposing Thee? To this the children of Adam devote all their energies. Were not reason so blind, the combined energies of all men put together would not suffice to make them bold enough to take up arms against their Creator and maintain a continual warfare against One who in a moment could plunge them into the depth....."O Lord, what hardness of heart! Oh, what folly and blindness! We are distressed if we lose anything, the merest trifle. Then why are we not distressed at losing that great Treasure which is the Majesty of God, and a kingdom in which our fruition of Him will be endless. Why is this? I cannot understand it.....I believe, Lord, that You treasure one soul that we gain for You by our prayers and works, thanks to your mercy, more than all other services that we can render You" (T.J. Exc, 12 - 14 -F, 1 - Way, 1).

After "Divine Intimacy" by Fr. Gabriel of Saint Mary Magdalen OCD.

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