Fire Within chapter 02

ladles? I think?

Fire Within: Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross and the Gospel on Prayer (Fr. Thomas Dubay, S.M.) https://ignatius.com/fire-within-fwp/

(If you are catching up: chapter 1's post is at https://withoutcost.substack.com/p/fire-within-chapter-01 )

Chapter 2: “The Woman and the Man”, or in other words, a discussion of St. Teresa of Avila as a person, and St. John of the Cross as a person: what were they like when they were walking this earth?

O Lord, here I am in the dining room (or close to it) and what am I to say about chapter 2? Because unbelievable claims are about to be made, we have to establish the credibility of the witnesses who are to give testimony — these are real historical people, so it's not like how C.S. Lewis can simply establish the trustworthiness of Lucy (neither a lunatic nor a liar) by authorial fiat near the start of the book — and in fact, even C.S. Lewis does so by the two older children in turn giving testimony that they know Lucy to be truthful and sane in general. Here, the author Fr. Dubay presents his testimony as deduced from their own writings (books, letters) and as presented by people who knew these two saints during their lifetime. In short, like Lucy reporting “there is a snowy forest with a faun and a lamp-post,” we ought generally to believe their first-person accounts regarding the spiritual life. If we do not believe them, is it because they are lunatics, or liars? [And what if we think “this is a poetic exaggeration / they don’t really mean what they are saying”? I think that would be the most common thought.]

The older children [in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe] remain somewhat skeptical until they see the snowy forest and then they are willing to take on credit everything else Lucy has said. In the case of Narnia, they were unable to choose on their own to enter it, and when they tried to, it did not work. This sounds “very convenient” (does it not?) if someone is making things up: “oh, of course, it's impossible for you to disprove it, simply because you found only coats and the back of the wardrobe every time you tried,” a sort of denial of the scientific method which is if someone else reproduces the experiment they get more-or-less the same results. In any case, if someone finds themselves in a snowy wood [figuratively[ later, they would be well advised to think back over what they had been told by a witness they now know experimentally to have been telling the truth about the first and most basic step into whatever.

St. Teresa of Avila (I think a reader would concede) is as amiable — lovable — as Lucy. We cannot even dislike her for being perfect because her “don't do this” advice is from her own experience in falling to temptation. “Do not give up prayer” should be taken as seriously as Glinda's warning to Dorothy in [The Wizard of] Oz: “never let those ruby slippers off your feet for a moment” [how useless it is that I can remember this verbatim! how much of my memory is stocked with pop-culture movie quotes? oh well] — prayer is your shield against the enemy and therefore the enemy wants to convince you to discard it. It is also the means by which you advance toward your goal. And it is just as much of a ridiculous, deus-ex-machina, way to get home, solely by wanting to. But to want to is not a small thing (it is the same as to unite one's will with God's will — I observe, Lord, that I have started writing about You as though You are not here, as though ideas are Lego bricks to be turned over and over in one's hand and build with for one's own amusement. Let me begin again; I am sorry.)

Lord, one thing that might happen reading this chapter is that a person might become intimidated or even frightened — I think we look at saints sometimes and think “I can't do that,” (or at the other end we look at how a saint was not perfect, and overlook how they struggled — it is their part to fight against habits and flaws and temperament, and it is Your part to grant success in an instant or to allow them to struggle for years or to the end of their lives on this earth. To grant success is Yours. To be willing to try even if we fail is ours. [Here inevitably I begin thinking of the song “Try Everything” from Zootopia.]) Lord, I think if we are afraid of a saint or if we don't “get” them or if we think “we would not get along, he and I / she and I,” we ought to (returning to the spirit of experiment) invite that saint to “change my mind.” [I.e. what people say when they are inviting debate.] E.g. “St. John of the Cross — you seem distant and unrelatable and maybe even crazy — change my mind.” [Most likely I was thinking about the last page or two in the chapter here.]

We ought, Lord, — we ought to haul our thoughts out into the light and sit down with You and go over them like You are helping us to sort laundry for washing (taking odd things and tissues out of the pockets) or helping us to declutter a kitchen drawer. I do not ever use the cheese grater [so I no longer have one], and somehow I had four [three, surely; anyhow it is one now] ladles - ladels - Lord, that word looks wrong no matter how I spell it. The things for dishing up soup.

I love St. John of the Cross very much (but not as much as I love You, O Jesus) but I could not say why. I think I have to pause for evening prayer. [Much later] Lord, I am back again.

The communion antiphon [because today we had the wedding at Cana https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/011925.cfm ] was “cf. Ps. 23:5” “You have prepared a table before me, and how precious is the chalice that quenches my thirst.” The reference is Psalm 23, the Lord is my shepherd, but what I think of is [looking up some locations] Mark 14:36; Luke 12:50; Mark 10:38-39. If someone is on fire with love for You, Lord, they will do things that look crazy or stupid or painful to the world (if the world saw them, which usually is not the case), for love of You, but we ought not to be intimidated or afraid on that account as though we are a rosebush aghast at the idea of bearing acorns — that is for an oak tree to do in accord with its nature and the rosebush will be asked to flower in the way that a rosebush does; grace builds on nature. Radical generosity will look different in different people; the desire to follow You (who were poor, despised, with nowhere to lay Your head, friend to lepers and the rejected), to stay where You are staying, to eat what You offer, to drink from Your own cup [what intimacy this is!] (precious — or as Indiana Jones [and the Last Crusade] identifies it, humble, [here I have jumped from Indiana to Isaiah] “with no form or majesty that we should look at [it] and no beauty that we should desire [it]” — will flower and bear fruit according to the way You have created that person to flower and bear fruit. (Like the second reading today but I won't say so — it would be distracting.) You will provide for us not only a chalice but also the thirst for it.

Next chapter: https://withoutcost.substack.com/p/fire-within-chapter-03