ST. THERESE, DOCTOR FOR OUR TIMES.

Mother Mary Stephanie, OCD

In "Divini Amoris Scientia" the Holy Father, John Paul, tells us that "the most authentic meaning of spiritual childhood is the experience of divine filiation under the movement of the Holy Spirit".

I would like to suggest that we are suffering at the present in our post-modern world and in the Church itself from a real plague of what may be termed 'defilialization'. This disease, which has its deep origins in the very wound of original sin, has penetrated today into theology, the understanding of scripture, the meaning of the priesthood and the fabric of family life, and it brings in its wake many other ills and complications.

If we consider the account of the original encounter of man with Satan in the book of Genesis, we can see that the essence of the temptation was to bring Adam and Eve to distrust God's word and His promise, to move from living in filial dependence on Him and His love for them, to being instead independent, deciding for themselves what only God can know and decide - the true reality of good and evil. And we know the sad outcome of this. The truth is lost from sight, man and woman find themselves estranged from God and hatred begins to mark human relationships, leading swiftly in the next generation to violence and murder.

When Christ the new Adam appears we find once again the tempter at work, trying to make Him doubt God's word, distrust His promise. "If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread." The Satanic enterprise here is defilialization 1. to make the Son a son no longer, and to do so by suggesting that Christ prove that He is the son. How? By making use of the divine power that belongs to Him as Son (what more normal or natural than this?) but by doing so independently of the Father's plan, the Father's will. Sin then is the rejection of sonship.It means to stop desiring that what one possesses should exist only in being given and received. Man then, instead of depending moment by moment on the father's gift of life and love, wants to take hold of his own life and order it as he desires.

Our Lord, tempted by Satan in the desert to cease being dependent on the Father, to follow a path that would bring worldly acclaim and success, clung with His whole Son's heart to his Father's will, defeated Satan by the word of Scripture of which He Himself is the total fulfilment - the Father's only Word, as St. John of the Cross reminds us - and victoriously overcame the original temptation thus beginning the reversal of original sin.

This will be reversed finally, as we know in His Passion and Resurrection. Once again, at this point Christ faces the same temptation to deny the true meaning of His Sonship: "If you are the Son of God, save yourself and come down from the Cross." But on the Cross, Jesus surrenders totally to the Father's Will, He adheres to His Father's promise with all His being.

He dies praying, praying with the Word of Scripture and thus, as Cardinal Ratzinger comments so aptly, "Death, which by its nature is a cessation, a rupture of all relationship, finds itself transformed by Him into an act of self-communication," 2. - of communion. Jesus dies, praying in an attitude of filial self-surrender and trust. He was heard as Hebrews 5 puts it, for His godly fear, an expression which could also be translated as "for His piety" - His filial reverence. He was heard beyond death and he brought death to death.

The very root of human sin is faced, exposed and overcome by Him who is both God and man, and in doing so He makes it possible for all of us, the whole human family down the ages, to enter once more into a filial relationship with God our Father. We are sons and daughters in the Son, we are a new creation in Christ, or we remain in darkness and are subject to the wiles of Satan.

Our whole Christian journey then must be into an ever deeper filial relationship with God in Christ. Insofar as we try to live this out in the details of our daily lives, as we try to live in dependent trust and loving surrender to God in His Providence, thus far do we, - with Christ, and only by His grace, - help to push back the darkness of sin and evil.

I think we would all be aware of how much there is today of deliberate attack on and undermining of the concept of the fatherhood of God. The prevailing attitude, growing ever stronger in our own century, that man or woman must control their own lives, forge their own destinies, comes fundamentally and originally from a rejection of God as Creator and Father. Spreading from this we have the animosity towards the fatherhood of priests in the Church and towards the father in the family. Because this is such a playing into Satan's hands, one could almost say a replay of original sin, it is accompanied by a deluge of evil, in all spheres that concern the pride of life, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes.

To cure such a malady, we need first the correct diagnosis, then to go to the root cause and apply the proper remedy. I would like to suggest that we have a little doctor who diagnosed this illness of society and Church 100 years ago, even though it was comparatively mild in its effects. She provided then and still provides it today.

Where she has been understood and heeded cures are underway. Thousands, perhaps millions of little souls have found through way of "spiritual childhood" a remedy for their own ills, and have spread her healing balm through their own families, communities and milieux in a marvellous, though largely hidden way.

I would like to suggest that we, her sisters in Carmel, have a vital role to play in easy. It does not happen of itself. We can only learn to live like this by holding our minds and hearts open at every moment to the gentle inspirations and promptings of the Holy Spirit. For it only by the Holy Spirit that we can say "Abba Father"; that we can say "Jesus is Lord"; that we are able to live in this constant filial relationship with God which is, as the Pope reminds us, the "most authentic meaning of spiritual childhood".

I suggest that we could, in this year dedicated to the Holy Spirit, turn to our little Doctor

of Divine Love and ask her to guide us in our prayer, in our daily lives, in our relationships with one another; to help us surrender more and more fully to the action of the Holy Spirit and allow His love to penetrate and uphold us at every moment. Then in the power of this Divine Love dwelling within us, we may all grow into an ever deeper filial relationship with our Father in Heaven and be more completely conformed to Jesus Christ so that He may use us to bring all men and women into the mystery of this Divine Life and Love for which we are all created.

Notes: 1. I owe Pere Jean-Pierre Batut the insight regarding "the Satanic Enterprise of defilialization" cf COMMUNIO Spring 1997.

2. "Journey Towards Easter" p105