To start with, let us
address the title itself and define the expressions. If we consider the unusual
aspect of the title in general, and if we pass the test of not thinking it is
meant to be provocative, we can say that this ‘unpleasant’ ‘categorisation’ of
the words: ‘committed parishioner’, ‘spiritual’ is in fact artificial or
harmful or reductive. However, on the contrary, it is based on the observation
of the action of the Holy Spirit in us, observation and analysis made in a
deeper and more articulate way.
God doesn’t make us
saints in one day. He needs our collaboration, our personal decision, the use
of our free will. From our position, from who we are in relation to who He is,
there is need for a long and arduous journey of growth and transformation. This
journey is described by great doctors of the Church like St John of the Cross,
Teresa of Avila and many others, but maybe not in such detail. So, in order for
us to understand how the Holy Spirit works in us, the different types and
levels of His action, it is important to study the writings of these doctors of
the Church carefully and with
great attention.
One of the most
important turning points in Christian life, a turning point that in a sense
introduces the human being to a new world, The Spiritual World, comes in meeting
with Jesus, in the beginning of a Personal Relationship with Him, and in the
experience of the first type of action of the Holy Spirit.
When we consider
Baptism, then, we see it is a Divine Seed in us, which parents and godparents,
educators and priests help to nurture. But there is a decisive moment when the
Divine Seed, with its divine power is awakened in us. It could occur slowly,
progressively, or suddenly, abruptly, but without a doubt it will have to
unfold. This is the turning point.
Note: it is important to remember
that we do not understand or grasp everything in the experience of others. Many
things can be developing in the ”background” of one’s being. And by “background”
I am not alluding to the unconscious or subconscious or any of these psychology
realities – though, of course, they deserve our attention and consideration. What
I mean by the aforesaid expression is the perception-awareness of any
experience and expression it. Not all that is lived by a person has a perfectly
well-shaped perception and awareness. Only very few people can even express clearly
to themselves what is happening to themselves and even less so can people express
it well to others. In giving an account to themselves or to others, of their
daily life, some people, might overlook important elements that they are
experiencing while underlining others. In this sense a person can very well
undergo the experience we are talking about but not have enough perception,
awareness, culture, to “see” it as relevant. It is not necessarily a defect at
all. It is just the human condition.
A blatant
example is the fact that St Teresa makes no relevant and consistent mention of
an experience similar to what St John of the Cross describes in the Dark Night of the Spirit. Does this mean
that she didn’t go through it? No. It could simply mean that suffering is so present
in her life, on a daily basis, that it starts to have less relevance. She states
that there is not a day that passed in her life without physical suffering such
as tummy aches, headaches and the like. Therefore, to her underlining suffering
might become less important or needed. It was her daily bread. As a reward for
greater and more meticulous attention to detail, if we look carefully into the
many chapters of the sixth mansions we will notice that there is a point where
she does mention suffering.
The Formator in
Spiritual Life or the Teacher of spiritual theology’s ideal student is the
person who has had this experience, this awakening. Why? He or she will be
better understood in his teaching. His teaching will be sought after with great
interest and even passion. As St Teresa of Avila states repeatedly: the person
who has had the experience will understand her better. And in certain
circumstances she adds: otherwise what I am saying will seem gibberish. This is
the fate of the teacher of Spiritual Life.
Before we move on to
the following point let us remind ourselves of a coined expression that is
highly useful here: Second Conversion. Hearing Jesus’ Call, discovering His
Presence, initiating a relationship with Him, can happen (and does) to people
who are already Christian. Therefore, we don’t call this new step “conversion”
but we prefer to call it “second conversion”. “Second” because the person is
already Christian. But the Seed of Baptism exists in a non-active state. It
doesn’t mean that the person is neglecting her Christian life. No, on the
contrary, one will find that it is a person a person who is fully committed in
her parish, active, helping others, a regular Mass goer, morally very sound,
not committing mortal sins and who goes regularly to confession! Having all
these qualities can puzzle many greatly. How come a person like this can still
not yet have had the “second conversion”? How strange! Indeed, it looks very
strange. St Teresa of Avila underlines it and Blessed Fr. Marie Eugene, see I Want to see God, also underlines this
apparent contradiction: on one hand we are faced with a “good catholic”, a good
“church goer”, a morally sound person, a committed person, and on the other
hand, we don’t find in this person the
relationship with Jesus, the powerful outpouring of the Holy Spirit described
by St Teresa of Avila after her conversion! Both St Teresa and Blessed Marie
Eugene say that this person is very rational. Reason is in control. I would
rather say: order. Because the person might not be intellectual. St Teresa has
this beautiful expression in the third mansions when talking about such people:
love didn’t bring them ‘out of reason’. By this she means: the love of Jesus,
the action of the Holy Spirit, didn’t unlock the strongbox of (good) habits of
that person, opening “reason” to a wider range of perspectives, led by Love!
Love breaks the mould. Love make us do foolish things for the beloved. Love
offers a new horizon. Love is a relationship. Experiencing Jesus’ Love gives a
divine “drunkenness”.
Spiritual Life
How can we then describe
the Spiritual Life of this person? What defines “spiritual” in fact comes at a
further stage. But can we say that there is no spiritual life in this person?
Would that be correct? Could we call it: dormant? This is a delicate subject.
There could be little bursts of fervent spiritual life, graces can be received,
but the person is not progressing yet, and the weight of his/her good habits could
return back. The moral weight of the life they lead can sometime cover any new
perspective on spirituality. Incorrect or misleading information about any
“spiritual life” or “mystical life” can/could dissuade as well.
Despite these few
attempts prompted by God, the person could go revert to type and continue to go
around in circles. The person will seem to be spiritually alive, truly alive,
but will hit a wall, the wall of the Second Conversion. The person could be
trying repeatedly, but without success.
All the moral values
of their life, of their Christian life, all the sound commitments in their life
can become – paradoxically – a good screen!
A little bit of pride mixed in with the commitments and the values can
indeed hinder the needed humility that will pave the way for the new stage. The
result is that we can then say that the person is “going in circles”, hitting a
wall and bouncing back, or being simply convinced that her the life she is
committed to is what it is to be a “good catholic”.
Can we Trigger the Second Conversion?
There is an important
question that now arises: why is conversion not triggered? Are there reasons
for this? Is there a moment in the life of this committed person where he or
she can hear Jesus’ Call more clearly? And put more directly: can we trigger
the Second Conversion? To a certain extent and to my limited knowledge, I am
not aware that this question has been studied. Why so? Theologically, we are
used to be constantly led by a very important truth: God is free, He gives His
grace to whoever He wants, when He wants, the way He wants! The sovereign
freedom of God cannot be touched! It has to be preserved at all costs. Plus,
our knowledge and wisdom cannot determine when and how it is best for a
specific person to undergo the Second Conversion. Is he or she ready? In
reality, however, we haven’t studied the subject enough, and in greater depth.
Here we are, standing
in front of the average committed parishioner, on one hand wanting earnestly to
invite him or her to attain greater depth, to a new experience, and on the
other hand we don’t know what to do and how to do it.
St Teresa’s of Avila Conversion
St Teresa of Avila’s
life can be also viewed as a paradigm, a teaching, a type for the Church. It
can be seen as a micro example of the macro reality of the Church; the church
of her time and the church of our time. Under certain aspects little has changed,
and the need remains the same.
When I say that her
life is a paradigm or example or type for the Church I allude, for instance, to
what happens to the prophet Ezekiel: overnight God makes him lose his wife (see
Ez 24). By acting this way God offers Ezekiel as an example: here Ezekiel
embodies God himself and Ezekiel’s wife is God’s People. So, the story of
Ezekiel is in fact a reflection of the story of God himself. In our case, God
gives us St Teresa of Avila as an embodiment of the story of the Church (not of
God).
 |
| Little statue that moved St Teresa during her Second Coversion |
In fact, her church
struggled for more than three centuries to reform itself. One can actually see
it! Council after council sees the Church, deciding to reform herself, making
important statements, but in the end, implementation-wise, she fails. For three
centuries this is ongoing! The desire for reform is truly present. The awareness
for the need to reform is most certainly there! But to no avail. Martin Luther
will then try. But his trial does not employ God’s methods: he departs from the
Church – though politics and ethnic reasons are certainly a great factor as
well – and tries something different. However, it is not in this way that one
reforms an existing body. Reforming an existing body is a most difficult task.
Leaving it to wither and die and working with a new “body” is so much easier!
But it is this the way? Anyway, this is not our subject. Our subject is how St
Teresa is a personified parable of the Church for the Church. How her
experience embodies the experience of the Church.
Therefore, St Teresa
of Avila’s experience is transformed into a clear message from God to the
Church, where God invites her to gaze at her life, and where we come to notice
that it reflects ours, as a church and as individuals.
Teresa, then, becomes
a nun at the age of twenty and for nineteen years will be living as a nun:
committed, spiritual, obedient, but not yet having had the “second conversion”!
So, it is only around the age of forty that she undergoes her second conversion
and change. Before that she indeed received graces, sporadically, but they
sadly didn’t have any serious consequences - something important was lacking.
After that, the graces of God start to be poured out, her life totally changes!
She remains a nun, but everything has changed! As she states in her Autobiography, from that moment on, it
was God’s life and history in her, not hers.
Her second conversion
is fundamental. But the temptation is to understand it in a fatalist way by repeating
the fundamental principle we stated above about God’s sovereign freedom: “God
is totally free to give His Grace to whoever He wants, when He wants, the way He
wants”. In doing so on the one hand we state a fundamental truth, but on the
other hand, we do not balance it with other truths, but instead we fall into a
heretical deviation, not seeing : 1- what God does, the repeated attempts to make
a move towards us or attract us! 2- the human response in general and in
particular that can hinder or facilitate the closeness to the Second
Conversion!
Are we facing a moody
and unpredictable God? If this fundamental truth is absolutised and not
balanced properly with other equally important truths, we end up not
understanding who God is and what He wants to do! God is love: a burning love who
wants to give Himself to us - this is
his constant state: a fire, a thirst, a Divine Desire to give Himself to us!!
Who can understand this thirst?! Hence, when we say that God gives His grace
“when he wants to”, we seem to imply that for some days or months or epochs He
burns with love for us, and at other moments in history, in the history of this
specific person, He is rather calm, cool, and not interested in giving Himself!
As if He could change his nature! Of course, this is simply utter nonsense! But
this is what we do unconsciously when we absolutise this fundamental truth: God
is free! He gives Himself when He wants! But God is love. He wants…He wants
now, now, now! No delay! Fire is fire! It can’t become water! “I am a devouring
Fire”! “I am Jealous”! say the Scriptures. What does this mean? It simply means
to burn with the desire to give oneself.
Thus, if Teresa’s
second conversion is delayed for almost twenty years, if the reformation of the
Church is delayed for centuries, it is not that this pleases God, or that from
these lengths of time He is busy doing something different! Or that He “went to
the market” as Prophet Elijah describes concerning the gods of Baal.
This indeed, by
contrast, gives us a glimpse of an urgent much needed endeavour on our part: to
ask ourselves and indeed study the reasons why the Second Conversion failed to
take place in the case of St Teresa and learn from it for ourselves and for the
life of the Church. What caused it to happen? How come she was not only a good
Christian, but also a committed nun, spiritual, faithful and obedient, yet
despite all that she wasn’t triggering the second conversion. Can we trigger it
then? What can we learn from her second conversion? What can we learn studying
this turning point, from looking at her life before, and during the second
conversion and of course her life afterwards!
Studying St Teresa of Avila’s Conversion
Considering the
“second conversion” of St Teresa not as proceeding not from a pure decision of
God, but from the human perspective i.e. what as individuals we can do, what we
can avoid,… is a necessity in honour of
God’s action: it was He who sent us a Prophet, i.e. Teresa, to teach us,
to show us a real second conversion, a proper
Reformation.
It is surprising to
see to which extent the conversion of St Teresa of Avila, her second
conversion, is so little touched on, studied and the elements which embody it
are so rarely studied or examined in greater depth! We don’t seem to see any
relevance in it! Like bees attracted by the flower, when we take her writings
into our hands we fly to the flower of the graces that the Lord is showering upon
her after her second conversion, we stand in awe in the face of all that God has
given her - all that He made her achieve, her foundations, her books, her
apostolic endeavours! But we hardly stop to consider that this nun had been for
no less than twenty years a nun in a monastery not creating any ripples, a
simple nun, with hardly any relevant events in her life and hardly any effects
on the Church to speak of. She could have continued like this for the rest of
her life, had she not undergone her second conversion! For some reason this
does not seem to move us! We take God’s graces for granted! Indeed, we have a
very weird understanding of God’s behaviour! We end up not gaining a great deal
from this living Parable that He gave us: St Teresa’s life, her struggles in an
turbulent sea for twenty years!
It is therefore
mandatory for whoever would like to work in the Spiritual Life, teaching it,
conveying it to others, to study with great care Teresa’s part in her conversion,
the reproaches that God made against her, the different elements of her
conversion, the stages of it. The benefits that come out of this study are
simply beyond human comprehension, because they will enable us to understand
the very known - but still “mysterious” for the majority of us – passage from
the third to the fourth mansions: how can we facilitate, remove the obstacles
for this crossing! What can we do to “open” that Divine Fountain in us, the Fountain
of the Outpouring of God’s Graces, of “Grace upon Grace”.
Conclusion
It is of the utmost
importance to focus on St Teresa’s Second Conversion in order to extract from
this research and study, the elements of teaching that God gives us through her
life and teaching.
She tells us about her
conversion in her Autobiography: Chapter
9 and the chapters that precede it and Chapters 23-24. As a result, from this
first stage in the study, having gathered the elements, one will find them
crystallised and synthesised in her book: The
Way of Perfection. In fact, this book in its entirety and in its structure,
is the living embodiment of the teaching that we can find about her Second
Conversion and which we can be viewed in her Autobiography. This book holds the secret that is needed to
“trigger” the Second Conversion and therefore all the Graces that God wants to
pour into us… “grace upon grace”.
Jean Khoury
Holy Week 2018
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