Tag Archives: vulnerability

St Therese of the Child Jesus

Posted on by
Reply

I can’t say I have ever been a fan of St Therese of Lisieux. Not, that is, until today. I tend to resist the sort of sweetness for which St Therese is known, being suspicious, like so many cynical people, of anyone who seems ‘too nice.’ Jesus, after all, wasn’t ‘too nice.’

That’s the grown-up Jesus, though. What about the child Jesus? St Therese, after all, is St Therese of the Child Jesus. Staying behind in Jerusalem strikes me as a not-nice thing to do–as the parent of an almost-12-year-old boy, I can’t help but think it was a bit vexing for Mary and Joseph. Not having been a great fan of St Therese, I don’t know for certain, but I suspect that it wasn’t the 12-year-old Jesus that she had in mind.sta_thumbSt Francis de Sales, in a series of letters published as Letters to a Wife and Mother, advises his cousin in her endeavor to life a holy and spiritual life in her ordinary, daily tasks. She gets discouraged; St Francis suggests that she go about her work imagining that she does everything as Our Lady might have done: holding the small hand of Jesus. St Francis offers to his cousin the presence of the Lord as a child. And there is something at once gentle and unyielding about that presence. The set of letters is well worth reading, especially if you happen to be a wife and mother. Even if not, St Francis gives advice so kindly that anyone would benefit from it.

It is the sort of advice that fits very well with what I know of St Therese: in the small things, the everyday tasks, there are opportunities for grace, for love, for living in the presence of the Lord Jesus. Tenderness is not the way of our world, but it is required in the proper care for small children. And anyone who spends any time caring for small children will tell you that tenderness can be difficult to muster. Attending to the presence of the child Jesus is not a way out of the hard work of the spiritual life, but is a deepening of it. Not only is the Lord present to us as teacher and savior, but as child–not to be ignored or forgotten, or left in a corner, but taken by the hand and kept by our side.

We have always been taught by the Lord in his vulnerability on the cross. Perhaps it is time for us to allow us to teach him through his vulnerability in those precious years between the presentation and the finding in the temple.

St Therese, pray for us.

random acts of unkindness

Posted on by
2

Let me apologize in advance: this is not a carefully crafted post. I am deeply disturbed by something I saw (over my son’s shoulder) on youtube this morning. The boys were watching a series of clips of people who were the victims of pranks. Mostly, these were the usual sorts of thing–someone opens a cupboard door only to find another person inside, who yells ‘Boo’, or something like that.

But there was one set that showed people playing a computer game, where the object was to solve a maze. At the end, a hideous and frightening face appeared on the screen and made horror-film terrifying sounds. If my kids tricked me with something like that, it might be funny. Not in the case of the last clip we saw. In that clip, a young man was playing the game. As he looked up over his left shoulder inquiringly, I saw that he had an intellectual disability. He hesitated, then continued, reassured by the person holding the camera. I thought: this is not going to end well.

It did not end well. On seeing the horrible face and hearing the associated sounds, the man shrieked, put his fist through the screen, and leapt back howling. As he stood facing the person holding the camera, the camera panned downwards to show that he had wet himself, then back up to his shocked and sad face. Crying, he said, ‘it’s not funny!’

Most certainly not. Not remotely funny. Now, you might say that this is just one of those things. Maybe the jokester didn’t think (I hope not) that it would be such an awful shock for the man. But if that were so, he or she would have put the camera down at once and apologised, and offered some comfort. To keep filming, to make a spectacle of the man so upset by the experience, and then to post it to youtube as if it is just another clip, like the others in the set… well. I don’t even have words for that.

It has haunted me all day long, and will continue to haunt me for a good while, I think. The person behind that camera has a lot to learn from the man in front of it. We are all vulnerable, and to use someone’s vulnerability against him or her is a violation of our basic humanity. My thoughts about this are still in a jumble–but I think there is something to be said here, or somewhere, about how we are in the image of God, all of us, and to disregard that feature of another’s humanity obscures it in us.

Please pray.