Facing the inner depths

“What delights God in me is to see me love my nothingness, and the boundless trust I have in His Mercy.” St Thérèse of Lisieux

By Sr Penelope

This courage to look nothingness in the face and not run away is perhaps only granted to those of great faith, who have staked their all on God.

An image which captures the horror of this loneliness very well is a drawing done by St John of the Cross executed sometime between 1574 and 1577, when he was chaplain to the Monastery of the Incarnation at Avila. While praying in a loft overlooking the sanctuary of the nuns’ church, he received a vision, as he later described it, of Christ crucified. Taking a pen he at once sketched what he had seen.Weighed down by the sins of the world, Christ is seen from above – from the view of the Father? Only the nails fastening his hands to the cross, and taking most of his weight, prevent him from falling forward into nothingness. It is not hard to imagine the unbearable pain should those nails be torn out; his body weight would also tear out the nails holding his feet, and he would somersault forward into the abyss. Jesus would cry out in utter anguish of abandonment; but he would not abandon his faith in God.

The Spanish surrealist painter, Salvador Dali, was shown this drawing sometime between 1945 and 1950, and subsequently painted ‘The Christ of St John of the Cross’. To my mind, this very carefully executed painting, which the artist described as ‘ a cosmic dream’, misses the very important point which, I believe, St John of the Cross’s drawing makes. Dali’s painting shows the imagined view from the cross; it is too calm, completely omitting that horror of nothingness which fairly shouts at us from John’s sketch: The crucifixion did indeed bring peace to the restless hearts of believers – but at the terrible cost of Christ’s descent into Hell, the abyss of nothingness. The sculptor, Sean Rice, comes close to John of the Cross’ vision in his Stations of the Cross, commissioned for the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, in Liverpool. In his Seventh Station-‘Jesus falls a Second time’ he presents a powerful image of Jesus’ total inability to save himself, his complete helplessness as he tumbles down.

Christ’s great gift to humankind – to every single human being – is that the abyss, has been robbed of that terrifying nothingness; since we believe that he ‘descended into hell’ and ‘took captivity captive’. In other words took what most imprisons each of us – our terror at ultimate everlasting loneliness – and put himself in that very place. Both St John of the Cross and Therese knew that Jesus was to be found in that place of desolation; both dared to join Him there. Thérèse was never to know the glory of this, other than by bare, dark faith; John may have had glimpses of that joyful reality – how else explain his ability to write ‘The Spiritual Canticle’ in a dark, stinking, sixteenth century dungeon? Truly, as St Paul tells us “Christ became sin for us so that we might become the glory of God”
St Paul would never stop proclaiming this, the central message of the Resurrection; for him it could be summed up in one word – hope.

Hope in Paul’s context always means not an emotion, but the object on which it is fixed. It is something external to us which is proposed to us and which we can grasp.
In his letter to the Hebrews ( Ch.6 – v.19 ) he exhorts his readers to take a firm grip on the hope held out to them. God’s promise, first made to Abraham, should give them:
“Strong encouragement to take a firm grip on the hope that is held out to us. Here we have an anchor for our soul as sure as it is firm, and reaching right through beyond the veil to where Jesus has entered before us and on our behalf … “
Encouraged by the account of Jesus’ ascension into heaven ( Acts. 9 -12 ), we usually think of Heaven as somewhere beyond the skies. Paul’s image of an anchor reaching all the way from the bottom of the sea right through ‘to where Jesus has entered before us’ may strike us as rather strange. Yet an attempt to understand it shows why hope is so central to Paul’s teaching.

An anchor belongs to a ship: it is external to it but useless if not attached to it. So whatever grounds and steadies (anchors) us, must be external and yet attached to us. In Paul’s view hope is not merely a human emotion, but is something external to us: it is proposed to us and if we consent to be held by it, it steadies us and becomes an anchor which holds our changing moods and circumstances and allows them to be steadied and at rest even in ‘the eye of the storm’, that calm place within a maelstrom of raging seas.
An anchor’s task is to stay firmly fixed in the sea-bed. In Jewish thought, the sea was a life-threatening place of chaos and it is significant that the Jews had no navy. Paul himself experienced the sea’s treachery on numerous occasions. In his second letter to the Corinthians he tells them “three times I have been ship-wrecked, and once adrift in the open sea for a night and a day.” ( 2 Cor. C.11 ).
The sea, in short, stands for the ‘underworld’ – Sheol – that place of deep darkness, of despair, of nothing; where men ‘cease to be’.

‘I have sunk into the mud of the deep, and there is no foothold.
I have entered the waters of the deep and the waves overwhelm me.’

This is the despairing cry of the Psalmist. ( Psalm 68/69)
Into all of this goes Jesus, our hope, our anchor; down to the very depths, which is the only place an anchor can function. We can understand an anchor anchoring a ship – us – the Church – so that we are kept safe and on course on the surface of the ocean, however rough that may be. But this anchor, Paul asserts reaches ‘through to the highest heavens’! Has the ship suddenly become a kite? Or is Paul saying something so breath-taking that we need never be afraid again; because there is simply nowhere ‘either in the heavens above or in the depths beneath’ that ‘does not bend the knee at the Name of Jesus’ ( Philippians. Ch.2.) i.e. acknowledge His Power. No wonder Hope features so often and so emphatically in St Paul’s letters.

Perhaps all this is best summed up in those beautiful words from Chapter 10 of ‘The Revelations of Divine Love ‘. Julian of Norwich tells us how “I was led in imagination down onto the sea bed, and there I saw green hills and valleys looking as though they were moss covered with seaweed and sand. This I understood to mean that if a man, or a woman, were under-sea and saw God ever present with him (as indeed God is) he would be safe in body and soul and take no hurt. Moreover he would know comfort and consolation beyond all power to tell.’

So where do we, who are just ordinary sort of believers fit into the picture? How can I possibly aspire to such faith, such hope? I cannot possibly aspire to the ranks of such heroes of the Faith. It is here that St Thérèse comes to the rescue. She tells us that these very same thoughts crossed her mind, and caused her courage to falter until she realized that she could not soar to the sun as did her brothers the eagles – the great saints. No she had to learn to be content as she was, a very small bird who could hardly fly at all; she had to learn to rely not on her own strength, but on that of Our Lord, who would always give preferential treatment to ‘little ones’. She took to heart Our Lord’s words: Unless you become like little children, you will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven. And so Thérèse dedicated her life to an unswerving following of the way of spiritual childhood; and whenever she had the opportunity, taught others to do the same.

Her writing, letters, and words recorded by her sisters as she lay dying, spell out again and again what her ‘Little Way’ means.

“To remain little means to recognize one’s nothingness, to expect everything from God, not to worry too much about one’s faults; in a word, not to lay up treasure in heaven, and to keep an untroubled heart.”

She knew that children cannot do great deeds, and so she too looked for small ones, those which were not even worthy of notice, doing little things out of love for God without any thought for herself at all. In a letter to her sister Celine, dated 18th July 1893, Thérèse writes:
“When I feel nothing, when I am incapable of praying or practising virtue, then is the moment to look for small occasions that give Jesus more pleasure than the empire of the world, more even than martyrdom generously suffered.”
It is all too easy to skate over these last words as pious hyperbole; but Thérèse never wrote for effect, never wrote anything she had not thought about. Of course we would think “martyrdom generously suffered” would – as it does – carry huge import in the business of salvation; far more than ‘buttoning your lip’ when you would rather ‘bite somebody’s head off’, or silently tidying up after a thoughtless sister.

Thérèse’s vision is so much bigger than any carefully worked out reasoning. We know what she means by nothingness when we experience it. The trouble is we are so afraid of our nothingness that our instinct is to run very far and very fast away from it whenever it catches up with us. Thérèse’s whole life was prayer and the practise of virtue – a Carmelite life is worth nothing else. To be incapable of living that life, and not to fill the vacuum with distractions: just to stay there in that place of nothing, yet without despairing, calls for heroic faith. Thérèse had just that; or rather she took to herself Jesus’ faith: It was this that enabled her to face the final abyss of her death. She knew she was too weak to ‘go it alone’, but that ‘relying on Jesus alone’, as she had done all her life, she could do anything.
At her Profession, she had dedicated herself not only to the Child Jesus, but to his Hidden Face, that face marred by the such suffering ‘that he seemed no longer human.’ She simply went with him into the Valley of Gethsemane:

“Though I dwell in the valley of the shadow of death,
No evil will I fear”

Thérèse felt afraid; she felt abandoned in the valley of her own death and, far worse, felt that heaven was closed to her. Jesus felt afraid and knowing that his death was near, “ a great fear came over him”. Later he would feel that God had abandoned him and cry out in anguish “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Yet Thérèse – like Jesus – clung in naked faith to the certain knowledge that God could not abandon her. She could feel nothing, do nothing, except choose, minute by minute not to give up believing in God’s love for her. She would come to live out her own words:

“Sanctity lies not in saying beautiful things, or even thinking or feeling them: it lies in being truly willing to suffer.”

Thérèse, like John of the Cross, like countless heroic souls before her, like Jesus Himself, faced the abyss – and dared to fly.