Let us first enter the mysterious and astonishing world of Jesus' parables and then show what an extraordinary insight Therese had into those enigmatic stories. Using Thérèse's teaching as a guide, my first reflection is distilled from the parable of the Publican and the Pharisee. Usually interpreted as an example of pride and humility, this parable has quite a different meaning once we grasp the context in which the hearers were listening to the story.

Two people went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus: "God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income." But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying: "God, be merciful to me, a sinner!" I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other. (Luke 18:10-14)

In this parable, the Pharisee is standing in the Temple and recounting his good deeds to the Lord during prayer. Recounting good deeds was not considered an expression of pride in those days, but the normal way that Pharisees prayed. It was an expression of their social status as holy men praying in a holy place. In the popular mind, holiness was associated with sacred places and sacred times. 

In this parable, the Pharisee represents someone who was an insider in the social structure of the culture. People at that time paid a lot of attention to demarcating who was inside the social structure and acceptable and who was outside and unacceptable. In our times, this demarcation is expressed in racial and ethnic prejudices, and has manifested itself on a monumental scale in the horrors we have witnessed in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.

The tax collector in the parable is from the secular world. He stands outside the sacred precincts of the Temple and prays simply: "God, be merciful to me, a sinner!" The tax collector was just doing what he was supposed to do in that religious culture, which was to stay outside the sacred place. A sharp distinction is thus made between those who belong to the sacred elite and those who come from ordinary life.

The conclusion of the parable probably seemed unbelievable to those who were hearing it for the first time. Jesus states that the tax collector went back to his home justified--that is, all his sins were forgiven--but that the Pharisee did not! That means that sacred places are not essential for someone to be able to enter the Kingdom of God. In Jesus' teaching, the sacred place is where you are. It is ordinary, daily life,

The idea that the sacred place is right where you are is a revolution in the popular concept of the sacred. There are places such as churches and shrines where we are spiritually renewed, where we hear the word of God, and where we may have spiritual experiences. But they are not the usual places where transformation takes place, according to this parable.

Our reactions to daily life are the gauge of the depth of our prayer and the empowerment that it provides. An obvious question following from this would be: Why do people enter monasteries or the religious life if the backyard is just as sacred as the cloister? The answer is that it is only appropriate if one has a genuine attraction to religious life indicating that God wants it to be everyday life for us--in other words, if to live in a monastery is our particular vocation.

For most people, daily life in the secular world is the place where transformation in Christ is worked out. Like the Pharisee, one can be in religious life and not be transformed. So, what is it that makes the difference between the daily transformed life and the religious untransformed life? It is the hidden action of the Kingdom of God that works not so much through external circumstances as through a radical change in our attitudes. This is what transformation is. It is not going on pilgrimage or entering a special state of life. It is how we live where we are and what we do with those circumstances.

The ordinary circumstances of daily life bring back the same faults, the same temptations, the same routines, and often the sense of going nowhere! But "nowhere" is where the Kingdom of God is most active. Grace and daily life are always in dialogue and sometimes in a state of war. There is a struggle to figure out what God is saying in the events and circumstances of daily life and how everyday life is meant to transform us.

What Therese called the "Little Way" is quite simply the circumstances of everyday life and what we do with them. The role of Centering Prayer or some similar method is to bring us into daily contact with God and especially into a disposition of attentiveness to his word in scripture and to his silent word within us. Listening to God in silent, loving attentiveness, enables us to let go of our preconceptions and over-identification with the events of daily life, which tends to dominate our emotional reactions rather than invite our free response. Events and people dominate us when our emotional reactions to them are the center of our attention and our thoughts. "How can people do this to me? Am I going to lose my job? Why are the children misbehaving? What am I going to do about mother and father now that they are ready for a nursing home?"

With such reflections buzzing in our heads, how do we listen to what the Spirit is saying and act out of divine love? "Everything is a grace" was one of Thérèse's favorite sayings--a saying that while right to the point, is still terribly hard to grasp. How, we may ask can everything be a grace? To grasp this insight, we must look at another parable that Thérèse understood to the depths: the parable of the mustard seed.

___________________
Excerpted from St. Thérèse of Lisieux by Fr. Thomas Keating

Visit the Contemplative Outreach Bookstore to obtain the book.

Table of Contents