Saint Therese of Lisieux and unbelievers

A few months ago, I read Tomáš Halík’s Night of the Confessor. I had bought it a while ago but never got around to reading it. Perhaps I wasn’t ready for it. I found it intriguing and helpful. After finishing it I began another of his books, Patience with God. I am now reading another, I Want You To Be. 

 This is a short and somewhat hurried reflection on an amazing insight he has written on St. Thérèse of Lisieux, whose feast we celebrate today. 

Print of Ade Bethune

 In a chapter of Patience with God, Halík reflects on St. Thérèse of Lisieux and what some have described as her dark night of the soul. But for him, it is not merely her personal struggle but a path toward solidarity with unbelievers, in the dark night of nothingness. Might St. Thérèse’s experience and Halík’s reflections, combined with Pope Francis’ call to go to the margins, reveal an opening to a new path of faith and mission.

For me, it has been important to open spaces for those on the margin to encounter the presence of God. Most recently, it has been personally important to reflect on those times when God seems absent. Saint Thérèse is important for this. 

As Halík notes, she describes how Christ led her into a subterranean space “where no sun shines any longer.” She experienced months of darkness, even until her death of tuberculosis. 

But what is striking is what Halík describes:

“Little Thérèse's” principle was “to accept even the strangest thoughts” out of love for God. What is therefore most remarkable about Thérèse is the way she accepted and perceived her contest with God, with darkness and forlornness, her experience with the absence of God and the eclipse of her faith. She accepted it as a mark of solidarity with unbelievers.

“Solidarity with unbelievers” – unbelievers are not seen as threats or as opponents to be conquered. As Halík notes:  

However, if I am correct in my understanding of Thérèse and of her path through paradox and constant reinterpretation, then her concern was something else: not simply to draw these unbelievers back into the heart of the church, but rather to broaden that heart by including their experience of darkness. Through her solidarity with unbelievers, she conquers new territory (along with its inhabitants) for a church that has previously been too closed.

I get frustrated when people dismiss or minimize the concerns of atheists or agnostics. I get even more upset when people rail against secularism or blame it for the problems of lack of interest in the church. I wonder how much of discontent or opposition to the church flows from what those in the church have done, not only the abuses of many kinds, but even more the failure of many to take seriously the concerns of those outside.

I think Halík offers us a serious challenge.

“Hasn't the time come for Thérèse's spiritual path, and particularly “solidarity with unbelievers,” to be an inspiration as a hermeneutic key toward new theological reflection on present-day society, its spiritual climate, and the church's mission at the present time?”

We need to take the darkness of Saint Thérèse seriously. This cold lead us in a very different direction. As Halík notes,

I can't help thinking that the world and the church would look very different if there were more people willing to view the Council's call for solidarity with this world (including the world of the “unbelievers,” those who are most radically “other” and different), not as a cue to superficially modernize the rhetoric and external resources of “evangelization,” but as a profound awareness of God's hiddenness, of how He “reveals” Himself through the experience of “unbelievers,” as we were taught by Thérèse de Lisieux on her deathbed. Thérèse could only indicate the path—which is what any good teacher does in any case—and bequeath to us the task of thinking through and accomplishing the spiritual journey.

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 Thomas Halík is a Catholic priest, who, while practicing as a psychotherapist in Czechoslovakia, was secretly ordained. After the fall of Communism, he worked with the Czech Bishops’ Conference and was an adviser to Vaclav Havel. He has been a professor of sociology and philosophy at Charles University and taught in other institutions.