Holy Foolishness
Hi friends,
I hope you’re doing well! September was a good month here. My kids are in school and things are going well: they’re learning and they’re making friends and so far no one has had to quarantine (knock on wood). On my end, I’ve been busy putting the finishing touches on the book that is due in just a few short weeks! I can’t wait to share it with all of you. <3
October kicks off with the feast of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, popularly known as “The Little Flower.” Thérèse was born in France in the 19th century to upper-middle-class and devout Catholic parents (her parents were canonized together in 2015, currently the only married couple to earn that distinction). She felt an early call to religious life, and became a nun in a cloistered Carmelite community, spending nine years there before dying of tuberculosis at the age of 24. Thérèse earned her nickname. Her life was very small and very simple, but it was beautiful too. She lived a hidden life, and she only became popular after her death through the publishing of her spiritual autobiography, The Story of a Soul. It’s a slim volume, and it details the foundation of her spirituality, which she called the Little Way.
The Little Way is exactly what one would expect from a saint like Thérèse. She lived into the simplicity of her life. She believed that sanctity could be achieved without great deeds or heroic acts. She wrote, “Love proves itself by deeds, so how am I to show my love? Great deeds are forbidden me. The only way I can prove my love is by scattering flowers and these flowers are every little sacrifice, every glance and word, and the doing of the least actions for love.” Thérèse wanted to love God like a child loves and she wanted to love other people like a child loves and she did just that, packing the smallest actions with the greatest charity. Her life was as small and assuming as the tiniest flower, but her Little Way was so simple and honest that it elevated her to sainthood.
Thérèse is a saint I’ve become close to in the last few years, and it’s happened through no effort of my own. To be honest, I avoided Thérèse for a very long time. I found her story and her theology to be too simple and too saccharine for my tastes. I balked at her naivety because true naivety—that open and honest goodness—is so hard to look in the eye. The saints I prayed to were the dramatic ones (my confirmation saint is Joan of Arc), the mystics and the intellectual heavyweights. Every time I thought about Thérèse, I thought to myself, “Well, the Little Way is cute and all, but what did she actually do?” Well, she loved God and she loved the people around her, and what else is there, really? She was the tarot’s Fool, willing to look naive in pursuit of Christ, willing to become like a child in the eyes of God, willing to let her ego fall off a cliff in order to love people better.
I don’t think I’ve ever written about pop culture in this email, but I want to talk about Ted Lasso, specifically the first season. I don’t watch a lot of TV, and I certainly don’t cry often when I watch TV, but I found myself with tears streaming down my face by the end of every episode of Ted Lasso. This feels silly for me to admit! I want to roll my eyes at my own dang self! But it’s true, and here’s why: Ted Lasso is a story of pure divine grace. The whole show feels like an experiment, and the experiment is this: what happens when a person encounters true compassionate love? What a premise! And we get to watch it! A fundamentally loving person is introduced, and we watch different characters interact with that love, alternatingly side-eyeing it, laughing at it, mistrusting it, getting angry about it. And then we get to watch them break open, undone by someone saying, perhaps not in words but surely in spirit, “I believe in the fundamental goodness of you.” What is that but divine grace? What is that but the Little Way?
I’ve been thinking about this too because I’ve been reading Dostoyevsky. For some reason, in my head, I associate autumn with Russian novels. Every single year, when the first cool fall morning arrives, I absolutely have to read a giant tome full of characters with fifteen different names. The last few years I’ve reread Laurus, which is well worth reading. This year I’ve picked up The Idiot. The Idiot was Dostoyevsky’s favorite of his novels, and the title is a reference to the main character, Prince Myshkin. I find the premise of the novel fascinating and moving for the same reasons I find Ted Lasso fascinating and moving. What Dostoyevsky was trying to do in The Idiot was to take a model of true Christian love and insert it into modern Russian society. He was trying to, in his own words, depict “the positively good and beautiful man,” “a completely beautiful human being.” Dostoyevsky wanted to know what it would look like for an essentially good and innocent person to be tested against people who are not. The Idiot is so named because Prince Myshkin is so good and open-hearted and naive that people think he’s stupid. What I find so beautiful, though, is that Dostoyevsky did not think he was stupid. Dostoyevsky treated Prince Myshkin with deadly seriousness and care, and while the novel doesn’t have a happy ending (of course it doesn’t), the reverence with which Dostoyevsky wrote Prince Myshkin feels like enough.
It’s easy to see Prince Myshkin as foolish for the same reason it’s easy to see Ted Lasso as foolish for the same reasons it’s easy to see Thérèse of Lisieux as foolish. Because love is hard to look at. By love, I mean real love. Not the score-keeping of so much adult love. Not the grand gestures of romance. Bright, honest Christian charity. To be truly kind and gracious in this world is to be perceived as naive, as simple, as a dumb hick, as an idiot. It is to open oneself to ridicule. And yet! And yet, we are called to this. We are called to love. The people who change our lives change them with love. And I keep trying to find a poetic way to talk about it, but there’s no way to sound intellectual about it.
My book is due in a few weeks, and I’ve been doing one last quick readthrough. I’m always comparing it to Meditations on the Tarot, because there is no other book with which to compare it. What feels most scary about sending it out into the world is that Meditations on the Tarot is a very intellectual book. It is dense and philosophical, and it is beautiful for that! My book is not dense and philosophical, and it’s exposing me again to a persistent little wound of mine, which is that my intelligence is the thing about which I am most insecure. I am not particularly well-educated (certainly not compared to many of the very smart and gracious people I know). I want to be smart, even though being smart matters so very little (matters not at all!), and I want other people to think I am smart.
I am not a theological heavyweight, and I never will be, but what I will tell you about this book is that it feels like a chance for me to tell you about exactly what I’ve been rambling about in this email. In reading it in its entirety over the course of a few short weeks, what strikes me is how this book feels like me just finding different ways of telling you this: I think that God adores you beyond all reckoning, and that you deserve that love, and that God created the whole world because God loves you that much. In some ways this book feels like me just trying to say that over and over and over again in a million (or rather, 78) different ways, a foolish and full-throated shout to the infinite varieties of God’s goodness and your goodness and the world’s goodness. There was a time when I would have thought that wasn’t enough, but now I think it might be.