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From the first moment I felt the desire to put my spiritual life into writing in the fall of 2008, I have been indefatigable in fulfilling it, or so it seems. Yet, never have I felt an inspiration that what I am writing is for anyone else. Still, I have consistently sought to lay out my thoughts over the years into a concrete form.

What I have discovered by doing so is the Holy Spirit working in my life as a teacher through the Immaculate Heart of Mary and through the magnificent saints with whom she has blessed me, namely, St. Joan of Arc and St. Thérèse of Lisieux. I have come to realize that the only way to understand what God is trying to teach me about who I am and my destiny is to write so that the immaterial Form becomes an object to be grasped by my senses. Our nature is such that this is how we come to know things, that is, through the senses. I have written many pages; however, I have no idea what God desires from it all save my understanding of how He intends to prepare me for Heaven. Thus, all that I write has a particular risk to it. How to publicize and promote these writings as a testimony in the spirit of the "new evangelization" in the Church remains somewhat enigmatic.

I can only implore the reader to keep the above in mind. I am nobody who seeks to be nothing that the great gift of Le Royaume bequeathed to me by the Holy Virgin Mary with the Holy Spirit will come "on earth as it is in Heaven." I am an insignificant Catholic layman seeking God's will through the incarnation, life, passion, death, and resurrection of His Son, Jesus Christ. I am striving to fulfill my consecration to the Virgin Mary according to St. Louis de Montfort, a consecration I began decades ago.

Thus, I can only reiterate what I have written elsewhere: I seek many to join me, but none to follow me. Only God, through the Holy Virgin in His Church, is to be trusted. We follow St. Joan and St. Thérèse along the Trail of the Dogmatic Creed to the center of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. However, praise be to God if Our Lady sees fit to offer another person help on their journey through this or any other of my writings.

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St. Thérèse gave us a spirituality of perfection grounded in the ordinary mysticism of phenomenological comprehension. The immensity of this gift and its correlation to Heidegger’s concept that ‘presence is not Being’ compel us to further seek a comparison between them based on the latter’s terms. Can we translate Thérèse to Heidegger’s phenomenology of Being? This would bridge the mystical world of the saint and Doctor of the Church to the natural world of phenomenology. Therefore, we will allow Heidegger the honor of opening the discussion.

“From the fundamental question of metaphysics, “Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?” we have extracted the prior question <Vor-frage>: How does it stand with Being?[1]”

To establish the project's foundation, then, we will ask: 'How does Thérèse stand with Being?'

The first step is to develop correlations between Thérèse and Heidegger’s essential phrases and concepts. The goal is to translate each philosopher's language into the other's, seeking similarities and allowing differences to emerge unprovoked naturally.

Let us start with a foundational premise: Thérèse's 'ordinary mysticism of phenomenological comprehension' appears as Heidegger's 'fundamental ontology.'

Fundamental ontology is Heidegger's essential understanding of the phenomenology of Being.[2] His ontology is compellingly clear once the concept is revealed. It is a discovery, which is the essence of the phenomenological approach.

"Dasein is ontically distinctive in that it is ontological." (Being and Time).[3]

Once we understand what Heidegger means by 'ontic' versus 'ontological' (a difficult challenge), it is the most elegant of his phrases.

William Richardson translates Heidegger's text differently, which is even more enlightening.

“… the ontic excellence of There-being (Dasein) consists in the fact that it is ontological.”[4]

Our ordinary, daily activities in the world of being (ontic) become excellent when we are 'resolved' in ‘foundational thinking’ (ontological).[5] More clearly, our excellence in the ordinary world is a transcendence in everydayness through foundational thought that seeks understanding in a matrix of meanings. The cashier at the store is ‘being’ to me (ontic), yet I perceive the exchange through a lens of overlapping meanings (ontological).

 However, it is essential to understand that we can only transcend the ordinary by living in the ordinary. The meaningful ontological relationship is discernable because I am ontically with the cashier in the store. The ontological (existential) is always the same world as the ontic (existentiel). They are the same world. We do not transcend to a mystical mountaintop to discern Being. We discover Being through ordinary living. While grocery shopping, we transcend as a mode of being as long as we are resolved through an awareness of fundamental ontology, not by escaping the ordinary world, but by rejecting the 'everydayness' of the inauthentic 'every man' while we are in the world.

Thérèse, on the other hand, sums it up using the simplest of examples.

"Pick up a pin from a motive of love, and you may thereby convert a soul."[6]

Remarkably simple. Thérèse had a natural (and God-given) orientation to perceive the world phenomenologically. She saw through multiple layers of Heidegger’s thinking in a glance. She likely did not think in terms of ‘ontic’ and ‘ontological,’ but more importantly she existed in that transcendence through the ordinary. She did that naturally through a phenomenological orientation and supernaturally through grace. Her world was the ordinary and the ontological. She did not experience visions and locutions. She lived a simple life in the convent and experienced dryness in her prayers. Her ‘Little Way’ of childlike trust in God was living ontologically and foundationally in the world of ontic beingness.

What remains hidden in Thérèse’s way is the supernatural life of grace. She uncovered more at a glance in the phenomenological journey than Heidegger but in a correlative manner. Thérèse saw mystically beyond Being to I Am as the fountain of this grace.

“Jesus alone can make our deeds of such worth, so let us love Him with every fiber of our heart.”[7]

I will continue the comparison with Thérèse's 'picking up a pin' (an ordinary, everyday act if there ever were one) as the first correlation with Heidegger's elegant but opaque concept of ontic and ontological modes that he termed later as, ‘the ontological difference.’.

From here, we will bring more Thérèsian examples of Heidegger's fundamental ontology, particularly: where in Thérèse do we see her resolved in foundational thought?

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Check out the Heroic Hearts podcast on Substack,  Spotify, or Apple. Heroic Hearts is a podcast about healing, enchanting, and elevating our hearts through the stories and spirituality of St. Joan of Arc and St. Therese of Lisieux. Co-hosted with Amy Chase.

[1] Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 45.

[2] Richardson, Heidegger - Through Phenomenology to Thought, 15. This effort to lay bare the foundations of ontology was called in the early years “fundamental ontology,”

[3] Heidegger, Being and Time, 39.

[4] Richardson, Heidegger - Through Phenomenology to Thought, 58.

[5] Richardson, 16. The thought which interrogates the foundation of metaphysics, we call simply “foundational“ thought.

[6] Thérèse, The Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, 322.

[7] Thérèse, 322.

Want to hear a discussion on St. Joan and St. Thérèse? Check out Heroic Hearts, a podcast devoted to a spiritual adventure with St. Joan of Arc and St. Thérèse of Lisieux. Co-hosted with Amy Chase.

We are the spiritual diaspora of the Kingdom of Catholic France.

That declaration is the natural extension of our devotion to Traditional French Catholicism and the Renaissance of Catholic France. It is such a natural extension based on the model for the mystical Kingdom of Catholic France given to us by St. Joan of Arc.

“In the language of images Jeanne has thus (with her banner) depicted the Church in heaven as pure adoration of God, the Church on earth as the reception of God in the womb of the Virgin Mary, and sinful humanity, gathered in this Church around the cross along with the priests and soldiers, redeemed and repentant. Yet it is the same Church that is on earth and in heaven.”[1]

Ste. Jehanne saw the Kingdom of France through this very lens which revealed a mystical relationship between heaven and earth.

"Gentle dauphin, I am Joan the Maid, and the King of Heaven commands  that through me you be anointed and crowned in the city of Reims as a lieutenant of the King of Heaven, who is King of France."[2]

Clearly, Joan's spiritual vision of France was bound to her mystical understanding of the Church as one Body existing both in heaven and earth. She saw France in the same light. Jesus Christ is King of France. Charles VII was to be his lieutenant and the steward of the Kingdom.

France, according to Joan of Arc, is one body existing both in Heaven and on earth.

In the future and from her place in Heaven Joan would see France officially recognize the Virgin Mary as its Queen through the consecration of the Kingdom to Mary by King Louis XIII and Queen Anne in 1638. This was another act that demonstrated dramatically the mystical relationship between France and Heaven. The Fleur-de-Lys remains close to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. To love Mary is to love the Kingdom of Catholic France and to love the Kingdom of Catholic France is to love Mary.

This is what we mean when we say that we see the Kingdom of Heaven bathed in the beautiful, mystical light of the combined spirituality of St. Joan of Arc and St. Thérèse. We see a particular Kingdom in Heaven where there are many Kingdoms. We see the mystical Kingdom of Catholic France through the eyes, heart, mind, and soul of St. Joan and St. Thérèse. By this we are saying that it is through Immaculate Mary, who holds the Fleur-de Lys close to her heart, and from her through the hearts of Joan and Thérèse that Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit pours His graces into our hearts, dwelling in us and espousing our own souls as part of His mystical Body, the Church. He does this through these beautiful saints and through their beautiful spiritual light that reflects the Kingdom of Catholic France. This is what we mean when we also say:

"To Jesus through Mary in the friendship and sisterly care of Sts. Joan and Thérèse!"

We are not necessarily part of the temporal Kingdom of France. We are from all corners of the earth. However, we form a spiritual community from around the world that is, in fact, part of the mystical Kingdom of France in Heaven. In the "real" world, which is that world eternal in Heaven, we are the children of this Kingdom where we joyfully make up our part of the beautiful landscape in the total Kingdom of Heaven. Let us begin our journey toward that Kingdom while we are on earth.

"Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven."

[1] Tavard, The Spiritual Way of St. Jeanne D’Arc.

[2] Pernoud and Clin, Joan of Arc - Her Story, 23.

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Are you interested in the complete, one volume anthological expression of The Dove and Rose? You can find it on Amazon  (Walter Adams Pen Name). 

Visit my home site where it all began at walteremerson.com.

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I am also the co-host of the Heroic Hearts podcast with Amy Chase. Heroic Hearts is devoted to a spiritual adventure with St. Joan of Arc and St. Thérèse of Lisieux! Join us on the journey!

Visit Amy’s Substack, The Occidental Tourist.

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My initial experience with Carmelite spirituality was similar to St. Edith Stein’s.

“Picking up a book at random, Edith began to read. It was St. Teresa of Avila’s The Book of Her Life. Edith was so taken by this Spanish marvel of God’s grace that she read through the book, it seems, without a break. On closing the volume, she had to confess to herself: ‘This is truth.’”[1]

 My own experience led me to the exact same conclusion with regard to St. Thérèse of Lisieux. Only a few months after I joined the Catholic Church, I visited a Catholic bookstore and came across The Story of a Soul – the Autobiography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux. I had no idea who St. Thérèse of Lisieux was, but for some reason, I wanted to read that book. Later, as I was reading it, I thought to myself, “What she is saying is true. I really don’t understand what she is saying. But I know that what she is saying is true.” That moment I began my journey on the Trail of the Dogmatic Creed with St. Thérèse. I desired to know that truth that she was saying, as I do still to this day, and my life with all of its joys, heartaches, successes, and failures would be, and still is, that journey into the depths of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Only a year later, on the Feast of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, I consecrated myself to the Immaculate Heart of Mary using the formula of St. Louis de Montfort. Mysteriously, I had met St. Joan of Arc prior to all this. In the summer after my high school graduation, I joined a small group of classmates for a six-week study in Brittany, France. Before returning to the United States, we visited the island fortress of Mont Saint-Michel where before the chapel door stood a statue of St. Joan of Arc. I asked my teacher and tour guide, “Who is that?” “Ah, c’est Jeanne d’Arc!” was her reply. Jeanne d’Arc and I had been introduced. I later would come to know that Joan of Arc was a kindred spirit with Thérèse, as the latter herself revealed.

So, once consecrated to Our Lady, I was prepared, it seems, to continue my journey. St. Thérèse, St. Joan, and the most Holy and Immaculate Virgin Mary were imbued in my interior life which was nourished by Jesus Christ through His Church and the sacraments. Whereas there is only one Church and one way to the Kingdom through Jesus Christ, there is, in fact, a creative elegance in our approach. Just as a beautiful panoramic meadow by a lake in front of majestic mountains is constituted by a wide variety of flowers, creeks, and trees, the panoramic Kingdom of God likewise consists of a wide variety of kindred souls making up the beautiful image of the landscape. Which path through the meadow would I take with my saintly sisters?

The answer came through the initial step in my journey after reading St. Thérèse. My fascination with her spirituality led me to take on the challenge of reading the works of St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, the founders of the Discalced Carmelites. I had the “St. Edith Stein” moment. I did not understand them, but I knew that “what they said was truth.”

Off we went, with St. Joan of Arc and St. Thérèse of Lisieux leading me down the path that is the Trail of the Dogmatic Creed, under the maternal care of the Blessed Virgin, and in the footsteps of St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross. These were my kindred souls. This was my family. This was Carmel, and even more specifically, it was Carmel through the combined spirituality of St. Joan and St. Thérèse, radiating that beautiful color of their combined hearts across the field that would inspire hope in me through the faith I had received. This hope, under the watchful eyes of my two saintly sisters, would lead me into St. John’s night and toward his mystical Mount Carmel.

[1] Stein, The Science of the Cross (The Collected Works of Edith Stein Vol. 6)., 10.

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The temporal mind cannot know the timeless unless the timeless has some type of relationship with the temporal. Edith Stein points out that there is no way that a finite mind can know the timeless immediately, without this relationship. There are two ways that this relationship can occur - through an analogous representation or through an effect the timeless has on the temporal.[1]

The Dove and Rose is both in the sense that the temporal Kingdom of Catholic and Royal France represents not an end in itself but an analogous type of the timeless Kingdom of God and therefore gives a representation to our senses by which we are able to know the timeless. Secondly, The Dove and Rose also is founded through an event, specifically, the event of St. Joan of Arc and her mission to free France for the King of Heaven Who her voices informed her was the true King of France. St. Joan demonstrates to us a true relationship between Heaven and earth through the significant event of her life and mission. Jesus Christ is the true King of France while the earthly King is His steward and lieutenant.[2] Here we have the key to our most important need for the heart of St. Joan of Arc. It is through her heart that the timeless was manifested analogously in the temporal. Joan’s heart became a phenomenological gateway between Heaven and earth by the Divine Will.

Through Joan’s mission on earth, we have an effect of significant meaning. Through Joan’s prophetic voice, we have an analogous Intellectual Viewing (Stein, op. cit.)) relating the temporal Kingdom of France to the timeless, thus allowing us to know the timeless that otherwise we would not know. Joan’s phenomenology becomes our own. The structure of objects in the temporal flow of her mental life becomes visible to us through the simple symbolic structure of her words, actions, and images which reveal what is holy to those striving for holiness, for example, the images she chose for her military standard. We come to know God’s Kingdom through Joan, the timeless through the temporal. Her mission is “divine” though temporal, as we might define through the Dionysian theology of symbolism.

Such is the very purpose of this image-language: to conceal what is holy from the profaning images of the throng and to unveil it for those who are striving for holiness and have freed themselves from childish thinking and have acquired the spiritual sensitivity needed to behold simple truths.[3]

Through the heart of St. Joan of Arc, and through no other, we have The Dove and Rose, a relationship of the eternal with the temporal. Her special calling was to be the relationship’s effect, as well as the prophet who reveals to us the necessary analogous relationship that we might relate to the timeless Kingdom of God. Joan leads us to a phenomenologically transcendent discovery. Objective reality, the Kingdom of God, becomes subjectively real universally and transcendently to us through St. Joan of Arc’s phenomenology. Here we have the essential nature of our need to unite ourselves to Jesus and Our Lady the Virgin Mary through the heart of St. Joan of Arc. It is to Joan’s heart that Jesus Christ willed this mission.

[1] Op. cit. The Science of The Dove and Rose and The Counsels of the Heart.

[2] Pernoud and Clin, Joan of Arc - Her Story, 23. “Gentle dauphin, I am Joan the Maid, and the King of Heaven commands that through me you be anointed and crowned in the city of Reims as a lieutenant of the King of Heaven who is King of France.”

[3] Stein, Knowledge and Faith (The Collected Works of Edith Stein, Vol. 8), 118.

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Often when people speak of spiritual phenomena, even those called “mystical,” they are referring to the domain of the natural. Humans are, by nature, spiritual. For purposes of this discussion, spirituality refers to the transcendent capacity of the person to step back from, to rise above, the activities of life to reflect on higher order, more abstract concepts relating to meaning and purpose. It is in the realm of spirituality that one understands the present “now” through the past as projected into the future. Present, past, and future merge into non-linear expressions of time that together manifest the canvas of our lives upon which we paint the “appearance of our existence as it is appearing” in this mysterious, chaotic but substantively teleological process. Becoming aware of the appearance of the appearing in a particular structure of consciousness is an act of spirituality, as is becoming aware of the appearance of the telos, the ultimate purpose, of our existence. Spirituality through non-linear time is consciousness built into the essence of the human person who can actualize that essence over linear time. We are created; yet we are being created.

However, spirituality remains an enigma. It can be difficult to bring together the constituent components of our transcendent experiences to make sense of the order, meaning, and telos of our existence. We have moments of transcendent clarity but often struggle to bring together these moments into a single whole, a “gestalt” image of understanding and transformation. This “problem” with spirituality is not really a problem with spirituality itself but one of intentionality and method. To bring forward the appearance of the gestalt appearing, we must lift our heads from mere day-to-day appearances which we accept with little to no reflection and contemplate intentionally on how the day-to-day presents itself to our consciousness. The world gives itself to us, and it is up to us to receive it as it intends to be received without our inherent biases and pre-conceived notions distorting the transcendent view.

A solution to this problem of a lack of intentionality with others is the phenomenological method whereby we learn to set aside our biases to receive the givenness of the “other” through empathy. Phenomenology can lead to a clearer understanding of that which appears through others as meaning and telos in our own lives. It is a willingness to open oneself to the possibilities of the other. Through phenomenology we can set aside our pre-conceived notions without forsaking them unless we determine through the methodology that they need to be forsaken. Setting aside our biases, we can systematize intentionally how the world appears to our consciousness and build an objective structure of meaning out of our subjective experience. As created beings, we allow ourselves to be created in higher states of consciousness through the transcendent givenness of the gestalt towards which we journey.

Spirituality with phenomenology as a pedagogical methodology for creating the structure of meaning in our lives remains natural despite its transcendent qualities. All human beings are capable of transcendence, phenomenological discovery, and meaningful expression through intentionality and the awareness of the need to see the world not merely as it appears in our mundane activities but as it reveals itself to our consciousness.

There remains, however, a vitally important distinction between spirituality in the natural sense and the experience of spirituality through the supernatural. What some call supernatural often is dismissed merely as an unexplored domain of the natural, for example, an otherwise unknown state of consciousness. Or perhaps the supernatural is an alternative and formerly unknown dimension of natural reality. In these modes, the supernatural is accepted only as a formerly unexamined state of nature and not truly as “super”-natural. However, looking beyond mere appearances and into the heart of what truly is given in the supernatural, we find much to be explored with a sense of awe. The question of just what a supernatural phenomenon is remains open.

The position of this author is that the supernatural is what it gives itself to be which is beyond the natural. It is “of God” who is the creator of nature and not bound by it. The supernatural is not “formerly unexplored nature”; it is an entirely different domain yet one capable of revealing itself in the natural. It requires of us not a leap of faith but simply an openness to receive it. Making sense of the supernatural experience usually is helped by looking systematically at the phenomenon through the lens of a religious hermeneutic. The religious hermeneutic provides one with a sense of who is the God of the “of-God” supernatural experience. It gives one definition and context, even if only one context of many. It helps us understand what we are receiving.

One could argue that the religious claim to revelation as a means of supernatural hermeneutical insight and discovery is, in fact, the very bias that the phenomenological method warns against. However, the position of this author is that religious context, that is, the framing of the phenomenon in a particular religious tradition, could be the very pathway through which the mysterious world of the supernatural becomes accessible. If the phenomenon gives itself as an essence within a particular tradition; then, that tradition might be the pathway to understanding the phenomenon. Far from being a bias, the religious context can be a conduit, a path, or a trail that reveals the very systematic structure derived by the phenomenon’s essence. In other words, religion can be revelatory, which is precisely what it gives itself as being.

The revelatory character of Catholicism is the religious context framing The Dove and Rose and the associated phenomenology of St. Joan of Arc and St. Thérèse of Lisieux. It is through the lens of Catholicism that the combined hearts of St. Joan and St. Thérèse give themselves as the Kingdom Blessed in the center of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. It is through the lens of Catholicism that the Jehannian hermeneutic imbued in the poetry and plays of St. Thérèse brings to light the appearance of that which is appearing as the Kingdom of Catholic and Royal France in the center of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. It is through the lens of Catholicism that we come into Our Lady’s Kingdom as a royal line of St. Mary Magdalene’s House of New Bethany.

The Dove and Rose is revealed through the heart of St. Joan of Arc as her heart is interpreted by St. Thérèse. It is a supernatural phenomenon contextualized and therefore manifested in its true givenness through the revelatory lens of Catholicism. The Dove and Rose is a phenomenological explanation of the supernatural experience of the combined hearts of St. Joan and St. Thérèse.

The reader will find in these pages a series of models and essays that flow in the order intended by the author. The connection between each may not always be apparent. The synthesis of all chapters into a unified whole of meaning is left by necessity to the reader who must follow their own phenomenological process through the syntax of supernatural grace working in their lives.

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In the following newsletters, I will relate the story of my journey on the Trail of the Dogmatic Creed with St. Joan of Arc and St. Thérèse of Lisieux through the lens of the Carmelite spirituality of St. John of the Cross. The purpose of this testimonial is not to point back to me. It is to shine the light of God’s mercy in my life on Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ through the Immaculate Heart of Mary and the combined hearts of St. Joan and St. Thérèse. My desire is to walk you through how this mercy restructured my life and oriented it toward True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin and Carmelite spirituality. As Jean Lafrance points out in his book, My Vocation is Love – St. Thérèse’s Way to Total Trust:

The starting point is clear. We don’t have to rejoice in ourselves, or make a drama about our own person. What is important is God, his holiness, and, above all, his merciful love. Thérèse knew that her ultimate vocation, both on earth and in heaven would be to sing eternally the mercies of the Lord.[1]

As St. John of the Cross’ writings are far too rich and deep for me to interpret competently, I will rely on St. Edith Stein’s The Science of the Cross. Even though my intellect can assess the genius of St. Edith Stein no more effectively than it can that of St. John of the Cross, the former developed her manuscript with weaker souls in mind. Having glimpsed the Ascent of Mt. Carmel as one who is a saintly a peer of John’s, Edith descends in charity to the rest of us that we might have more spiritual clarity and make progress more effectively and efficiently through her insights.

The ultimate driving force behind this account is a methodological need to systematize Carmelite spirituality within the framework of my own experience to better follow the Divine will and to love God more thoroughly. In short, descriptive writing is one of the core activities that moves me along the Trail of the Dogmatic Creed with my saintly sisters, Joan and Thérèse. Writing organizes and synthesizes my thoughts to understand what the Holy Spirit through the Immaculate Heart of Mary is trying to teach me. This will be the same story I have shared in previous writings; however, this time it will be told through the more specific lens of Carmelite spirituality.

The reason for this Carmelite focus is that my spirituality by nature and by the grace of God is an amalgam of the combined spiritualities of St. Thérèse of Lisieux and St. Joan of Arc. Their combined spirituality is for me the most beautiful color in the Heavens. It is through their intercession, sisterly care, sharing of spiritual gifts, guidance, and protection on my journey that they serve as a proximate means of God’s love through the Immaculate Heart of Mary. It should not be a surprise that St. Thérèse and St. Joan, kindred spirits themselves and both being Secondary Co-Patronesses of France, would lead me through the saving Dogmas and Doctrines of the Church using the Carmelite spirituality of John of the Cross as a light on our path toward the Kingdom I was told to seek by the Blessed Virgin Mary.

My objective, beyond what I have explained above, is quite simply to inspire souls to seek the Kingdom themselves with the aid of St. Joan and St. Thérèse through a dogmatic confession of the Catholic faith and in total consecration to the Blessed Virgin Mary.

[1] Lafrance, My Vocation Is Love - St. Thérèse’s Way to Total Trust, 18.

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What is Phenomenological Devotion?

Phenomenology makes understanding more accessible to our consciousness by constructing meaningful relationships among the phenomena in our lived experiences. It helps us make logical inferences about how our lived experience correlates to what we comprehend through gestalt constructions of insight. Phenomenology harmonizes the principles governing these emerging self-evident truths in our lives and guides us as we attempt to make sense of our experiences. Phenomenological Devotion more specifically focuses on the appearance of self-evident truths revealed to us by Divine Providence in our contemplative lives and harmonizes their governing principles in a hermeneutic that clarifies their meaning and purpose. It helps us make sense of the truths revealed to us. Phenomenological devotion begins with a divinely received embodied point of inquiry. That point of inquiry given to The Dove and Rose is Joan of Arc as revealed to us through the heart and Jehannian hermeneutic of St. Thérèse. Thérèse is necessary to receive Joan of Arc in this expression. We receive Joan most profoundly through Thérèse’s presentation.

How does Phenomenological Devotion work?

Applying phenomenology to our religious devotions is a cooperation with grace that we might intuitively understand the meaning of the lived experience of our spirituality. We develop meaningful relationships which lead to higher categories of thought. Through a hermeneutical process of continually adapting our understanding with new insights, we constitute the intuited gift revealed by the movement of the Holy Spirit. Phenomenological devotion brings clarity to our thinking as we contemplate the mysteries of the faith. Our contemplative categories imbue us with agility of thought by which we cooperate with grace through the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, notably, wisdom, knowledge, counsel, and understanding. 

What is Phenomenological Devotion to St. Joan and St. Thérèse?

Phenomenological devotion to St. Joan and St. Thérèse is the application of the principles of phenomenology to our celestial relationship with our saintly sisters, Joan of Arc and Thérèse of Lisieux. Joan becomes our embodied point of inquiry, of our intentionality, through the heart of St. Thérèse. Together they guide us to self-evident truths that when harmonized make radical changes in our conscious understanding of the world. Joan and Thérèse guide us to a Heavenly understanding of who we are in the Kingdom of God. In this way, phenomenological devotion to St. Joan and St. Thérèse leads to the meaningful fulfillment in our lived experience of the Our Father. His Kingdom come, His will be done, "on earth as it is in Heaven."

How does Phenomenological Devotion to St. Joan and St. Thérèse work?

Through disciplined prayer, contemplation, and study founded on a life of sanctifying grace, we follow in the footsteps of St. Joan and St. Thérèse with intentionality; we seek the truths evident in their life-stories and come to understand through them the self-evident truths in our own life-stories. We then expand on those Jehannian-Thérèsian meanings through the hermeneutics of experiential insight. We receive, record, interpret, assert, and articulate what these saints give us. Applying phenomenological methods to our spiritual and religious devotion to St. Joan and St. Thérèse gives us clarity of mind, agility of thought, and pureness of heart through wisdom that together leads us in an enlightened manner to the center of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. We call this walking the Trail of the Dogmatic Creed with St. Joan and St. Thérèse.

What is the goal of phenomenological devotion to St. Joan and St. Thérèse?

The goal of phenomenological devotion to St. Joan and St. Thérèse is to clarify the meaning and purpose of our lives through our relationship with our saintly sisters. It is to aid in our sanctification through grace in union with the Holy Catholic Church and in full assent to all that she teaches. Phenomenological devotion is neither a substitute for traditional Catholic spirituality nor doctrinal teaching. It is an intuitive methodology for making sense of how our lived, contemplative experience of the heart correlates to the world of traditional metaphysical understanding as we do follow traditional Catholic spirituality. Its goal is our sanctification through the obedience of faith in the Holy Catholic Church.

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I have written extensively about empathic devotion to St. Joan of Arc. Our Lord and Our Lady have transformed my life through this uniquely powerful relationship. The Holy Spirit has willed to provide the sanctifying grace I need in hierarchical fashion, through the Immaculate Heart of Mary and then through St. Joan. I have been fascinated for over a decade as to the process and mode of this grace. It feels as though I am called to think it through for whatever mysterious purpose that thinking out, that modeling of the grace, serves the Kingdom of God.

The key aid has been St. Edith Stein. Stein was a pre-conversion phenomenologist who, post-conversion, reconciled phenomenology with the scholasticism of the Church. The result has been a treasury of knowledge for my cause. Edith Stein integrated modern philosophical thought with the ancient tradition of the Church. She is modern without being a modernist, a spiritual talent sorely needed in contemporary society.

Her description of the need to engage a mentor, even across time and space, by studying their thinking from “grounds to conclusions” overwhelmed me as being most appropriate for understanding my own devotion to Joan, my mentor.

Philosophical understanding is different. The philosopher must not only be able to see and show the fact that someone else went about it in such and such a way; his insight must not only extend to the connections between the other's grounds [Grund] and consequences. The philosopher must also grasp why his predecessor went about it like this. He must get down into the grounds themselves and grasp them. And this means that the grounds must grip him and best him in the sense that he decides to accept them and retraces within himself the path the other followed from grounds to conclusions, perhaps even going beyond him. Or else he must best the grounds; I mean, he must decide to get free of them and take another path.[1]

It was my first reflection on empathy from Edith Stein’s perspective and the beginning of my articulation of “empathic devotion.” I began to realize that it was empathy, in the Steinian sense, that I felt with Joan of Arc. I wanted to go where she goes, to follow in her footsteps to the pearl of great price. This empathy, this tracing of footsteps, when understood through the harmonization of the revealed truths discovered in this communion, also can be described as an empathic sharing of Joan’s mode of being. It is a union of heart, mind, and soul with Joan through empathic harmonization with her "internal horizon," her thematic field of French, Catholic, and Royal perceptual noematic meaning. We are interested in understanding Joan's mind, heart, and soul by reducing her life's story to its transcendent meaning and sharing her point of view. In this way, we truly can follow her to that pearl of great price from "grounds to conclusions."

[1] Stein, Edith. Potency and Act - Studies Toward a Philosophy of Being. Washington DC: ICS Publications, Institute of Carmelite Studies, 2009. locs. 425–429.

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The goal of The Dove and Rose is to help us unite our hearts, minds, and souls in a divinely infused friendship with St. Joan of Arc and St. Thérèse of Lisieux, the two celestial patronesses chosen for us by Our Lord Jesus Christ and the Blessed Virgin Mary. This friendship with Joan and Thérèse is an expressive outpouring of charity, justice, and mercy from the Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Immaculate Heart of Mary. More specifically we refer to St. Joan and St. Thérèse’s combined French Catholic spirituality as the means Divine Providence has chosen for us to become fully who we are destined to be in the mystical, beautiful “living garden of souls,”[1] to use St. Thérèse’s metaphor. Rephrased, the goal is to ascend the Dionysian stairway (Stein, op.cit.) to mystical France by being intuitively “present” with Joan and Thérèse in a union of hearts as they are to each other in clarity of mind, agility of thought, and pureness of heart. Our divine friendship with them is brought-to-being by a coming-to-understand in these modes of being received through grace. It is our way of ascending the stairway through both intellect and will with Joan and Thérèse.

As clarity, agility, and purity are manifestations of glory revealed in the body of the resurrected Christ which we are promised as heirs with Him,[2] our project invites our saintly sisters to form these same attributes in us through their intercessory care. We draw closer to them through a phenomenological understanding and transcend to know them ever more fully here on earth as they know each other in Heaven through clarity of intuition and agility of correlative insight whereby we contemplate the connections revealed across an ever-expanding panorama of meaning. We call the constitution of these "categorical" intuitions "following the science of the Saints,"[3] or in our metaphorical language, "Walking the Trail of the Dogmatic Creed with St. Joan and St. Thérèse." Thus, this work is about bringing the Father's Kingdom "on earth as it is in Heaven" in union with our saintly sisters, Joan and Thérèse. Through grace we ascend the Dionysian stairway by these Heavenly attributes of clarity, agility, and pureness so as to unite ourselves with Jesus, Mary, and the saints in one panorama of unity and wholeness.

How do we make this phenomenology of Joan and Thérèse a reality? How do we "walk the Trail of the Dogmatic Creed" with them to the center of the Immaculate Heart of Mary? We share life-stories about them to transcendently share their mode of being with them.

“In either case, one spirit, by joining with another, comes to share in the other’s mode of being.”[4]

Empathy is a mode of being in union with them. Through this empathic union, they lead us to contemplation of the self-evident truths held within our own life-story. These self-evident truths unite into meaningful, higher level categorical intuitions. Through holy realism we construct our new world view. With that, our liturgical, spiritual, and religious lives become the material by which we ascend the stairway to Heaven. They become the very means by which we come to realize our place in the Kingdom of Heaven with Joan and Thérèse - as much as possible here, and to be fulfilled entirely only in heaven.

Yet, more than being simply “our” place, it is where we fit in community with others, in the communion of saints; it is our place in the “garden of souls” in the Kingdom. And this is what we all are looking for in our liturgical, spiritual, and religious lives - to come to understand who we are in the Kingdom.

Thérèse influences us through the ascent of the soul in mystical prayer while Joan influences us through the ascent of understanding the nature of the Kingdom. Together they lead us to a deep comprehension of who we are in the mind of God and where we fit in this Kingdom.

[1] Thérèse, The Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, 22. “And so it is in the world of souls, Our Lord's living garden.”

[2] Holy Bible - The Verse It: All(TM) Edition - Catholic Douay-Rheims Version, Luke 24.

[3] Stein, The Science of the Cross (The Collected Works of Edith Stein Vol. 6)., 40. “Such realism, when it leads a holy soul to accept the truths of faith, becomes the science of the saints.”

[4] Stein, Potency and Act - Studies Toward a Philosophy of Being, loc. 2064.

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The phenomenology of the Dove and Rose is an embrace of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. It is a fairytale-like story of divine friendship brought-to-being. This friendship is revealed in its eidetic universality as an expression of truth, beauty, and goodness through the Sacred Heart of Jesus among souls in a Kingdom. Phenomenology is a creative process that reveals these divinely infused friendships and brings-them-to-being in the soul in congruous participation with grace. The Dove and Rose is the phenomenological expression of a story we have never been told but which is coming-to-being in us. Like a novel, the journey with St. Joan and St. Thérèse toward the Kingdom of France in Our Lady’s heart brings forth the “appearance of the story appearing” unconcealed through wisdom, knowledge, and understanding. Through receiving, recording, interpreting, asserting, and articulating the story, we are transformed in the truth, beauty, and goodness of that emerging story-never-told being revealed in us. “It is quite obvious that He who hath founded the earth by wisdom and hath established the heavens by understanding could not show less perfection in governing His works than in creating them. (Prov 3:19)”[1]

Coming-to-understand as our ‘way of perfection’

The anthological and eclectic discourse in the Dove and Rose is an account of coming-to-understand the story in union with the French royal hearts of St. Joan of Arc and St. Thérèse of Lisieux. It is our ‘way of perfection’ efficaciously produced through the sacraments and the grace of contemplation. It is intuited and then projected into being through the phenomena of the life of St. Joan of Arc, Thérèsian Carmelite spirituality, the golden legend of St. Mary Magdalene in France, and the philosophical lens of St. Edith Stein. Its aim is Faith, Hope, and Love "on earth as it is in Heaven" through the majesty of Jehannian-Thérèsian French Catholic spirituality and True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. It is founding Magdalene’s Kingdom of Catholic and Royal France ‘on earth through wisdom and the heavens by understanding.’

The Dove and Rose began with a phenomenology of devotion to St. Joan of Arc through the Jehannian hermeneutics of St. Thérèse of Lisieux. This developed into a devotional theory of the “combined hearts” of these two saintly sisters. The resulting phenomenological possibilities formed a more expansive totality of meaning based on the golden legend of St. Mary Magdalene in France. The urge to search for what remained hidden in this emerging map of meaning led to a more formal phenomenological methodology through the inspiration of St. Edith Stein.

The Dove and Rose model developed through three diachronic movements.

The first movement, developed from the years 2008 to 2010, is the descriptive devotional expression to the combined hearts of St. Joan and St. Thérèse.

The second movement, developed from 2010 to 2017, is the phenomenological expression of France in the City of God through the royal household of St. Mary Magdalene who lived out her last years in the grotto of Provence.

The third movement, developed from 2017 to 2021, is the phenomenological method under the luminous guidance of St. Edith Stein.

In summary, the initial phenomenon of the "divine glance" of St. Joan of Arc through the Jehannian hermeneutics of St. Thérèse resulted in an understanding of the emergence of "Catholic and Royal France" in the heart on earth as it is as a form in the center of Our Lady's Immaculate Heart in Heaven. Spiritual “France” through the heart of St. Joan phenomenologically revealed the metaphysical structure for the Dionysian stairway to Heaven (Stein, op.cit.). The royal House of Mary Magdalene’s New Bethany ascends by way of this stairway. This opens the fairytale-like ‘true’ story of Our Lady’s gift to us. “For if He assigns to His creatures the end that He wills, and chooses the means which seem good to Him to lead them to it, the end He assigns them must be good and wise, nor can He direct them towards their end other than by good and wise means”.[2]

Implications

This story is for those seeking a journey of phenomenological understanding to mystical Catholic and Royal France in the center of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in union with the combined hearts of these saintly, celestial sisters. The Dove and Rose also can serve as a template for a more universal model of meaningful lived experience in the presence of God through the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

With Joan of Arc as my guide and "point of inquiry” to begin the journey, I passively and systematically followed the lighted pathway representing the movement of my living reality with her. Through grace her guiding principles harmonized into a Holy Expression - a gestalt construction - of unity of hearts with St. Joan and St. Thérèse in a spirit of French Catholic Holy Realism grounded in True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin.

The theoretical framework of this method is the French Catholic Carmelite mysticism of St. Thérèse and the philosophical influence of St. Edith Stein.  

This phenomenon of meaningful, experiential union of hearts is not perceived through natural insight but through St. Joan and St. Thérèse who reveal it to us from Heaven. It is not a leap into imaginative ideas we create out of ourselves but a reception of supernatural union of hearts and minds through grace.

The Dove and Rose focuses on a transcendent phenomenological "presence" with St. Joan of Arc through the heart and Jehannian hermeneutics of St. Thérèse of Lisieux. It is a relationship with the Combined Hearts of St. Joan and St. Thérèse leading along a line of meaning to a discovery of Holy Expression. Those who sense the call to these two "saintly sisters" through an "unreflective certainty" will benefit foremost. However, I believe that there are broad implications for the general Catholic devotional life. The interplay of grace with phenomenology ennobles our soul with a sense of mystical, contemplative meaning as we pursue "the appearance of something appearing" through St. Joan and St. Thérèse like an artist bringing the transcendent to life on a canvas. This pursuit is imbued with the Faith, Hope, and Love of our Catholicism and becomes our method of "spiritual artistry" through interpretive understanding. Perhaps its most profound significance is the demonstration of our Holy Catholic faith as far more than an abstract concept of dogmas and ideologies. Our faith is a life-changing lived experience imbued by sanctifying grace grounded in the sacraments and the real and substantial presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist.

[1] Saint-Jure and de la Colombière, Trustful Surrender to Divine Providence - The Secret of Peace and Happiness, 4.

[2] Saint-Jure and de la Colombière, 4.

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“Wisdom is the refulgence of eternal light, the spotless mirror of the power of God, the image of his goodness. And she, who is one, can do all things, and renews everything while herself perduring; And passing into holy souls from age to age, she produces friends of God and prophets.” ~ Wisdom 7: 26-27

The phenomenology of the Dove and Rose is a Jehannian-Thérèsian-inspired profession of faith. It is a journey in friendship with Jesus Christ, Our Lord and Savior, the Blessed Virgin Mary, the angels, and the saints. It is a story emerging through our interpretation of St. Joan of Arc's point of view and map of meaning. It is a story of how St. Mary Magdalene, on the shores of Provence, established a heavenly royal line for France as a form in the center of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Through her contemplative life on the shores of modern-day France, Mary Magdalene established a royal diaspora through time and space devoted to the Immaculate Heart of Mary and to the form of France as a Magdalene lily of the Virgin Mary's heart. Through phenomenological comprehension, St. Joan of Arc guides us in divine friendship to our homeland in this heavenly France. Through the grace of holy friendship, we share in this royal calling. Divine friendship is founded on God's love, justice, and mercy, forming the essence of union with Jesus and Mary. Divine friendship, often called a union of hearts, is this devotion's remarkable and indelible sign.

Friendship, when it is genuine, is not readily affected, by these reversals of fortune. Based on the beauty of the soul, it arises from regions more liberal, purer, and deeper than any other affection.

Friendship is born from one soul into another soul; and the soul has value only in itself. Once we meet there, everything else disappears.

And yet, by an admiral privilege, time confirms friendship… like two rocks overhanging similar waves and showing them unwavering resistance, so do they notice the flow of years vainly attacking the unchanging harmony of their hearts.[1]

A friendship between souls requires a journey whereby the “harmony of their hearts” is fine-tuned for the heavenly choir. Divine friendship is not merely an affection but an ongoing story of hearts uniting across time and space between souls purified in the blood of Christ. In this sense, divine friendship with St. Joan - and St. Thérèse as our interpreter of Joan’s life - has a fairytale quality revealing the appearance of the hidden story of Magdalene as it appears in our personal testimony and devotional expressions. This phenomenological expression emerges as a gift through an existential encounter, a “divine glance,” into the combined hearts of St. Joan of Arc and St. Thérèse of Lisieux. This encounter can be a moment in time or gradual but always draws the soul into a state of mind and heart which is the beginning of a holy friendship with St. Joan of Arc and St. Thérèse of Lisieux, our guides on this journey to Magdalene’s France.

The process for responding to the call to holy friendship with St. Joan and St. Thérèse begins with a sense of being ‘urged’ by the Holy Spirit to discover the meaning of the divine glance. What is this? What is this love and affection for Joan and Thérèse? What does it mean? I must search it out! This leads to descriptive reflection and journaling as our means of searching. New maps of meaning emerge in our interior. We begin to connect the various nodes of meaning into a ‘story.’ The story reveals ‘that which we are not yet’ but toward which we are called. The story develops further as we contemplate, reflect, and journal. Empathy with St. Joan as we understand her through the hermeneutics of St. Thérèse becomes the foundation of our newly formed map of meaning. We begin to see as she sees based on our empathic understanding of her own map of meaning. The ‘syntax’ developing the coherence of the larger story emerges through the Magdalene, the foundress of our heavenly French royal line. Mary Magdalene, as the interior spiritual being of France, is the ‘gestalt’ image of this story.

Jesus Christ had left his mother to Jerusalem, St. Peter to Rome, St. John to Asia; to whom would he bequeath Mary Magdalene?

We already know; it was France that received from the hand of God that part of the testament of His Son.[2]

As the heavenly form we seek in the center of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, France is bequeathed in divine friendship to the interior being, the gestalt image of Mary Magdalene. This we can confirm by the testimony of history and tradition.[3] Through her heart and in her friendship, we will enter fully into divine friendship with Jesus and Mary in this holy Kingdom prepared for us. This is the Kingdom toward which St. Joan and St. Thérèse, our French royal sisters in heaven, lead us.

[1] Lacordaire, OP, The Life of St. Mary Magdalene, 11–12.

[2] Lacordaire, OP, 58.

[3] McClosky, The Life of St. Mary Magdalene - The Life Story of St. Mary Magdalene the First Apostle and Apostle to the Apostles as Theological Biography, 202–3.

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St. Thérèse unintentionally mastered phenomenology, which is why her simple childlike way is so compelling. She approaches us from the standpoint of enchanting experience and mesmerizing hermeneutics in her everyday life rather than academic erudition. The dry path of deductive reasoning through the painstaking rigors of medieval metaphysics, while necessary for our faith, does not readily imbue us with a comprehension of the meaning of our individual lived experience. Metaphysics confirms us in faith but rarely opens us to unravel the mystery of our own Being, which is what phenomenology helps accomplish in us. Thérèse perceived the phenomenon of her life as a process of Being that evokes a sense of mystery – a sense that something is there but hidden – what is it?

…but generally I preferred to sit on the grass some distance away. Then my reflections became really deep, and, without knowing what meditation meant, my soul was absorbed in prayer. Far-off sounds reached me, the murmuring of the wind, sometimes a few uncertain notes of music from a military band in the town a long way off; all this imparted a touch of melancholy to my thoughts. Earth seemed a place of exile, and I dreamed of Heaven.1

Martin Heidegger, a key figure in phenomenology, influenced modern philosophy to ask the same question. He developed a single concept that summed up his philosophy – presence is not Being. There is always something hidden in Being – what is it? Like Thérèse, he knew that the dry path of deductive metaphysics would never reveal the meaning of Being, which could only be discovered phenomenologically. He posited that we need to look anew beyond metaphysics - to their foundation - through the lens of interpretative phenomenology to understand the true meaning of Being. We must let Being speak to us from its obscurity in ‘original experience.’

…then the decisive question, and the place where an answer to the crisis is to be found, is in bringing the subject matters under investigation to an original experience, before their concealment by a particular scientific inquiry.2

The more we measure, weigh, and otherwise analyze beings as objects to be studied, the more Being (the Being of beings) withdraws from our view because “presence (being) is not Being.” We might say the presence of a particular being is not the full manifestation of Being. The more we analyze presence, the more the Being of a thing is hidden - “Earth seemed a place of exile,” Thérèse recalled as she became aware that the Being of earthly life remains hidden. In a Thérèsian sense, Heidegger was on the right track; he urged us in the right direction. To comprehend the enchanting ‘hidden,’ we must approach its meaning phenomenologically.

This amounts to saying that the manner of research is neither historiological nor systematic, but instead phenomenological.3

Heidegger's approach was descriptive and hermeneutical. He was not an analytical metaphysician. That left him pointing in a more fundamental direction. He asked the right questions by moving to the roots of metaphysics. This path led him to the phenomenological comprehension of angst in the face of death. Resolutely facing death lifts one out of the everydayness of the "every man." Angst becomes a phenomenological force driving one to authenticate one's life and think beyond the "they" of "every man." However, in going to the roots of metaphysics, must we dispense with them?

What if we ask the right questions through phenomenological discovery yet open ourselves to Being in a metaphysical framework? What if metaphysics becomes a framework through which we phenomenologically authenticate our Being? This is what Thérèse does for us. For Thérèse, God not only is the first cause (necessary but dry scholastic knowledge – an analysis of presence), God is the 'hidden' phenomenon of lived experience that appears in our day-to-day existential reality -  “the murmuring of the wind, sometimes a few uncertain notes of music." God is the concealed 'original experience' Heidegger seeks. He is Being itself. He is "I AM." Our Little Flower frames her autobiography from the outset with a stunning display of phenomenological insight imbued with metaphysics.

Our Lord has deigned to explain this mystery to me. He showed me the book of nature, and I understood that every flower created by Him is beautiful, that the brilliance of the rose and the whiteness of the lily do not lessen the perfume of the violet or the sweet simplicity of the daisy. I understood that if all the lowly flowers wished to be roses, nature would lose its springtide beauty, and the fields would no longer be enameled with lovely hues. And so it is in the world of souls, Our Lord’s living garden. He has been pleased to create great Saints who may be compared to the lily and the rose, but He has also created lesser ones, who must be content to be daisies or simple violets flowering at His Feet, and whose mission it is to gladden His Divine Eyes when He deigns to look down on them. And the more gladly they do His Will the greater is their perfection… As the sun shines both on the cedar and on the floweret, so the Divine Sun illumines every soul, great and small, and all correspond to His care–just as in nature the seasons are so disposed that on the appointed day the humblest daisy shall unfold its petals.4

Heidegger posited that every great philosopher has one idea he spends his entire life developing. With her metaphor of the "book of nature," Thérèse presents her "way" designed intellectually and through lived experience, which reveals itself in the clearing of Being as a towering model of spirituality – her "little way" of childlike trust in God. Through phenomenological discovery, she revealed a pathway for the spiritual perfection of souls leading to a metaphysical heavenly form. This is phenomenology sweeping the soul off her feet, authenticating her being in the hiddenness of Being. She perceived a metaphysics in Jesus' book of nature. To discover the form and then explain it, she first had to contemplate "an original experience, before their (the subject matters) concealment by a particular scientific inquiry" and develop a manner of correlative insight that was "neither historiological nor systematic, but instead phenomenological."

Thérèse opened for us a spirituality of mysticism that is ordinary. She unlocked the "little way," the pathway of childlike trust in God imbued with phenomenology's "ordinary" mysticism. Everyone can live the unremarkable way of Thérèse, a way of 'original experience' and phenomenological purity perceived through metaphysical insight. The "little way" is the way of ordinary mysticism. We can all participate in everyday mysticism.

Martin Heidegger could see what was needed to understand the true meaning of our Being. He profoundly changed the world by revealing that “presence is not Being.” The result was that we must seek the meaning of our hidden Being through authentic experience, through a phenomenology of everyday living. As a mystic of the ordinary life, St. Thérèse might agree.

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Check out the Heroic Hearts podcast on Substack,  Spotify, or Apple. Heroic Hearts is a podcast about healing, enchanting, and elevating our hearts through the stories and spirituality of St. Joan of Arc and St. Therese of Lisieux. Co-hosted with Amy Chase.

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The key to Catholic Hope is Holy Realism. “For, true fulfillment and joy come not in understanding how to live; they come through seeking that for which we would die. That for which we would die is that in which we truly hope” (From my manuscript, Seek First the Kingdom – The March of Hope). That for which we would die must be mind-independent Catholic truth; otherwise, we do not Hope virtuously in the Kingdom of God, we hope basely in ourselves and the Kingdom of Man. To “get out of ourselves,” and into the Kingdom of God, we need Holy Realism.

In her reflection on St. John of the Cross, Edith Stein teaches us that “one can only hope for what one does not possess, hope will be the more perfect the less one possesses.”[1] She explains the meaning of Holy Realism through the lens of the Carmelite mystic’s writings.

“This is holy realism: the original inner receptivity of the soul reborn in the Holy Spirit. Whatever the soul encounters is received in an appropriate manner and with corresponding depth, and finds in the soul a living, mobile, docile energy that allows itself to be easily and joyfully led and molded by that which it has received, unhampered by any mistaken inhibitions and rigidity. Such realism, when it leads a holy soul to accept the truths of faith, becomes the science of the saints. If the mystery of the cross becomes its inner form, it turns into a science of the cross.”[2]

Holy Realism is the key to unlocking the mysteries of the Kingdom of God “on earth as it is in Heaven” which is itself a statement of Holy Realism from the lips of Our Lord.

This was the same “inner receptivity of the soul” I received from St. Joan of Arc on my journey along The Trail of the Dogmatic Creed:

Joan of Arc was the chosen guide
On the path of the Dogmatic Creed next
No one can see the Kingdom
Without Hope that forms our desire

“Joan of Arc will lead you”
Spoke my saintly sister Thérèse
“To a new world view”
“Your actions belie your words of faith!”

“Joan of Arc acts
According to her faith”
“She is no practical non-believer!”
Saintly Thérèse smiled with eyes dancing

“Unlike her, brother,
You honor God only with lips!”

“You hope in yourself” Thérèse continued
“While whispering faith in God”
“You cannot see the Kingdom
With your old point of view”

“Joan of Arc will show you
The glorious new world view
That will animate you with love
And create the appropriate desire in you”

(Seek First the Kingdom, op.cit.)

The “glorious new world view” leading to a powerful, life-changing “appropriate desire” was the shared Holy Realism of St. Joan of Arc. It was a radical new dimension that led me to accept the truths of the faith and became a science of spiritual growth. It was like I formerly held a lens to my eye reversed such that everything was blurred and then St. Joan turned it over that I could see with vivid distinction.

Turning the lens over allowed St. Joan of Arc to lead me into truth by plan of the divine will and through the Immaculate Heart of Mary as Mediatrix of All Graces. Flipping the lens over through Holy Realism gave me the clear new world view enabling my will to march forward and through that act of will to be taught through the intellect under St. Joan’s care and guidance.

Holy Realism gave me “hope for what I did not possess.” It gave me a vision of “that for which I would die” rather than seeking simply to “understand how to live.” That movement of the will then subjected the intellect “to be easily and joyfully led and molded by that which it has received, unhampered by any mistaken inhibitions and rigidity.” (Stein, op.cit.)

The result was my own Thérèsian child-like trust in God.

“Holy realism has a certain affinity with the realism of the child who receives and responds to impressions with unimpaired vigor and vitality, and with uninhibited simplicity.”[3]

[1] Stein, The Science of the Cross (The Collected Works of Edith Stein Vol. 6)., 100.

[2] Stein, 40.

[3] Stein, 40.

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Jesus said, “Everyone who listens to these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock.” (cf. Mt 7:24)

There is no shortage of books on Joan of Arc. Each attempts to explain her thunderously supernatural, enigmatic life. We read commentaries that try to unravel the core of her substance. We know how she altered the course of Western civilization. We know the lingering effects and how this instills great devotion to her in many of our hearts. Yet, we might explore one more perspective still. Joan is like a gem, perhaps like an emerald, through which light reflects differently depending on one's point of view. Joan casts an array of startling colors through streams of heavenly light depending on where we stand when we look at her.

A perspective we might consider is that of her philosophical worldview and how that was, at its core, the real reason she ran into trouble with the political and religious leaders of her time. Philosophy is where our natural reason interfaces with supernatural grace. Natural philosophy cannot save us any more than can natural human acts of the will. However, grace works through our nature. We are blessed supernaturally by reading scripture because of our natural capability to read. We are blessed supernaturally through our natural sense of hearing. "Faith then cometh by hearing; and hearing by the word of Christ. " (Romans 10:17). Our natural senses are the gateway to our soul. Our natural philosophical orientation is one such gateway and one of the most important. A poor or inadequate philosophy impedes grace in the same way that dyslexia impedes comprehension in reading. Without proper philosophy, we struggle to understand the fullness of God's Word in our life just as a dyslexic struggles to understand the printed word before them.

So, we must consider Joan's philosophical orientation and how that ran obtusely and afoul with her contemporaries. It could be the key reason, even more so than her politics, that she died at the English stake before a crowd of ecclesial onlookers.

Joan of Arc was a Platonic ultra-realist in an Aristotelian world. This is one reason why she as a devout Catholic ran into trouble with a Catholic jury and so aggravated a Catholic England. Being an alleged Catholic “heretic” was not the real issue. Being a Platonist was.

“In the language of images Jeanne has thus (with her banner) depicted the Church in heaven as pure adoration of God, the Church on earth as the reception of God in the womb of the Virgin Mary, and sinful humanity, gathered in this Church around the cross along with the priests and soldiers, redeemed and repentant. Yet it is the same Church that is on earth and in heaven.”[1]

Joan saw the Kingdom of France through the lens of the Kingdom of Heaven. Therefore, nothing could be "true" on earth unless it conformed to Truth in Heaven. England, in her view, was wrong to be in France not simply because of political preferences. England did not belong in France because this was not the form of True France in Heaven.  Therefore, an "English France" on earth could not stand. Such a France would be false and opposed to True France.

“When the king saw her, he asked Joan her name and she answered: “Gentle dauphin, I am Joan the Maid, and the King of Heaven commands that through me you be anointed and crowned in the city of Reims as a lieutenant of the King of Heaven, who is king of France.”[2]

We see clearly in the examples above Joan's divinely oriented ultra-realism. True France was a heavenly form of which the earthly kingdom was a seed. Not to be obedient to True France was not to be obedient to Jesus Christ. Joan is a masterpiece of philosophical inspiration that opens the earthly floodgate to heaven's supernatural grace. She worked miracles. Grace abounded in her, seemingly without impediment. Her philosophical orientation, we might contemplate, was a key part of her secret. Her will was perfectly aligned to that of Jesus Christ as a result of grace ennobling her natural philosophical worldview. Jesus, therefore, united Himself with her soul in splendor. Joan was perfectly receptive to her call because she was already oriented through grace to accept it as is evident by her inquisitional trial testimony.

Question: What sort of help say you that this voice has brought you for the salvation of your soul?

 Joan: It has taught me to conduct myself well, to go habitually to church…

Question: Have you some other sign that these voices are good spirits?

 Joan: Saint Michael assured me of it before the voices came.

 Question: How did you know it was Saint Michael?

 Joan: I knew it by his speech and by the language of the Angels, and I believe firmly that they were Angels.

 Question: How did you know that they were Angels?

 Joan: I believed it quite quickly, and I had the will to believe it…[3]

Joan of Arc is a model for us. By God's design in the heavenly aristocracy of grace, she guides us with the abundance of her own spiritual gifts to a new world view. Joan shows us how to understand God's point of view. She guides us by pointing out the correct first philosophy and the optimal philosophical worldview to respond most fully to Christ's grace. Joan of Arc stands at our side as the morning light of grace emerges to shine brightly over the meadows, creeks, rivers, lakes, and majestic mountains of the Kingdom in our hearts.

By God's ordination in the divine aristocracy of the Kingdom of Heaven, Joan of Arc will guide us to a new point of view. She will show us how to let God explain his point of view.

Sadly, this was not the predilection of most of Christendom at the time. While Catholic France, as Joan pointed out indirectly to the dauphin Charles, truly owned the ultra-realism of the day, much of Catholic Christendom had been seduced by the glittering, flashing lights of Aristotelianism. The Renaissance was on its way, and while Plato would ultimately see the light of day again as the Renaissance moved forward, Aristotle's "we are called to question all things first through human reason" aura still ruled the day.

The Florentine rediscovery of Aristotle’s politics of freedom signaled the birth of a new ideal for Europe.

In short, a republic built on Aristotle’s model will allow men to achieve their highest potential not only as political animals, but as complete moral beings.[4]

As opposed to Augustine or Anselm's "we believe that we might understand," to which Joan would have agreed wholeheartedly, the crowds wanted their "freedom" to "understand before they believe." All matters, even those theological and pronounced by the Church, were up for grabs. The masses wanted Adam's false "freedom" to question God as opposed to accepting the eternal forms as revealed to us through scripture and the sacred traditions of the Church. Here is where the real tragedy of Joan of Arc played out. Joan, a model of obedience to traditional papal authority and the Social Kingship of Christ, was faced with those of the University of Paris who supported modern conciliar reform.[5]

This also explains what is otherwise inexplicable to the Aristotelian mind; that is, why did she follow her "Voices" to death at the stake when she seemingly had nothing to gain? There is no apparently sufficient syllogism from which to deduce a "reasonable" answer. The Aristotelian mind is arrested in wonder. Conversely, however, the Platonic mind, while still pained by the tragedy of her end, is not baffled at all. As Joan was consumed by fire, an English soldier saw a white dove ascend from the flames and fly toward free France. The Aristotelian mind, relying on syllogistic deduction based on natural reasoning, figures this a hallucination. Those with the Platonic mind smile, knowing that this is a sign that Joan truly succeeded in her divine mission and will be with us in True France for all eternity. It all has to do with one's perspective when observing the saintly jewel we call Joan of Arc.

Let us learn from God's Joan of Arc whom Heaven loves so much. It is time that we follow her through the meadows, across the creeks, over the rivers, around the pristine lakes, and upward to the majestic mountains.  Joan of Arc will give us the heavenly assistance we need to let God explain His point of view.

[1] Tavard, The Spiritual Way of St. Jeanne D’Arc.

[2] Pernoud and Clin, Joan of Arc - Her Story, 23.

[3] Pernoud, Joan of Arc - By Herself and Her Witnesses, loc. 392.

[4] Herman, The Cave and The Light - Plato versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization, 359.

[5] Pernoud and Clin, Joan of Arc - Her Story, 5. Prelude by Jeremy Duquesnay Adams - The intellectual leadership of the University of Paris was overwhelmingly in favor of conciliar reform.

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"You know that I have taught you statutes and justices, as the Lord my God hath commanded me: so shall you do them in the land which you shall possess: And you shall observe, and fulfill them in practice. For this is your wisdom, and understanding in the sight of nations, that hearing all these precepts, they may say: Behold a wise and understanding people, a great nation." (Deuteronomy 4:5-6)

In one moment on July 17, 2006, my life changed unalterably, as if concealed binding chains suddenly fell freely from my hands to the floor. I was near my end both spiritually and physically. For a quarter of a century, I lived in spiritual, mental, and emotional bondage. After this moment, I was free and had new life infused in my soul and body.

This moment of freedom set me on a new course, one of discovery, whereby the search proved to be life itself. Every new understanding built on the previous ones and increased my spiritual strength, which had dissipated to near death prior to the moment. With the aid of Heaven, I began building a spiritual staircase out of the cold, dark cell wherein my soul had dwelled, and upward to something grand and life-affirming. It gave life as I climbed upward. I was not exactly sure where I was going, or toward what I was building. Something had happened; yet, I was not sure exactly what that Something was. What I did know at the time, however, was that I had to find out. The following day, I heard a retreat master utter the phrase, "Seek first the Kingdom," (Matthew 6:33) and knew immediately that this was my course.

I did know that it was the grace of God at work in me. I did know that this grace came through the Immaculate Heart of Mary. I was praying to her before her statue when the moment occurred. She spoke to my heart through scripture that following day. By her command, I set about to seek first this Kingdom; for, I had a great fear that not to do so would return my soul to its former state. I felt compelled both in wonder and by fear; however, I knew that my life depended on seeking this Kingdom.

Seeking itself was nothing new for me. During my entire sojourn in darkness prior to that moment of freedom, I sought answers. Strikingly, on the Feast Day of St. Thérèse of Lisieux in 1984, the very substance of all answers to follow had been given to me. It was another moment, one to which I refer as the Great Event. The Great Event gave me an assurance of a Truth outside myself. In that moment, I came to believe, fully and completely, in Our Lord's Catholic Church and in His real and substantial Presence in the Eucharist. I knew that through this faith, I would find the answers I had been seeking. Yet, despite the certainty of my belief, I struggled painfully for decades.

I do not mean that I did not respond sincerely. I do not mean that I did not try. I exerted my will but continued to fall into deep spiritual crevices. I accumulated all the knowledge I could about this Kingdom. I studied it. I was erudite to some degree in it. Yet, I continued to fall into ever more frightening crevices. I failed to respond appropriately not as a matter of a lack of sincerity nor a lack of belief but due to a conditioned, backward methodology of understanding I had been taught from my youth. I saw reason as the foundation of truth. I believed but needed to prove this belief to be certain it was true. Reason determined truth in my conditioned model, not faith. The new certainty of faith given to me confronted my conditioned need for reasoned certainty.

Rather than climbing the lighted staircase of understanding given to me through faith, I tried to assemble the pieces in the darkness here below and build my own stairway of understanding. Philosophically speaking, rather than Plato's top-down ultra-realism, I relied on Aristotle's bottoms -up moderate realism. In so doing, I failed to see that I had it backwards. I simply needed to turn around the philosophical lens though which I saw the world and follow the pathway opened for me through Jesus Christ from above. From a natural reasoning point of view, Aristotle's logic is useful but only if subjugated under Plato's ultra-realism which the Apostles and early Church Fathers themselves adapted to interpret God's revelation.[1] Aristotle's principle of non-contradiction and his syllogisms are essential to reasoning; however, the syllogism is only as good as are its premises. From Plato’s realism we get the framework for proper premises. In my new model, understanding starts with faith, not reason.

The stumbling stone was that I had the right belief in the Church but the wrong philosophical orientation to unlock and open the gateway of the Church’s wisdom leading to the Kingdom. I missed this point entirely for decades. Our philosophical orientation either helps, or detracts from, our understanding of and ability to respond to God's grace. The Kingdom I am seeking conforms perfectly to a universal idea in the mind of God.[2] It went completely over my head all those years that the Great Event was not a call to seek Truth. Truth had been given to me. What I was called to do was obediently to follow that Truth to the Kingdom. Reason would be unconcealed along the way. This is “seeking first the Kingdom of God.” Knowing this and acting upon it is Wisdom.

We do not judge the truth of the Heavenly Kingdom by reasoning we construct on earth; we judge our reasoning on earth by what is revealed to us from the Kingdom. This is to live the prayer of the Our Father – “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven.”

The Great Event on the Feast Day of St. Thérèse in 1984 led to the moment at the feet of the Blessed Virgin Mary in 2006. Only two years later, in October of 2008, both would result in the Platonic philosophical re-orientation I needed to clear my vision. I call this the Trail of the Dogmatic Creed. Dogma, doctrine, Sacred Tradition, Sacred Scripture and the magisterial teachings of the Church represent the boundaries of the trail, outside of which we risk falling into deep crevices.

While reading a poem about St. Joan of Arc by St. Thérèse,[3] I was given the grace of this breakthrough. God's grace ran like a river through the Immaculate Heart of Mary and the hearts of St. Joan and St. Thérèse to my own. Thérèse passed on to me the great grace of devotion to Joan that was her own while she lived on this earth. Through this gift from Thérèse, St. Joan turned my entire viewpoint around.

Joan helped me see that what I needed was to let God explain His point of view. Through St. Joan of Arc, my philosophical orientation was radically altered. I turned to see the light of the Kingdom in the distance through the lens of Platonic ultra-realism, a gift of reasoning that I am convinced she herself obtained for me through her intercession. The rivers of grace flowed.

By reversing the lens through which I perceived the landscape, I could see the pathway before me by which to journey on the Trail of the Dogmatic Creed along and over those rivers of grace with St. Joan and St. Thérèse as my heavenly sisters and patronesses. I came to seek God's point of view, to see the world through His eyes, as given to us through revelation. I let God develop my understanding through this revelation. In short, St. Joan turned my glasses around, and I began to desire the Heavenly Kingdom I now could see in the far distance.

[1] Wikipedia, “Credo Ut Intelligam.” Credo ut intelligam (alternatively spelled Credo ut intellegam) is Latin for "I believe so that I may understand" and is a maxim of Anselm of Canterbury (Proslogion, 1),[1] which is based on a saying of Augustine of Hippo (crede ut intellegas,[2] lit. "believe so that you may understand")

[2] Stein, Knowledge and Faith (The Collected Works of Edith Stein, Vol. 8), loc. 1614. Consequently Thomas rejects an independently existing world of objective ideas. He admits created “forms”: the essence-forms that have their being in things, and he admits ideas different from them as eternal types of things in the divine mind.

[3] Thérèse, The Poetry of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, 264–65. See “To Joan of Arc.”

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Did the crisis in the modern world begin in the sixties, perpetuated through a revolution in the Church at Vatican II? Was it perhaps initiated further back by way of the Enlightenment? We should consider that this crisis began even further back in time, in fact, all the way to the vaunted golden age of Christendom, the thirteenth century. Then, and in the centuries that followed, the Western world pivoted from the Church Fathers on an important philosophical matter which gave way to something new which wrought revolutionary side-effects that still plague us today.

While religious dogma and doctrines stayed the same, the philosophical lens through which we understood religious teachings shifted. From the earliest apostles, Platonic top-down ultra-realism supremely ruled the day over Aristotelian bottoms-up moderate realism.  The thirteenth century and forward brought about a revolution whereby the mind of Aristotle usurped that of Plato as the starting point from which we came to understand reality[1]

The Catholic Church being the pillar and foundation of all truth[2] guards this unchanging truth in the name of Jesus Christ and by His authority; however, changing the natural philosophical orientation of those seeking that truth will lead them astray. The Church proclaims the same truths. However, the soul now reflects on them differently. The mind is clouded over. There is doubt, and the will grows weak.

Through the lens of Plato, that same lens assimilated into Christianity by the early Church fathers (op.cit. Coulombe), we see the divine teachings of the faith emanating and cascading down in resplendent hierarchical beauty.[3] We understand the necessity of a divine order as the means to facilitate our union with God in the Heavenly Kingdom. This downward emanating light draws us upward to Truth. Dogma is the trail leading to this Truth and is revealed to us in the mist through this light. The Church, founded by Christ and guided by the Holy Spirit, points us toward the true Forms of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness as they are in the Mind of God. It is from that perspective, the Platonic philosophical orientation, that we see ourselves in the company of the saints and angels as a purposefully and perfectly designed hierarchy of mediators sharing this divine light. They are our guides on this trail of Dogmatic light to Heaven and Truth.

This all changed well before the Protestant Revolution and the Enlightenment through the newly introduced moderate realism of Aristotle. Through Aristotle, we start not with the divine truths and then draw conclusions about the nature of things (the Platonic methodology), rather, we start with our existing understanding of things and use our rational minds to decide what truth really is. Plato is top-down. Aristotle is bottoms-up. By subjugating Plato to Aristotle, we feel a break between "faith and reason" as reason, rather than faith, becomes the ultimate judge of what is true.[4] In Aristotle's world, we must "understand before we believe." Through this Aristotelian realism, we must first prove God’s existence before we can believe Him.

Conversely, in the Platonic model, we, as St. Anslem and St. Augustine inferred, "believe that we might understand."[5] In this way truth will lead us to itself. "I am the Way and the Truth and the Life" (John 14:6). This is why "without faith it is impossible to please God. For he that cometh to God, must believe that he is, and is a rewarder to them that seek him." (Hebrews 11:6). Belief comes first by accepting the mind independent truths of the faith.

By the authority of his absolute transcendence, God who makes himself known is also the source of the credibility of what he reveals[6].

 In the language of natural Platonic philosophy, Truth, Beauty, and Goodness are similarly mind independent. We accept first, and from those premises we come to the knowledge of that which we tacitly understand.  Knowledge presupposes understanding through faith. Our whole intellect, both in its deductive and inductive capacities, is properly formed beginning with belief in Christ, who is the Truth. The natural Platonic orientation opens the window, allowing the divine Truth to flood our souls.

Just as in the natural order of things we need to know how to read that we might gain knowledge and wisdom from reading sacred scripture - otherwise we are looking at an array of written symbols we do not understand - we need properly oriented natural philosophy to unlock the divine mental symbols before us.

On her part, the Church cannot but set great value upon reason's drive to attain goals which render people's lives ever more worthy. She sees in philosophy the way to come to know fundamental truths about human life. At the same time, the Church considers philosophy an indispensable help for a deeper understanding of faith and for communicating the truth of the Gospel to those who do not yet know it.[7]

 We need a philosophical orientation toward light in order to see. "I am the light of the world: he that followeth me, walketh not in darkness, but shall have the light of life." (John 8:12). Mental models oriented in Plato’s realism turns us toward the divine light of grace that engulfs our souls just as the natural knowledge of how to read opens the divine light of grace when reading scripture.

Edith Stein also found the reorientation toward Plato irresistible.

The question may perhaps be asked why the author (Stein) has followed the lead of Plato, Augustine, and Duns Scotus rather than that of Aristotle and Thomas. The obvious answer is that she did indeed start out from Thomas and Aristotle. The fact that the actual discussion led in the end to certain goals which might have been reached faster and with greater ease if a different point of departure had been chosen, constitutes no sufficient reason to disavow the way which has been followed. The very difficulties and handicaps which had to be overcome on this way may prove of advantage to others.[8]

Our core problem is philosophy not theology. The Church officially teaches today what it has always taught. Historically, the revolutionaries in the Church rarely have been bold enough to declare straight-forward heretical doctrines. However, they have been unrelenting in tempting us to question our doctrines through Aristotelian skepticism. Through syllogistic formulas grounded on worldly premises, the enduring dogmas no longer appeal to us as relevant through the Aristotelian lens. God must conform our reasoning, rather than us conforming to His revelation. 

Here is the root of the revolution against the Church and Our Lord Jesus Christ. Natural philosophy cannot save us unaided by the saving grace of Jesus Christ. Plato did not open the gates of Heaven for us. Christ is the Truth - true God and true man - the only Savior of the world. However, not having our natural philosophy right surely obscures our understanding of Him and dims the light of divine reason and wisdom in our already cloudy minds.

[1] See Coulombe, Desire and Deception - How Catholics Stopped Believing. and Herman, The Cave and The Light - Plato versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization.

[2] Holy Bible - The Verse It: All(TM) Edition - Catholic Douay-Rheims Version, 4386. “But if I tarry long, that thou mayest know how thou oughtest to behave thyself in the house of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth.”

[3] Herman, The Cave and The Light - Plato versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization, 383. Plato’s reference to “a staircase” would have triggered immediate thoughts of heavenly hierarchies and the Great Chain of Being. So would the notion of a movement of the soul from lower to higher, as part of its processional return to its heavenly realm.

[4] Herman, 333. Why assume a Great Chain of Being or a Celestial Hierarchy of divine emanations, if there is no direct evidence for them around us and we can talk about and understand the world without reference to either one?

[5] Wikipedia, “Credo Ut Intelligam.”

[6] Pope St. John Paul II, “FIDES ET RATIO - On the Relationship between Faith and Reason,” para. 13.

[7] Pope St. John Paul II, “FIDES ET RATIO - On the Relationship between Faith and Reason.” para. 5.

[8] Stein, Finite and Eternal Being - An Attempt at an Ascent to the Meaning of Being, Preface xxxi.

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St. Thérèse, the other half of The Dove and Rose, is a Doctor of the universal Church. Her devotion to Joan of Arc is well documented in her images, plays, poetry, and autobiography.

She was eight or nine years old when she first discovered the heroine of France. She felt illuminated, filled with enthusiasm; the discovery of Joan affected her deeply: "a grace which I have always looked upon as one of the greatest in my life," she would recall in 1895 (Ms. A, 32r). There were both similarities and differences, but the little girl began to grasp her own destiny.[1]

Thérèse is possibly one of the greatest Doctors the Church has known. Her role in the mystical body of Christ is vast and rich. One specific Thérèsian feature relating to the fundamentals of this project is her integration of Catholic metaphysics and modern phenomenology. Though a bright student in her youth, she never attended the university. Yet, she naturally emanated brilliant phenomenological insights grounded in the magisterial teachings of the Church.

He (Jesus) showed me the book of nature, and I understood that every flower created by Him is beautiful, that the brilliance of the rose and the whiteness of the lily do not lessen the perfume of the violet or the sweet simplicity of the daisy. I understood that if all the lowly flowers wished to be roses, nature would lose its springtide beauty, and the fields would no longer be enameled with lovely hues. And so it is in the world of souls, Our Lord's living garden. He has been pleased to create great Saints who may be compared to the lily and the rose, but He has also created lesser ones, who must be content to be daisies or simple violets flowering at His Feet, and whose mission it is to gladden His Divine Eyes when He deigns to look down on them. And the more gladly they do His Will the greater is their perfection.[2]

She also boldly proclaimed phenomenological discovery of that which is new yet not theologically novel.

I must bear with myself and my many imperfections; but I will seek out a means of getting to Heaven by a little way--very short and very straight, a little way that is wholly new.[3]

Thérèse is a model for the modern world. She understood subjectivity as it relates to the dogmatic teachings of the Church and their associated metaphysics. She courageously walked through the valley of modern mind/object dualism into a world of phenomenological wonder filled with meadows, flowers, springs, and lakes. She could discern the necessary structures of the mind that extended beyond the material world through which she journeyed. She discovered a “way that is wholly new” without falling into novel modernism. All the while she was grounded in the Church. Thérèse was alive in the fullest sense of our Catholic faith.

She also has the role of interpreting Joan of Arc’s life for us. Her interpretation is the “Jehannian hermeneutic” for The Dove and Rose.

For Therese, the highest point of the epic of Joan of Arc was neither Orleans nor Reims, but the bonfire at Rouen. From historical science, she borrowed the facts. From the Word of God, she asks the meaning of this humanly incomprehensible fate.[4]

St. Thérèse is the spiritual and philosophical foundation of The Dove and Rose. She is our “little mother, Queen, and saint” walking beside us as we follow St. Joan into our own wonder-filled phenomenological world grounded in Catholic metaphysics.

[1] Thérèse, The Plays of St. Thérèse of Lisieux - “Pious Recreations,” loc. 561.

[2] Thérèse, The Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, 22.

[3] Thérèse, 151.

[4] Thérèse, The Plays of St. Thérèse of Lisieux - “Pious Recreations,” loc. 1029.

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 “St. Joan and St. Thérèse – Together they are the most beautiful color in the heavens. I am nothing but an accent.”

One wonders just why Our Lord gives each of us certain devotions. These devotions are particular favors that reflect Jesus’ own goodness in our lives. He demonstrates His affection for us sometimes directly and sometimes through others. I think that it is only when we step back to see the whole that we gain insight as to why He prefers one way over another in the particular.

We might relate this to understanding the principle behind an action. It is one thing to know we are walking down a dirt path. It is another to know that our purpose in doing so is to reach a beautiful creek pouring into a deep lake sitting in a peaceful meadow. One might say, “I care not about the reason I travel. I simply trust the One Who leads me. I will just let the mystery unfold!” That is well and good. Yet, what if we were to say, “I trust the One Who leads me, and He has promised to lead me to a beautiful creek pouring into a deep lake sitting in a peaceful meadow!” Now, that is even more marvelous. That is more fulfilling. And there is a reason for this. It is our nature to seek wholeness of understanding through the principle that drives our actions and desires.

St. Thomas Aquinas tells us that Truth is the principle whereby the intellect is moved. Desire for the perfect Good, i.e. Happiness, i.e. God is the principle whereby the will is moved. Neither the intellect nor the will can rest until perfect Truth and Perfect Happiness are attained. Only when the perfect Good is attained do all of the other appetites of our soul rest, there being no higher good to reach. It is weakly comparable to resting under a shade tree by the ocean on a perfect afternoon with no pressing issues. We have much going on in our lives; however, in that moment everything else seems unimportant. Our spiritual house is at rest. For the moment at least, we think there is nothing more to attain; therefore, we have no unruly, anxious, and unmet desires roaming about our soul to disturb us. This is what it means to have our appetites quieted.

We can see from this why we can know what perfect Happiness is in the principle and even journey toward it in movement of intellect and will, but we nevertheless cannot attain it in its fullness in this life. The perfect Good before which all other truth and desire is surpassed, and therefore before which all unruly spiritual appetites are stilled, is God Himself. Though understanding Him to be our End, we still cannot attain Him perfectly in this life, for we can do this only in the next. Such is our state that no matter how happy we become in this life, we continue to feel a tug on our hearts toward something even higher. “My heart is restless until it finds its rest in Thee, O Lord,” says St. Augustine.

So, even though we may tell ourselves that we do not need to know the end principle behind our spiritual journey, that it is “just an unknowable mystery,” our nature is such that we are constantly pursuing just that principle. Our nature is such that the intellect seeks more, the heart seeks more, and there will be no final rest until the End Principle, that toward which our entire being yearns, is attained.

What a state in which we would find ourselves, if not for the benefit of being further blessed, beyond our human nature, to receive from God the graces that lead us in the direction of that End Principle which is Himself in all of His glory. We call those graces the theological virtues of Faith, Hope, and Love. Where the natural intellect can reach no further with earthly reason, Faith provides that which it seeks. Where natural desire for earthly happiness yields the inevitable lack of fulfillment, Hope provides the desire for that which is truly fulfilling beyond the material world. Both Faith and Hope beckon us to that which is real and authentic but yet remains beyond our nature. That End Principle, that state of being beyond our purely human nature is Divine Love, the highest of the theological virtues. As it is beyond our human nature to attain this Divine Love on our own and as it is only attainable through sanctifying grace, we call this final state of being Glory. It is glorious indeed to be raised to such sublime heights. To live in Glory in Heaven is to attain God, Who is perfect Love. In Glory, the soul has reached the End toward which it has yearned and will be at perfect peace, its intellect and will now resting in Love.

Now, this all may seem to be a curious introduction to a discussion of my devotion to Sts. Joan and Thérèse. Yet, it is all of this that, in fact, drives me to say, “St. Joan and St. Thérèse – Together they are the most beautiful color in the heavens. I am nothing but an accent.” I will need to explain. Though not immediately obvious, these words reflect a key grace in my life that corresponds to the entire flow of ideas above. It has to do with that idea of movement toward the Principle, the End, and the Person Who is Love.

My devotion to Sts. Joan and Thérèse throws into living color how it is that I fit into the whole, unified panorama of metaphoric creeks, rivers, and meadows mentioned above, and the unified wholeness of which represents the End Principle of my movement on the Trail of the Dogmatic Creed. The unity and completeness of the panoramic landscape is the Principle of Divine Love in the Kingdom of God. The Trail represents the movement of my intellect and will toward that principle. We all have a desire to know where and how we fit into God’s loving plan. Our intellect and will move by nature toward answering this question and then actualizing the answer as demonstrated above. To understand even a little more and to have our desire increase even a little more, is an astonishing satisfaction in the heart of the soul. That is what it means to travel on the Trail of the Dogmatic Creed. One never reaches the End Principle in this life, but joy and meaning come from moving toward it with both heart (will) and mind (intellect) in this life. And my devotion to Sts. Joan and Thérèse has been a gift that moves me just so along that Trail.

In summary, this devotion has given me true freedom by showing me the End, which is Divine Love, and the means to reach the End. Authentic freedom is the freedom to obey. It is the freedom to do that which I ought to do, which is to love God and my neighbor as myself. It is freedom to seek that End which the intellect desires to know and the will desires to Love. I did not have that freedom before. I “did that which I did not want to do, and did not do that which I wanted to do.” Therefore, I was a slave. I was the victim of “license,” demanding my “right” to be allowed to do whatever I please and by which I felt “affirmed,” which is the world’s understanding of freedom.

In this devotion I found true freedom, which is that of obedience. If joy is found in moving toward the authentic End, which is Happiness, which is God, then one needs to be obedient to that Trail that leads the intellect and the will there. The principle is quite simple. If you follow the proper trail, you will arrive to the desired location.

Still, despite my joy in journeying along the Trail of the Dogmatic Creed with this devotion, I have, over the years, been troubled by one aspect. That troubling aspect has been the degree to which I perceived I did not fit. I have been most perplexed as to why this specific manifestation of grace has been that of two young women who were both very pious and holy in their lives while on this earth despite the differences in each vocation, one a Carmelite nun and the other a Warrior. There is no semblance of the goodness of their lives in my own. How would a cowardly vagabond and scoundrel find himself in such company?

To answer that one might think of the murderous villain for whom Thérèse prayed as a youth and who was converted just before being executed at the guillotine. Or perhaps one might think of the uncouth and foul-mouthed Captain La Hire whom Joan of Arc forced to pray, confess, and attend Mass before leading his men into battle. My life history would place me somewhere in their company, and, if not for the grace of God, to be even worse than both combined.

However, it fell upon my soul one day to understand all this in the more edifying light of the journey toward the End Principle St. Thomas has introduced to us. Referring back to Thérèse’s own metaphor of Jesus’ garden of souls being like that of a beautiful landscape where not every flower is a rose nor every tree a mighty oak, we see that each falls exactly into place so as to create for Him the most pleasing mystical landscape. I have often referred metaphorically to Joan and Thérèse as both being flowers making up the most beautiful flower bed in that landscape. They are, in their combined spiritual blooms, “the most beautiful color in the heavens.” Yes, I believe that to be true.

And this edification that fell upon my soul stemming from this metaphor is that in order for the landscape to be truly right, that is, for its end principle to be truly attained in its splendor, it was therefore essential that there not only be the subjects of beauty, such as flowers, and rivers, and trees. There must also be, for every color and every subject, proper accents to bring the subjects into proper proportion.

Now, accents do not exist but for the purpose of the subject matter. For example, an accent above the é in Thérèse’s name means nothing sitting alone. Brightness is a meaningless concept without color. The audible softening of a note has no meaning without the violin actually bringing that note to life.

However, accents are very important. It is a most noble call to be an accent. How would the flower bed’s hues resonate without accents? How can the flower bed move the eye in fascination toward it unless placed amidst the proper accents of grass, earth, and light? Yes, accents are crucial to making the picture just right. But an accent by itself is an oxymoron.

Yes, as I think of my life, now the meaning of it all is coming into focus.

My life on my own, that ignoble life I introduced above, was oxy-moronic both in the real meaning of the word and in the pun. My adult life has been filled with both incongruity and foolishness. This has been driven by a self-destructive desire to accent myself, which is to accent nothing, and to therefore be the oxymoron as defined.

Our Lord sought to save me from this dire condition of self. He first presented to me a magnificent inspiration to both my intellect and will, that is, through Faith and Hope, to honor Him by healing the wounds of His mother’s heart, so grievously saddened by the impious blasphemies our world hurls at her Son. This gracious gift was analogous to asking an impoverished man dying of an untreatable disease if he would prefer to live healthily in a seaside mansion amidst perfect temperature and sunshine. My intellect and will leapt forward toward that magnificent God of Love and the meaning He wished to place in me just as our dying man might leap toward that mansion.

Later, as I came to know St. Thérèse and her metaphor of the heavenly garden of souls, I was drawn further into this mystery of Jesus’ love and just what He would like from me in more detail. In the Lord’s garden where sat the Thérèsian bed of flowers, He and Our Lady revealed those other blooms, those from Thérèse’s spiritual sister, Jeanne d’Arc. And there, right there, when seeing those blooms arrayed together, I saw the color. I saw that color to which I refer when I say, “Together they are the most beautiful color in the heavens.”

Those blooms and that colorful array moved me. I knew I had discovered the place Jesus and Mary wished for me to be. This would be a place where He is honored and where she is therefore consoled. It was the place where I could take my wretched nothingness and at last be part of something beautiful. It was the place where my intellect and my will could move in obedience a step closer to the End-all principle Who is Jesus Himself and Who is Love, by fulfilling my role in the landscape. It was where I discovered that Jesus was pleased and glorified by this bed of flowers and where Our Lady desired to place accents in order to delight Him.

Journeying further along the mystical Trail of the Dogmatic Creed, I could see more clearly that to please Jesus and to console her own heart, Our Lady simply wanted me to be an accent. She wanted me to write, speak, whisper, and sing about His elegant flowers in His beautiful landscape that makes up His glorious Kingdom, the archetype of which is the heart of that same faithful mother whose spirit “rejoices in God her Savior.” Together with all of the other flowers, trees, rivers and lakes, each having their own colors, tones, and accents, the entire landscape exalts in Him and sings the praises of the Blessed Trinity. And that is what everything is all about.

“Je ne suis rien mais un accent.” I am nothing but an accent. My place is not about me. In principle, it is not even about Joan and Thérèse. It is about being where I am supposed to be in that mystical and mysterious landscape that is the Kingdom. It is about this Kingdom and about this Kingdom’s End Principle Whom we desire with all of our minds (intellect) and all of our hearts (will) to adore. It is about Love. At least that is what Joan and Thérèse told me.

So, this is why I tell people about Joan and Thérèse. It is what I am supposed to do. I am nothing, an accent with no subject, if I do not do it. At the same time, though I am very small in the scheme of things, I am still important. When Jesus walks through His Kingdom and by this flower bed to enjoy those blooms and to breathe in that joyful fragrance, the accents need to be in place. We all want Him to be pleased. Sunlight over here, please. Slide the rock to the right. And smooth that soil. He’s coming.

I may seem a bit foolish in my devotion. But I believe that the Holy Spirit has defended my demeanor in Scripture. The sinful but penitent woman who bathed Jesus’ feet in her tears made quite a scene at that Pharisee’s dinner party. It happens when you love Jesus. In fact, I think it should happen when you love Jesus.

And though I may seem foolish in my devotion and my expressions of love for Sts. Joan and Thérèse, for Our Holy Mother the Virgin Mary, and for Our Lord Jesus Christ, it beats being lost in the Dark Forest where I had previously been not only foolish but mad. Furthermore, and in all truth, I will say it beats being, well, I think the expression is, an oxymoron.

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I cannot express with enough sincerity how edified I am to be reading through St. Thérèse’s script for her play on the life of Joan of Arc, one of eight plays she wrote on various subject matters. This work exceeds my expectations in that our Little Flower, yet great Doctor of the Church, has interpreted her own life and spirituality in the historical person of Joan. Joan of Arc speaks true to her historical perspective, but we hear Thérèse’s voice. This is a most uplifting experience. And as a relevant aside, and lest one question the Carmelite nun’s affection for and familiarity with Sacred Scripture, there are over two hundred and seventy biblical references (either explicit or implicit) through all eight of her works.[1] Thérèse was imbued with the Sacred Writings.

Thérèse considered herself a kindred spirit with Joan of Arc. I did not realize fully the intensity of this kinship until reading in the Forward to the play (written by a modern day Carmelite) that “…the discovery of Joan of Arc affected her deeply; a ‘grace which I have always looked upon as one of the greatest in my life’ she would recall in 1895.”[2] Now, that got my attention, for I have considered the discovery of both Thérèse and Joan to be among the very greatest of gifts that Our Lord and Our Lady have ever bestowed on me. Certainly, Joan of Arc has had a similar relative impact on me, and it warmed my heart to hear Thérèse speak in such a way. I say relative impact because, in absolute terms, there is the difference between me and Thérèse that exists between the space just outside the gates of hell and heaven itself. One of her confessors stated that he believed that she had committed no mortal sin in her life. There is not one confessor of mine who would speak the same way about me, this I can assure you. But, nevertheless, Joan’s enormous influence on me, though as on a caterpillar in a flowerbed filled with butterflies, led me to feel deep appreciation for Thérèse’s own experience.

And the very thing that so lifts my heart is this combination of the two. I have for quite a while sought to understand the two saints as different sides of the same coin. Joan being the valiant and brave warrior for the King of Kings, willing to suffer a martyr’s death rather than betray Our Lord’s mission, while Thérèse is the soft, loving flower who unites herself with Jesus, not through fire, but through the suffering of Love, as she herself puts it.

However, the more I study these souls, whom I hold in such admiration, I sense that my metaphor is not only overly used but also very inadequate. There is truly a unity of spirit between them, more like the amalgamating of precious metals. Both of them died willingly in great suffering out of their love for Jesus. Both fought the good fight with unimaginable courage, Joan through death at the stake, Thérèse through bitter illness. Both have demonstrated to me the life of a true Christian, a true lover of Jesus Christ. Hearing (in the spirit) Thérèse’s words in Joan of Arc’s voice is like watching Jesus paint something more beautiful than the Sistine Chapel, create music more life-giving than Mozart’s Jupiter symphony or Beethoven’s Ninth, or write a poem that leaps into your heart before you have the chance to ruin it with your brain. It is this amalgam of souls, this painting, music, and poetry of Our Lord’s that has made me a better person.

The brush strokes, melodies, and poetic images that are Thérèse and Joan make me feel small as a Christian when I am near them. I simply do not match up, and that is all there is to it. I am a caterpillar crawling through a flower bed of roses. But they make me want to fly despite the crudeness of my ways. And that is, I believe, why the Lord and Our Lady have established them so firmly in my heart. They all want me to keep crawling until one day I fly too. I can think of no better mentors, sisters, or examples.

You may think I exaggerate the affection I have, but, on the contrary, I do not really have the words to express it adequately. I have no courage on my own, but because of these two, I wonder if maybe one day I might. And I think Jesus smiles at that. I feel small but think of great things with Our Lord. And I think He smiles at that, also. I want to take in the painting, hear the symphony, and absorb the poem, despite my awkwardness and “buggy” characteristics. I think, too, that this is what Jesus wants for me. For, these two, separately and combined, are Jesus’ own work of art.

The following is just one excerpt that speaks to my point:

Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

“Console yourself, Joan, dry your tears.
Lift up your eyes and ears to heaven.
Thence you will learn that to suffer has charms
Of its own.
And you will rejoice with harmonious songs.
These melodies will fortify your soul
For the battle which is soon to come.
You’ll need a love made all of flame,
For you will have to suffer!...
For pure souls exiled here on earth,
The only glory is to bear the cross.
One day, in heaven, this austere scepter
Will far outshine the scepter of a king.” 3

Pure Thérèse and pure Joan of Arc, together in that symphony of which I spoke. I hear the music of the Holy Spirit here, and I like it.

Thank you Lord, I do want to fly.

[1] The Plays of St. Therese of Lisieux. Translated by Susan Conroy and David J. Dwyer, ICS Publications: Institute of Carmelite Studies, Washington, D.C. p. 42.

[2] Ibid. p.62.

[3] Ibid. pp.74-75.

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