Saint Joan and Saint Thérèse, together they are the most beautiful colors in the heavens.
They form spiritual blossoms that wonderfully dazzle our senses
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Saint Joan and Saint Thérèse, together they are the most beautiful colors in the heavens.
This motto describes St. Joan of Arc and St. Thérèse of Lisieux individually and in their blended spiritual kinship. Each saint is individually her own remarkable and unique color imbued in the magnificent, metaphorical spiritual landscape that is the Kingdom of God; yet, together their souls create a colorful collage of even more astonishing beauty. Expressed in the language of St. Edith Stein’s phenomenology, Joan and Thérèse share an internal horizon of meaning while maintaining their inalienable individual “I.” Their combined hearts radiate with the grace of God through a unifying noetic plurality of individual meaning.
We could expand this metaphor of the Kingdom to say that they are flowers in the landscape, each with individual brilliance; yet together forming blossoms that wonderfully dazzle our spiritual senses. Furthermore, we raise our eyes to see that this bed of flowers is part of a larger, unified ensemble of trees, meadows, lakes, rivers, hills, and mountains. If we contemplate this scene as one standing quietly on a hilltop overlooking a remarkably edifying panorama, we begin to appreciate God’s work of supernatural artistry that is the spirituality of Sts. Joan and Thérèse.
In this contemplative image, we are enlightened as to the substance of their spirituality, both individually and as an amalgam of two souls. Individual spirituality receives its beauty and grandeur from the ground in which it is planted. Flowers only grow to perfection in the right soil with the proper sunlight and adequate water. A river only looks masterfully rich and powerful in the proper setting. Meadows only receive a pristine elegance in the context of their surroundings made of lakes, forests, and mountains. Just so, Sts. Joan and Thérèse lift our souls to heavenly heights with their spiritual beauty by being uniquely inspiring within their combined, authentic context that elevates the dignity of the larger picture.
It is the latter point that is so often misunderstood or even ignored when contemplating these two great saints. To be beautiful in oneself is one thing, but to have that beauty be appropriately proportional to an even higher principle representing a unified wholeness of all parts is to reach perfection. Our spiritual perfection cannot be attained in a vacuum. By the very nature of what it means to be perfect, our spirituality must, while retaining our individual “I,” be moved outward from ourselves toward the authentic whole. Being a beautiful flower is wonderful. Being a beautiful flower in a meadow which sits by a rushing river with majestic mountains in the distance is perfection.
St. Thérèse spoke of how Jesus taught her this very thing. He opened her spiritual eyes through the mystery of nature to observe how not every soul in the metaphorical landscape of His Kingdom is created equally to be a mountain, or an oak, or even a fragrant rose. Each soul is created differently and proportionately by Him for the purpose of magnifying the glory of God in the unified oneness of the end Principle which is Himself.
Thérèse could see that this is comparable to how beautiful individual elements in nature glorify the whole landscape. Each can be seen in its individual wonder while at the same time all are lost in the magnificence of the unified whole. Whether one is a rose or a small violet, an oak or a shrub, our perfection comes in being that for which we were designed that we may all celebrate the beauty of the whole as one family. This is the glory that is the Kingdom of God, that is, unity in Principle while still astonishing in individual variety. Referring again to Stein’s phenomenology, this glory is a shared communal internal horizon of meaning experienced through the beauty of each individual “I.”
Using this general scheme, we see a mystery unfold in the particular with Sts. Joan and Thérèse as they retain their individual spiritual beauty but still blend together in that flower bed of dazzling array. Stepping further back we contemplate that dazzling array as it brings to life a unique beauty that glorifies the entire Kingdom. It is this perfect ordination that we celebrate.
A flower needs nothing but the potentiality held in a seed to be transformed to its end. It is bound by the laws of the created order to appropriately actualize with the application of the proper efficient causes of change such as water, sunlight, and minerals. A rose seed cannot resist becoming a rose in the proper environment.
This is the beauty and marvelous mystery I encountered when I was called by St. Thérèse and St. Joan out of the Dark Forest of individualism, relativism, and secularism among many other cancerous “isms” that seek the ending principle not through unity in meaning but only through the chaotic, subjective desires of the particular individual. Theirs was a beauty far more reasonable, intellectually stimulating, and emotionally life-giving than the subjective, intellectually inconsistent, and emotionally unsatisfying self-affirmation of the individual.
In relief, these two took me by the hand to lead me along a narrow pathway I came over time to know as the Trail of the Dogmatic Creed. The Trail is the path of revelation that, through Faith and Hope, transforms our potentiality into the final Form of Love as one travels toward the true Kingdom. These two were sent by the Mother of God who had pity on me in the sickness and spiritual death I had experienced as I fell to the ground seeking my own way in the Dark Forest of the secular world.
Though I am like but a blade of grass resting in the shade of these two elegant, fragrant, and beautiful flowers, I am more than content. I am happy and joyful, two attributes I was unable to acquire while trying to be a mighty Redwood in the smoke-filled Dark Forest of man-made philosophies and fanciful spiritualities.
It was when I heard my name called by those two saintly souls who possessed such beauty and freedom that I felt it only reasonable to approach them to know more. They pointed toward the Kingdom in the far distance at the end of the Dogmatic Creed which ran gracefully through the meadows and over the hills. Though only a trace of this Kingdom appeared in the distance, for the rest is mystery not to be fully revealed in this life, my heart was inflamed with desire for it. From that moment forward, every other principle paled in comparison.