RonRolheiser,OMI

A Soul Friend

April 27, 2026

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One of the saints who speaks to me is Therese of Lisieux, commonly known as the Little Flower. This wasn’t love at first sight. For years I was put off and left cold and uninterested by how her person and her image have become encrusted in an overly saccharine piety. She was too sweet, too pious. Not a saint for me! That changed, thanks to a friend who told me, “Don’t read books about her – read her!” I read her and found in her a soul friend.

Who is Therese of Lisieux? She was a Carmelite nun who died from tuberculous in 1897. She was only twenty-four years old when she died, and as a Carmelite nun hidden away in a convent in rural France, she died in anonymity, probably known by fewer than a hundred people. However, during the last two years of her life, as she lay dying from tuberculous, she kept several diaries. After her death, her Carmelite sisters sent her unpublished diaries to a few other convents, intending to let a small circle of religious women know of her death and a little about her life.

The rest is history. The manuscripts were leaked to a wider public and in less than ten years, printing presses were literally having trouble meeting the demand for her autobiography. Her little convent in Lisieux was receiving more than five hundred letters a day, and people from all over the world were beginning to come to Lisieux on pilgrimage. A hundred and thirty years later, little has changed. She remains extraordinarily popular.

Why? Why this perennial intrigue about Therese? Because there is something about her that touches the soul in a particularly empathic way. How so?

Therese had an anomalous background that produced an extraordinary character. Her life as a child was in many ways tragic. Her mother got sick at the time of Therese’s birth and was unable to care for her during the crucial first year of her life. She was cared for by a nurse and an aunt. As a one-year-old she was returned to her mother, but her mother was already terminally ill and when Therese was four, her mother died. Therese then chose her older sister, Pauline, to be her new mother. Five years later, Pauline entered the convent and as a nine-year-old Therese again lost a mother.

Shortly after this she took ill and almost died. This was triggered by a visit to Pauline who was then a Carmelite nun. Together with her three other sisters and her father, she had gone to visit Pauline in her convent. After Pauline had spent some time focused on her little sister, she naturally became preoccupied in adult conversation. Left out, in sheer frustration, little Therese stood right in front of her big sister and, shaking her dress, began to cry.

“What’s the matter?” asked Pauline. “You didn’t notice!” cried Therese, “I’m wearing the dress you made me!”

She then became disconsolate and on returning home took to bed and for some weeks; despite the best efforts of various doctors and every kind of cajoling by her family, hovered between life and death. Eventually she recovered. Such was the tragedy and oversensitivity of her childhood.

Yet, and this is the great anomaly, as a child, Therese was doted on and loved in a way that few children ever are. Her father, her sisters and her extended family considered her their little queen and she was cherished and made to feel extraordinarily precious and unique. Her sister Celine photographed her every move. Few children ever grow up as nurtured in love and affirmation as did Therese.

And her personality bore out the effects of both the tragedy and the love. On the one side, she could be heavy, dark, withdrawn, and otherworldly. She made easy friends with mortality, was a mystic of darkness, the austere adult, the little girl-woman, who, wounded early, grew up fast. But, on the other side, she always remained the magical child, Cinderella, who, because she was so loved and graced, developed a very robust self-esteem, a confidence and a capacity to love as few others ever have.

So loved as child, a part of her remained ever the little girl, the puella, the incarnation of childlikeness, innocence, and gaiety. Only a Therese of Lisieux could end all her letters with the phrase: I kiss you with my whole heart!

In a soul so formed lies her mystique, that is, her unique combination of depth, insight, and other worldliness, even as she desperately clings to the tiniest gifts from her family and every small token of earthly affection. Only a soul so formed could, at age twenty-two, have the complexity and wisdom to write a mystical and theological treatise that rivals that of great theological doctors, and only a soul so formed could be both a study in hyper-sensitivity and human resilience.

A saint so pathologically complex can be a soul friend to our own complex souls.

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Struggling with Our Own Complexity

April 20, 2026

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Catherine de Hueck Doherty, the founder of Madonna House, once gave a particularly insightful interview. A renowned and respected spiritual figure, she acknowledged that her path wasn’t easy, that she had her fair share of inner struggles. Why? Because, like the rest of us, she was pathologically complex. Being a human being, she suggested, isn’t easy.

Here’s how she described herself. I paraphrase:

“Inside me,” she said, “it seems that there are three people. There’s someone I call the ‘Baroness’. The ‘Baroness’ is the one who’s spiritual, efficient, and given over to prayer and asceticism. She’s the religious person inside me. She’s the one who founded a religious community, who writes spiritual books, challenges others, and has dedicated her life to God and the poor. The ‘Baroness’ reads the Gospels and is impatient with the things of this world. For her, life here and now must be sacrificed for the next world.

But, inside me too, there’s another person I call ‘Catherine’. ‘Catherine’ is a woman who would like fine things, luxuries, comfort, pleasure. She would like to enjoy idleness, long baths, fine clothes, putting on makeup, good food, and used to (while married) enjoy a healthy sex life. ‘Catherine’ enjoys this life and doesn’t like self-sacrifice. She’s not particularly religious and generally hates the ‘Baroness’. ‘Catherine’ and the ‘Baroness’ don’t always get along.

However, there’s still another person inside of me, who’s neither ‘Catherine’ or the ‘Baroness’. Inside me too there’s a little girl lying on a hillside in Finland, watching the clouds and daydreaming. This little girl doesn’t particularly like either ‘Catherine’ or the ‘Baroness’. … “and, as I get older, I feel more like the ‘Baroness’, long still for ‘Catherine’, but think maybe the real person inside me is the little girl daydreaming on a hillside.”

Had these words been uttered by someone still struggling with basic conversion, they wouldn’t pack much punch. They came however from a spiritual giant, from someone who had long ago mastered essential discipleship and had, long ago too, vowed herself to a radical discipleship of service to God and the poor.

If saints struggle in this way, what about the rest of us?

We all struggle because we’re all complex. It’s not a simple thing to be a human being and it’s even more complex if you’re striving to give yourself over beyond what comes naturally.

Like Catherine de Hueck Doherty, all of us have multiple “persons” inside us. Inside each of us there’s someone who has faith, who wants to live the Beatitudes, who wants to be attuned to truths and realities of the Gospels. Inside each of us, there’s a martyr who wants to die for others, a saint who wants to serve the poor, and a moral artist who wants to carry his or her solitude at a high level. But inside each of us there’s also someone who wants to taste life and all its pleasures. Inside each of us there’s a hedonist, a sensualist, a libertine, a materialist, an agnostic, and an egoist.

Beyond that, inside each of us there’s also a little girl or little boy, innocent, daydreaming, watching the clouds on some hillside, not particularly enamored with either the saint or the sinner inside us.

Who’s the real person? They all are. We’re all of these: saint and pleasure-seeker, altruist and egoist, martyr and hedonist, person-of-faith and agnostic, moral artist and compensating libertine, innocent child and jaded adult, and the task of life is not to crucify one for the other, but to have them make peace with each other.

And peace, as we know, is more than the simple absence of war. It’s a positive quality. What makes for peace? Two things: harmony and completeness.

Harmony. A melody is peaceful when all the different notes are strung together to make a harmony, a melody. To have peace, is to not have discord. And there’s also another part to peace, completeness. To play a complex melody, you need a full keyboard. Peace depends upon having enough keys at your disposal to play all the notes life demands.

That’s true too of human nature. Our complexity is not our enemy but our friend. All those seemingly opposites inside us demand a full keyboard. Because we’re both sinner and saint, hedonist and martyr, adult and child, we need a complete set of keys to play the various musical scores that life hands us.

The secret is to arrive at harmony, where the various aspects of our lives make a melody. Metaphorically, we need to move beyond a random stabbing at the keyboard that produces discord. We must also employ a full keyboard so that we can play all the notes life demands. We’ve all had enough experience in life to know that. Peace comes when we put all the complex pieces inside of us together in an order to make a beautiful melody. And, of course, the more varied the notes, the more complex the musical score, the richer the final melody.

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Our Problems with Faith Today – A Diagnosis and a Prescription

April 13, 2026

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In 2007, Charles Taylor wrote a book entitled, A Secular Age which gave us a clear and comprehensive analysis of the secular age we live in and the implications of that for our faith. More than a thousand years before that an unknown author in the fourteenth century wrote a book, The Cloud of Unknowing, that (in way that doesn’t initially leap out at you) answers the fundamental question Taylor left us with.

I had read both Taylor’s book and The Cloud of Unknowing without making a connection between the two. That connection was pointed out to me by a doctoral student whose thesis I am directing. Her thesis? She is interfacing Taylor’s analysis of secularity with the fundamental insight of the unknown author of The Cloud of Unknowing. Here’s her thesis in capsule:

One of the ways Taylor defines our secular age is this: “The shift to secularity consists of a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and unproblematic to one in which it is understood to be one option among others – and frequently not the one that is easiest to embrace.” Taylor suggests that two things are conspiring to produce this.

First, we now are what he calls “buffered persons”, that is, we have moved from “a self who is vulnerable to many religious fears and superstitions to a self that is buffered from all the ‘spirits’ within the enchanted world.” I’m old enough to have been brought up in that enchanted world where spirits, demons, and supernatural powers lived under every rock, where you sprinkled holy water around the house during a lightning storm.

 Second, for Taylor, we now live inside what he calls an “immanent worldview”, where our secularized world gives us the idea that there is no other world than this one and we don’t need anything beyond this world to achieve full flourishing, meaning, and happiness.

Taylor, a devout Christian, concludes by saying that this new situation doesn’t constitute a crisis of faith, but rather a crisis of imagination. The old imaginaries within which we imagined our faith don’t serve us anymore. We need a new imagination within which to picture our faith.

And from where can we draw this new imagination?

According to my doctoral student, the new imagination we need within which to re-picture our faith can be drawn from the fundamental counsel given us in The Cloud of Unknowing. But this isn’t immediately evident.

On the surface, what this unknown fourteenth century writer advocates is a simple prayer practice, not unlike what many today call “centering prayer”, where you go to prayer without any agenda, request, or words. You just sit in silence, without expectation, simply trusting that God will give you what you really need.

However, for the author of The Cloudthis is not just a simple prayer practice, it’s a basic stance before life itself. It’s a stance of radical honesty, of radical sincerity, where you stand naked in soul before yourself, life, and God. What’s being said here?

In short, because of our buffered persons and our immanent consciousness, we are almost never fully naked in soul, almost never fully sincere (sine cere – without wax), never fully ourselves. It is rare for us to get beneath all the distractions, ideologies, cultural obsessions, traumas, daydreams, and groupthink that seemingly forever color our consciousness.

What The Cloud advocates is that we, as our habitual stance before reality, try to strip away everything that’s not true in us in an attempt to stand outside of all of our distractions and defenses, naked in soul, helpless to think or imagine, just asking life and God to give us what we cannot even imagine is best for us.

Taylor suggests that we need a new imagination within which again to picture our faith. The Cloud suggests that the new imagination we need will not be the result of intellectually thinking ourselves into a new way of imaging our faith. Rather, that new imagination will be given us when we stand before God, naked in spirit, devoid of our own imagination, and helpless to help ourselves. Then, paradoxically, when we can no longer help ourselves, we can be helped from what is beyond our buffered selves and the virtual immanent prison within which we live. Life and God can now flow into us, and flow into us in an untainted way, precisely because we are standing naked, helpless and unknowing, before the mystery of ourselves, life, and God.

John of the Cross words this invitation this way: Learn to understand more by not understanding than by understanding.

What this means is that, paradoxically, faith starts at precisely that place where we are tempted to think it stops, namely, at that place where we find ourselves naked and helpless to imagine faith and God.

What’s our real struggle for faith today? Charles Taylor gives us a diagnosis. What are we to do inside this struggle? The Cloud of Unknowing gives us a prescription.

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