VIRIDITAS2: SOUL GREENING
Interviewed by Sister Malia Dominica Wong, OP
Hawaii Catholic Herald
During a lunch with some new team members at Chaminade, a colleague posed an intriguing question: “When did you first want to be a scientist?” As the conversation circled to me, I found myself answering (to everyone’s surprise) “As a teenager I thought I had a vocation to contemplative life as a Poor Clare or Carmelite, but that was fleeting and soon science became my vocation, and life happened.” After lunch, I reflected that “to everything there is a season” because my spiritual life has re-emerged in unexpected ways, with Carmelite spirituality and prayer at its center.
Re-engaging with my faith in my mid-40s, started, as for many people, with a sense of something missing and lost. Like many, I created my own barriers of feeling unworthy and not belonging in church or with God and I didn’t know how to shake off those feelings. But God’s loving hand started to guide me through what I love to do the most: reading.
By chance I found “My Beloved: The Story of a Carmelite Nun” by Mother Catherine Thomas. Her story captivated me, spanning from entry to the Carmelites in the 1950s through her journey “into the desert,” and later years as a hermit. While the rigors of Carmelite life were evident — the cold nights and hunger pangs — her vivid descriptions of an intimate relationship with Christ fascinated me. I felt pangs of envy and yearning — how could I reach that same intimacy with God?
Marianist Father Marty Solma placed St. John of the Cross in my path, and his poignant poetry and raw vulnerability affected me deeply. Through John, I came to Teresa of Avila. Other Carmelites — Theresa of Lisieux, Edith Stein — would come later, but Teresa of Avila’s writings provided a tangible roadmap to spiritual connection and that intimate friendship with God that I had sensed but been unable to grasp. “The Interior Castle” and “The Way of Perfection” are profound roadmaps that articulate and guide a crystalline path toward intimacy with Christ.
My clumsy, jerky, amateur journey into Carmelite spirituality has been both intellectual and spiritual. I read tales of historical drama and political intrigue, profound spiritual poetry, flights of mysticism and Teresa’s practical plain speaking about prayer. It is in my prayer life that I have experienced the most marked impact of her words. For Teresa, prayer is a conversation: “nothing else than having contact with a friend of whom we know that he loves us and with whom we therefore seek contact in order to speak with him alone and in confidence.”
Walking her “Way,” my prayer life evolved from the transactional and perfunctory to a loving dialog and, on occasion, the moving experience and rainfall of mental prayer. I came, haltingly, to understand the idea of God praying through us once we can achieve the environment of silence needed to truly hear.
God finds a way for us all, in our time and in our season. We can be our own roadblocks, succumbing to self-doubt and unworthiness. Father Marty told me straight: “You do belong, are deserving, are worthy.” And Teresa reminds me that God’s invitation is omnipresent; but our response to that call defines us.
Helen Turner is a professor of biology at Chaminade University of Honolulu.
