Table Of ContentEnduring Grace
Living Portraits of Seven Women
Mystics
Carol Lee Flinders
Dedicated to
my teacher
Sri Eknath Easwaran
&
To my parents,
Jeanne Lee Ramage
and Gilbert H. Ramage
Contents
Acknowledgments v
Preface vii
Introduction 1
Saint Clare of Assisi 15
Mechthild of Magdeburg 43
Julian of Norwich 77
Saint Catherine of Siena 103
Saint Catherine of Genoa 129
Saint Teresa of Avila 155
Saint Thérèse of Lisieux 191
Conclusion 221
Notes 229
Select Bibliography 239
Index 244
About the Author
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
Acknowledgments
To Christine Easwaran, for her warm encouragement from the very outset,
my deepest thanks. Also to my agent and friend Candice Fuhrman for
initiating me into the subtleties of proposal writing, and to her daughter Carrie
Jacobsen for her graceful editorial work on the proposal itself. And of course
thanks to Candice for finding me a home at HarperCollins. My editors have
been superb: Tom Grady, Caroline Pincus, Priscilla Stuckey all improved the
manuscript substantially, bringing astute critical faculties to the task but
kindliness, too, and tact.
Enduring Grace really began in the Sunday-morning sessions of retreats given
by the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation in northern California, where for
about five years I gave talks regularly on the mystics included in this book. To
all of the participants in those retreats, I owe a great deal, for they gave me
ample opportunity to develop my ideas and raised penetrating questions as
well.
The members of my spiritual family at BMCM have helped me through this
project more than they’ll ever know: especially JoAnne Black, and also Laurel
Robertson, Helen Cornwall, Sarah Dole, Julia MacDonald, Gale Zimmerman,
Sumner West, Melissa Larson, Sandra Delay, and Sultana Harvey. Several
friends read and responded to early drafts—Madeline Gershwin, Janet Niemi,
Spring Gillard—thank you!
Undertaking a project like this, you never really know—and it’s probably
best that you don’t—how much time it will take and how much of you. For
bearing the brunt of my absorption with good cheer and full support, my
greatest thanks go to my husband, Tim, and my son, Ramesh.
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Wouldn’t it show great ignorance, my daughters, if someone when asked
who he was didn’t know, and didn’t know his father or mother or from
what country he came? Well now, if this would be so extremely stupid,
we are incomparably more so when we do not strive to know who we
are, but limit ourselves to considering only roughly these bodies. Because
we have heard and because faith tells us so, we know we have souls. But
we seldom consider the precious things that can be found in this soul, or
who dwells within it, or its high value.
—Teresa of Avila,
Interior Castle 1.1.2
Preface
It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love,
are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think
of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I
am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the
love of it, and the hunger for it…and then the warmth and richness and
fine reality of hunger satisfied…and it is all one.
…There is food in the bowl, and more often than not, because of what
honesty I have, there is nourishment in the heart, to feed the wilder, more
insistent hungers…. There is communion of more than our bodies when
bread is broken and wine drunk. And that is my answer, when people
ask me: Why do you write about hunger, and not wars or love?
1
—M. F. K. Fisher, The Gastronomical Me
That prayer has great power
which a person makes with all his might.
It makes a sour heart sweet,
A sad heart merry,
A poor heart rich,
A foolish heart wise,
A timid heart brave,
A sick heart well,
A blind heart full of sight,
A cold heart ardent.
It draws down the great God into the little heart,
It drives the hungry soul up into the fullness of God.
It brings together two lovers,
God and the soul,
In a wondrous place where they speak much of love.
—Mechthild of Magdeburg,
The Flowing Light of the Divine Godhead (5.13)
FRIENDS who know me mostly as a food writer and one of the authors of
Laurel’s Kitchen were surprised by this book about women mystics: many
wondered out loud what the connection was between these two realms and
how I happened to pass from the one to the other. The lines I have quoted
above—from a celebrated contemporary food writer
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viii / Carol Lee Flinders
in the first instance, and a revered medieval mystic in the second—are meant
to suggest that my two worlds are not as remote from each other as they might
seem. Whatever interest we have in food, the late and much loved Mrs. Fisher
reminds us, arises out of the simple fact that we are hungry—hungry, albeit,
for all kinds of things. Mechthild, too, recognizes how hungry we are, and for
how many forms of nourishment, but she traces that hunger to the soul itself,
and insists that nothing short of “the fullness of God” can satisfy it.
That is the short answer. I like to offer it because it hints at the rich possibil-
ities of dialogue between women—no matter what their historical context—who
know something of “the wilder, more insistent hungers.” But demonstrating
that those two worlds are not mutually exclusive doesn’t explain how one
might actually travel from the one to the other, and I think that is what friends
and readers of Laurel’s Kitchen want to know. Here, then, is the longer answer,
a backward look, brief as I can manage, at how this project came to be—spe-
cifically, at the personal concerns and questions that shaped it, for these lives
can be approached, and have been, from a great many perspectives, and the
one I have adopted is admittedly idiosyncratic.
In the first place, I am not a Roman Catholic. I didn’t grow up acquainted
with any of these women as saints. None of them hovered in the background
of my childhood, either as inspiring role models or as figures who might have
interceded with the higher powers on my behalf. Not that I disliked the idea,
because some form of intercession would have been in order. But at the rural
Presbyterian church where my parents dropped me off on Sunday mornings,
I got the idea that you were expected to lay your case directly before your
maker—in person, or not at all.
They were absent, too—both Catherines, Teresa, all of them—throughout
my growing-up years. At Stanford, in fact, in the early sixties, feminine voices
and perspectives of any kind were a rarity. Not until late in the spring of my
senior year was there even a hint of the great opening-out that was to come:
this was when some of us organized a faculty-student conference on the topic
“The Role of Women.” Amazing now that it could have been stated as clumsily
as that—“the role,” indeed! But there it is; we didn’t know any better, men or
women.
About the same time, and as predictive of things to come, another group of
us took advantage of a new university policy that permitted stu-
