A holy expression of Jehannian-Thérèsian French Catholic Spirituality
Our living reality along the lighted pathway in union with St. Joan and St. Thérèse
A Phenomenology of the French Royal Hearts of St. Joan of Arc and St. Thérèse of Lisieux
Royaume France is an embrace of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. It is a fairy tale imagined as a painting, a poem, and a song revealed in its eidetic purity as a phenomenological expression of truth, beauty, and goodness. Fairy tales are truths proclaimed through the medium of “story.” Phenomenology is a creative process of casting light on the essence and meaning of the story to understand the truths inherent. Royaume France is the phenomenological expression, the “emergence,” of a fairy tale we have never been told. Like a painting, Royaume France is the “appearance of the story appearing” as lived experience described in words. Through the phenomenology of lived experience, our being transforms as the truth, beauty, and goodness of that emerging story-never-told in us.
Lived experience
Royaume France is an account of lived experience in union with the French royal hearts of St. Joan of Arc and St. Thérèse of Lisieux. It was intuited and then modeled through the phenomena of the life of St. Joan of Arc, Thérèsian Carmelite spirituality, the golden legend of St. Mary Magdalene in France, the early Church martyr St. Philomena, 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 French Catholic spirituality and True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Royaume France 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 theory of the Kingdom of France in the City of God based on the golden legend of St. Mary Magdalene. Contemplative intuition based on the model's ontology led to a phenomenological discovery revealing St. Philomena as the gestalt expression and Queen of France under the universal Queenship of Mary.
The Royaume France model developed through three diachronic movements.
The first from 2008 to 2010 is the devotional expression to the combined hearts of St. Joan and St. Thérèse.
The second from 2010 to 2017 is the phenomenological reduction of devotion to St. Joan and St. Thérèse demonstrating the possibility of structuring a theory of the Kingdom of France as the Lily and at the center of Our Lady's Immaculate Heart. This is performed by bracketing the natural attitude toward our historical interpretation of France in the City of Man. This movement founds 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 from 2017 to 2021 is the phenomenological creative expression of discovery revealing the holy martyr St. Philomena as the Queen of France under the universal Queenship of the Virgin Mary. This last movement is the pinnacle contribution to the Church. It is understood to be within the noematic field of the Church's doctrinal and dogmatic understanding and obedient to her teaching authority.
The initial phenomenon of the "divine glance" of St. Joan of Arc through the Jehannian hermeneutics of St. Thérèse revealed "true France" as the gestalt of Philomena in the center of Our Lady's Immaculate Heart.
The first and second movements generally are found at RoyaumeFrance.us and in the books presented below. The third is found in the pages of this site, RoyaumeFrance.com, with a publication forthcoming, the Lord and Our Lady willing.
The publication of Royaume France is her proclamation of hope through the combined hearts of St. Joan of Arc and St. Thérèse of Lisieux. This model is for those seeking a journey of lived experience to mystical France in the center of the Immaculate Heart of Mary with these two saintly, celestial sisters. Royaume France also can serve as a template for a more general model of meaningful lived experience in the presence of God through the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
The Jehannian-Thérèsian Model
Clarity of mind, agility of thought, and pureness of heart
The goal of Royaume France is to help us unite our hearts, minds, and souls with the two celestial patronesses chosen for us by Our Lord Jesus Christ and His Mother, the Most Holy and Immaculate Virgin Mary. These two proximate figures are St. Joan of Arc and St. Thérèse of Lisieux. More specifically we refer to their combined French Catholic spirituality, the Combined Hearts of Joan and Thérèse, as the means Divine Providence has chosen for us that we might become fully who we are destined to be in the mystical, beautiful panorama of the “landscape of souls,” to use St. Thérèse’s metaphor. Rephrased, the goal is the salvation of our souls by being intuitively “present” to Joan and Thérèse as they are to each other in clarity of mind, agility of thought, and pureness of heart as they lead us through the Immaculate Heart of Mary to the Sacred heart of Jesus in His Holy Catholic Church.
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, 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 an ever-expanding panorama of unified meaning. We call the modeling of these "categorical" intuitions "following the science of the Saints," 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 staircase 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 so as to share transcendence “with” them. Sharing transcendence with them is a way of being in communion with them. Through this communion, they lead us in contemplation of the self-evident truths held within our own life-story. These self-evident truths unite into meaningful, higher level categorical intuitions. Through a "Holy Realism" we construct our new world view. With that, our liturgical, spiritual, and religious lives become the material by which our intuitions build a bridge 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 panorama of 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 realization of who we are in the mind of God and where we fit in this Kingdom.
The Jehannian-Thérèsian Spirituality
My Jehannian-Thérèsian Story
I still have the image in my mind of the high plains outside of my childhood home of Guymon. I'm talking about Guymon of long ago, the one that has almost faded into the mist of my aging memory. The land and the sky both were as big and wide as the whole earth, at least it seemed. Occasionally, big dark clouds would form way out in the distance, and you could see the shadow beneath them made up of the rain falling over some distant acreage. The occasional flash of lightning would result in a low rumble maybe five seconds later. The clouds were ominous but not threatening, as they were miles away.
In my life-story, the land and these experiences infused into me the spiritual model I would come to actualize over the course of my life. What I received from the land was a sense of divine order. My response was a form of "empathy" with that land.
Later this empathy was catalyzed through St. Thérèse of Lisieux' descriptive metaphor of spirituality as a panoramic landscape. Through her I was introduced to Joan of Arc who, I discovered, had the exact relationship with her land that I did with mine, only hers was at a much more profound level. This led to an immediate sense of kinship and to an "empathic devotion" to Joan of Arc, whom I trusted could develop and fully actualize Thérèse's panorama in my soul. I could trust no other at her level in the created order. Only she could lead me, and this by command of the Divine Will.
This empathic devotion with Joan led to an understanding through her eyes of Catholic and Royal France as a representation and incarnation of this divine order. Joan's Catholic and Royal France became for me the event horizon between Heaven and earth in this divine order.
That is the story of how I became introduced to the Jehannian-Thérèsian model and came to understand my own story as reflected in the stories of Joan and Thérèse. The nature of this devotion came about through a sharing of ideas with the French heroines, Joan and Thérèse, and an understanding of how their self-evident truths revealed the truths of my own life.
The Jehannian-Thérèsian Pearl of Great Price
The Jehannian-Thérèsian approach is an empathic sharing in Joan's own noematic field of meaning.
I have written extensively on the subject of 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 Edith Stein, known as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. 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. 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 reduction. It is a union of heart, mind, and soul with Joan through a sharing in 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 core essence and sharing in her point of view. In this way, we truly can follow her to that pearl of great price from "grounds to conclusions."
Books (Pen Name - Walter Adams)
