St.
Therese of Lisieux is a Doctor of the Church and one of the most venerated saint
in recent times. Her relics toured Australia in 2002 as part of a wider
international trip. On that occasion we were lucky enough to welcome her to
Bathurst for 3 days of prayer and renewal. It was this this visit that gave
renewed impetus and life to youth ministry in the Bathurst parishes- a ministry
that had been flagging in recent years. So it seemed only right that we take
this saint on as our Patroness. we pray that she will smile on our efforts and
intercede for us before our Heavenly Father.
Patron of the Missions
Generations of Catholics have admired this young saint, called her the "Little
Flower", and found in her short life more inspiration for own lives than in
volumes by theologians.
Yet Therese died when she was 24, after having lived as cloistered Carmelite for
less than ten years. She never went on missions, never founded a religious
order, never performed great works. The only book of hers, published after her
death, was an brief edited version of her journal called "Story of a Soul."
(Collections of her letters and restored versions of her journals have been
published recently.) But within 28 years of her death, the public demand was so
great that she was canonized.
Over the years, some modern Catholics have turned away from her because they
associate her with over- sentimentalized piety and yet the message she has for
us is still as compelling and simple as it was almost a century ago.
Therese was born in France in 1873, the pampered daughter of a mother who had
wanted to be a saint and a father who had wanted to be monk. The two had gotten
married but determined they would be celibate until a priest told them that was
not how God wanted a marriage to work! They must have followed his advice very
well because they had nine children. The five children who lived were all
daughters who were close all their lives.
Tragedy and loss came quickly to Therese when her mother died of breast cancer
when she was four and a half years old. Her sixteen year old sister Pauline
became her second mother -- which made the second loss even worse when Pauline
entered the Carmelite convent five years later. A few months later, Therese
became so ill with a fever that people thought she was dying.
The worst part of it for Therese was all the people sitting around her bed
staring at her like, she said, "a string of onions." When Therese saw her
sisters praying to statue of Mary in her room, Therese also prayed. She saw Mary
smile at her and suddenly she was cured. She tried to keep the grace of the cure
secret but people found out and badgered her with questions about what Mary was
wearing, what she looked like. When she refused to give in to their curiosity,
they passed the story that she had made the whole thing up.
Without realizing it, by the time she was eleven years old she had developed the
habit of mental prayer. She would find a place between her bed and the wall and
in that solitude think about God, life, eternity.
When her other sisters, Marie and Leonie, left to join religious orders (the
Carmelites and Poor Clares, respectively), Therese was left alone with her last
sister Celine and her father. Therese tells us that she wanted to be good but
that she had an odd way of going about. This spoiled little Queen of her
father's wouldn't do housework. She thought if she made the beds she was doing a
great favor!
Every time Therese even imagined that someone was criticizing her or didn't
appreciate her, she burst into tears. Then she would cry because she had cried!
Any inner wall she built to contain her wild emotions crumpled immediately
before the tiniest comment.
Therese wanted to enter the Carmelite convent to join Pauline and Marie but how
could she convince others that she could handle the rigors of Carmelite life, if
she couldn't handle her own emotional outbursts? She had prayed that Jesus would
help her but there was no sign of an answer.
On Christmas day in 1886, the fourteen-year-old hurried home from church. In
France, young children left their shoes by the hearth at Christmas, and then
parents would fill them with gifts. By fourteen, most children outgrew this
custom. But her sister Celine didn't want Therese to grow up. So they continued
to leave presents in "baby" Therese's shoes.
As she and Celine climbed the stairs to take off their hats, their father's
voice rose up from the parlor below. Standing over the shoes, he sighed, "Thank
goodness that's the last time we shall have this kind of thing!"
Therese froze, and her sister looked at her helplessly. Celine knew that in a
few minutes Therese would be in tears over what her father had said.
But the tantrum never came. Something incredible had happened to Therese. Jesus
had come into her heart and done what she could not do herself. He had made her
more sensitive to her father's feelings than her own.
She swallowed her tears, walked slowly down the stairs, and exclaimed over the
gifts in the shoes, as if she had never heard a word her father said. The
following year she entered the convent. In her autobiography she referred to
this Christmas as her "conversion."
Therese be known as the Little Flower but she had a will of steel. When the
superior of the Carmelite convent refused to take Therese because she was so
young, the formerly shy little girl went to the bishop. When the bishop also
said no, she decided to go over his head, as well.
Her father and sister took her on a pilgrimage to Rome to try to get her mind
off this crazy idea. Therese loved it. It was the one time when being little
worked to her advantage! Because she was young and small she could run
everywhere, touch relics and tombs without being yelled at. Finally they went
for an audience with the Pope. They had been forbidden to speak to him but that
didn't stop Therese. As soon as she got near him, she begged that he let her
enter the Carmelite convent. She had to be carried out by two of the guards!
But the Vicar General who had seen her courage was impressed and soon Therese
was admitted to the Carmelite convent that her sisters Pauline and Marie had
already joined. Her romantic ideas of convent life and suffering soon met up
with reality in a way she had never expected. Her father suffered a series of
strokes that left him affected not only physically but mentally. When he began
hallucinating and grabbed for a gun as if going into battle, he was taken to an
asylum for the insane. Horrified, Therese learned of the humiliation of the
father she adored and admired and of the gossip and pity of their so-called
friends. As a cloistered nun she couldn't even visit her father.
This began a horrible time of suffering when she experienced such dryness in
prayer that she stated "Jesus isn't doing much to keep the conversation going."
She was so grief-stricken that she often fell asleep in prayer. She consoled
herself by saying that mothers loved children when they lie asleep in their arms
so that God must love her when she slept during prayer.
She knew as a Carmelite nun she would never be able to perform great deeds. "
Love proves itself by deeds, so how am I to show my love? Great deeds are
forbidden me. The only way I can prove my love is by scattering flowers and
these flowers are every little sacrifice, every glance and word, and the doing
of the least actions for love." She took every chance to sacrifice, no matter
how small it would seem. She smiled at the sisters she didn't like. She ate
everything she was given without complaining -- so that she was often given the
worst leftovers. One time she was accused of breaking a vase when she was not at
fault. Instead of arguing she sank to her knees and begged forgiveness. These
little sacrifices cost her more than bigger ones, for these went unrecognized by
others. No one told her how wonderful she was for these little secret
humiliations and good deeds.
When Pauline was elected prioress, she asked Therese for the ultimate sacrifice.
Because of politics in the convent, many of the sisters feared that the family
Martin would taken over the convent. Therefore Pauline asked Therese to remain a
novice, in order to allay the fears of the others that the three sisters would
push everyone else around. This meant she would never be a fully professed nun,
that she would always have to ask permission for everything she did. This
sacrifice was made a little sweeter when Celine entered the convent after her
father's death. Four of the sisters were now together again.
Therese continued to worry about how she could achieve holiness in the life she
led. She didn't want to just be good, she wanted to be a saint. She thought
there must be a way for people living hidden, little lives like hers. " I have
always wanted to become a saint. Unfortunately when I have compared myself with
the saints, I have always found that there is the same difference between the
saints and me as there is between a mountain whose summit is lost in the clouds
and a humble grain of sand trodden underfoot by passers-by. Instead of being
discouraged, I told myself: God would not make me wish for something impossible
and so, in spite of my littleness, I can aim at being a saint. It is impossible
for me to grow bigger, so I put up with myself as I am, with all my countless
faults. But I will look for some means of going to heaven by a little way which
is very short and very straight, a little way that is quite new.
" We live in an age of inventions. We need no longer climb laboriously up
flights of stairs; in well-to-do houses there are lifts. And I was determined to
find a lift to carry me to Jesus, for I was far too small to climb the steep
stairs of perfection. So I sought in holy Scripture some idea of what this life
I wanted would be, and I read these words: "Whosoever is a little one, come to
me." It is your arms, Jesus, that are the lift to carry me to heaven. And so
there is no need for me to grow up: I must stay little and become less and
less."
She worried about her vocation: " I feel in me the vocation of the Priest. I
have the vocation of the Apostle. Martyrdom was the dream of my youth and this
dream has grown with me. Considering the mystical body of the Church, I desired
to see myself in them all. Charity gave me the key to my vocation. I understood
that the Church had a Heart and that this Heart was burning with love. I
understood that Love comprised all vocations, that Love was everything, that it
embraced all times and places...in a word, that it was eternal! Then in the
excess of my delirious joy, I cried out: O Jesus, my Love...my vocation, at last
I have found it...My vocation is Love!"
When an antagonist was elected prioress, new political suspicions and plottings
sprang up. The concern over the Martin sisters perhaps was not exaggerated. In
this small convent they now made up one-fifth of the population. Despite this
and the fact that Therese was a permanent novice they put her in charge of the
other novices.
Then in 1896, she coughed up blood. She kept working without telling anyone
until she became so sick a year later everyone knew it. Worst of all she had
lost her joy and confidence and felt she would die young without leaving
anything behind. Pauline had already had her writing down her memories for
journal and now she wanted her to continue -- so they would have something to
circulate on her life after her death.
Her pain was so great that she said that if she had not had faith she would have
taken her own life without hesitation. But she tried to remain smiling and
cheerful -- and succeeded so well that some thought she was only pretending to
be ill. Her one dream as the work she would do after her death, helping those on
earth. "I will return," she said. "My heaven will be spent on earth." She died
on September 30, 1897 at the age of 24 years old. She herself felt it was a
blessing God allowed her to die at exactly that age. she had always felt that
she had a vocation to be a priest and felt God let her die at the age she would
have been ordained if she had been a man so that she wouldn't have to suffer.
After she died, everything at the convent went back to normal. One nun commented
that there was nothing to say about Therese. But Pauline put together Therese's
writings (and heavily edited them, unfortunately) and sent 2000 copies to other
convents. But Therese's "little way" of trusting in Jesus to make her holy and
relying on small daily sacrifices instead of great deeds appealed to the
thousands of Catholics and others who were trying to find holiness in ordinary
lives. Within two years, the Martin family had to move because her notoriety was
so great and by 1925 she had been canonized.
Therese of Lisieux is one of the patron saints of the missions, not because she
ever went anywhere, but because of her special love of the missions, and the
prayers and letters she gave in support of missionaries. This is reminder to all
of us who feel we can do nothing, that it is the little things that keep God's
kingdom growing.
Source: Catholic.org.
Click here for the Prayer of St. Therese.
This site was last updated 16/09/03
