I am re-reading the best book on Therese--The Hidden Face by Ida Gorres, and I am remembering my own meeting with Therese in 1987 on my pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The story is told here. Time and again her presence has been known in my life. At my ordination two friends gave me beautiful images of Therese and another friend gave me a first class relic.
Do people wonder about spirituality and religion? The two are not separate. They come together in the lives of the saints. Benedict XVI says that Sacred Scripture can only be interpreted through the lives of the saints. The same is true of the whole riddle of religion. It is in the lives of the saints that we see spirituality and religion incarnated in one inexplicable experience.
Read the lives of the saints. Meet the saints. Live with the saints. Pray with the saints. You will soon come to see that you cannot have spirituality without religion and you cannot have religion without spirituality. If you would have one you must have the other, and as you have both you will understand the saints. You will understand the Scriptures. You will understand the Church.
You will understand your destiny.
I have gone off track. I only meant to say that from this day St Therese is the patroness of this blog. Officially.
And I am going to expect some miracles little sister!
I loved Gorres' book, and must admit that she explained to me a saint who had utterly perplexed me. I didn't take naturally to Therese after my conversion, and it wasn't until I read that book that I could understand the Little Flower. The key was the author's explanation of the complex milieu in which the Martin girls were raised, and the difficulties that the French Catholics had in rebuilding after the revolution. Fascinating account which I highly recommend.
ReplyDeleteI'm reading the Gorres book for the first time and it really is the best book I've read on Therese. I've gotten at least one big miracle through her intercession and I really believe I would not be a priest today if it were not for her prayers.
ReplyDeleteI will get that book. The only one I've read is Story of a Soul (old John Beevers translation) and I thought I would not like it. Quite the opposite. Maybe it is because I have a teen daughter, but Therese seemed very real and very girly to me. The fact that she probably would have written in bubble letters and liked Hello Kitty does not mean that she wasn't a saint. She was a girl AND a saint. I think that what is most amazing is to see is the strength of her soul from her childhood on. She KNEW she was a saint, in a way. But she also knew she was a child. I think her "little way" came precisely from that. She knew she could have led armies, but she lived in a tiny French town and there was no war. She showed that sainthood consists in what you are, not what you do. Someone else wrote that while philosophers were positing that the strongest wills must triumph by going beyond morality, she was living in complete obscurity with very little say in what she did or what happened to her. But who from her day has transformed the world, and is still transforming it? She is a very strong saint. Strong like a sword.
ReplyDeleteDear Father L. I too have St therese as my patron saint. I went to Little Flower High School many yrs ago and that is where, unbeknownst to me, she started working in my life.
ReplyDeleteNow many yrs later and after my return to the Sacraments 15 yrs ago I am now a lay Sister of the Carmelite order, OC's. I am still in formation; however I consider myself part of the order - of course.
I choose to TRY to follow her way of life, small things w/lots of love and so often fall; I am a sinner! But she and the Immaculate Mother Mary help me tremendously.
I will pick up the book; I have not read it. God Bless you Father
I have been in love with St. Therese since I was a little girl! She is , and has always been, my favorite saint. Maybe it had something to do with her hard-headedness about getting what she wanted. Her writing is so profound, so touched by God, it makes you shake your head in apt wonder!
ReplyDeleteI read Story of a Soul last Lent, and am still amazed.
Eleven plus years ago my wife and I were struggling to have a second child. It had been six years since our first and we'd wanted more, but nothing was working. My wife, in frustration, complained to our intensely faithful and devoted sister in law that she was givinig up. She'd decided God didn't want us to have more children. Our sister-in-law became extremely upset and chastised my wife for casting away hope. She also told my wife she'd been praying to Saint Therese for a miracle. Roughly twelve months later, Joseph was born.
ReplyDeleteFast forward about five years, On the door of our refigerator is the familiar picture of Saint Therese as a little girl with the curls, but this is the portrait, capturing only her face. My father-in-law, a faithful man but not particularly familiar with saints, looks at the portrait and asks if it's someone from my side of the family a couple generations back. I take down the picture, block out the curls and realize the face is identical to that of our then five year old son. They are virtually indistinguishable.
To this day we still take down the picture, cover the hair and ask people who they see (no other promptings). The answer is always the same.
Saint Therese has had a long though indirect association with Anglican priests. An Anglican priest, Fr. Vernon Johnson (later Msgr.) was an early devotee of the Little Way and visited Therese's Carmel whilst her sister was still alive and who was the superior there. When she realized that the visitor was not a Catholic priest she gave him a terrible scolding for being a heretic which appears to have the desired effect.
ReplyDeleteI myself find Therese so appealing because she acts as one of the better points of contact between Protestants and Catholics. In spite of her adamant loyalty to Rome, she personally seems to understand the essence of the Protestant gospel of justification by faith alone. As Dr. Edward T. Oakes, S.J., noted in First Things, she was deeply influenced by the time and place of her birth:
ReplyDelete“The Jesuit Order was restored in 1815, at which point my story shifts. The odd twist in the plot is that the Catholic Church in the nineteenth century--especially in France--represented a kind of subterranean Jansenism fused to a bourgeois "ledger morality" of Do's and Don'ts. It was in this hothouse atmosphere that Ste. Thérèse of Lisieux was raised. Although brought up in a thoroughly Catholic household, and pious to an almost preternatural degree, she was assaulted toward the end of her short life (she died at the age of 24 of tuberculosis) by fierce temptations to atheism, which she could only resolve when she came to these "Lutheran" insights, four months before her death:
‘I am very happy that I am going to heaven. But when I think of this word of the Lord, "I shall come soon and bring with me my recompense to give to each according to his works," I tell myself that this will be very embarrassing for me, because I have no works. ... Very well! He will render to me according to His works for His own sake.’”
“And in her Offrande à l'Amour miséricordieux, she prays to Jesus thus:
‘In the evening of this life I shall appear before Thee with empty hands because I do not ask Thee, Lord, to count my works. All our just acts have blemishes in Thine eyes. Therefore I want to wrap myself up again in Thy justice, and to receive from Thy love the eternal possession of Thee Thyself.’”
Ste. Therese also reflects a more Protestant understanding in her take on purgatory. (I quote here from the webpage, http://franciscan-sfo.org/ap/litfwrpu.htm .)
“One can rightfully say that Therese is turning all common opinions on Purgatory upside down. She wants to appear before God empty-handed and explains why it can be easier for sinners who have nothing to rely upon, to reach Heaven than the great saints with all their merits. She emphasizes that trust alone is enough, that merits are no guarantee but often an obstacle for the straight way to Heaven, and that sins do not need to be an obstacle. After a 'messed-up' life, God can still take one straight to Heaven if the dying person only has trust. And how easy it can be to trust if there are no merits but only one's misery! Through trust she shows the shorter way to Heaven to the small and humble. And so many can and will go that way. She writes about this to her sister Marie: "... what pleases Him (God) is that He sees me loving my littleness and my poverty, the blind hope that I have in His mercy... That is my only treasure, dear Godmother, why should this treasure not be yours?"
To my mind, Therese of Lisieux personally seems to understand the essence of the Protestant gospel of justification by faith alone. She—better than most Protestants, quite frankly—exhibits the profound humility that gives credit for all our blessings to God himself, and to nothing and no one else. “Nothing in my hands I bring. Simply to thy cross I cling.” Such a lovely saint can effectively express this message to her church, a church whose ears are often stopped to the same message delivered by the saintliest of Protestants.
***I credit my conversion to the Catholic faith, my miraculous ordination to the Catholic priesthood and my preservation in the faith to St Therese of Lisieux.***
ReplyDeleteFather, I have long been an admirer of your writing, but these words are rather incredible, even disturbing.
You were once converted, and are everyday preserved, by the glorious sovereignty of God, not by the ministrations of Saint Therese.
"For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God (Ephesians 2:8).
"So then it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy" (Romans 9:16).
"For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them" (Ephesians 2:10).
"Now this I say, that every one of you saith, I am of Paul; and I of Apollos; and I of Cephas; and I of Christ. Is Christ divided? was Paul crucified for you? or were ye baptized in the name of Paul" (I Corinthians 1:12-14).
Your faith is of Christ, by Christ, and from Christ, not Saint Therese.
Philip Jude, don't read too much into what I didn't say. All I meant was that the prayers of St Therese helped me into the Catholic Church and ordination.
ReplyDeleteI didn't say she saved my soul from sin or purchased my redemption.