One of my favourite saints, St Thérèse of Lisieux, 1873 -1897, has her feast on the first of October.
I first heard of St Thérèse of Lisieux when I was child. I was watching Blue Peter and her story was told by Peter Purves. She grew up in a middle class very Catholic family in France at the end of the 19th Century. At a very young age she perceived a vocation, a calling to join the Carmelite convent in her home town of Lisieux. At the time she was too young to join the order, but as we shall see her determination was rewarded. More of that later.
One of the things that struck me about her story as I heard it on Blue Peter, was her prayer for Henri Pranzini. He was a notorious triple murderer, who having been convicted and condemned to death, nevertheless showed no signs of remorse or repentance. Thérèse took it upon herself to pray for his soul and for his conversion. It seemed to no avail. However at the very last moment, just before he was executed, he was seen to take the crucifix and kiss it three times. Thérèse took this as both evidence of his repentance and as a confirmatory sign of her vocation. That part of her story made a deep impression on me as a child, and much, much later, I was moved to read her own account of it.
Still too young to join the order, Thérèse went on a pilgrimage to Rome, there she was given, with others, an audience with the Pope and she asked him to wave the minimum age requirement for her to join the Carmelites. His response was, I suspect, was to equivocate, “Well, my child, do what the superiors decide… You will enter if it is God’s Will”. Her pilgrimage continued and when she returned she was given permission to enter the convent.
It was her intention to become a missionary in the Far East. It was not to be however. On Good Friday 1896, Thérèse coughed up blood in to her handkerchief. This meant that she was sick with tuberculosis, she knew then that she could not travel and that she would probably die at young age, she died at the end of September of the following year, 1897, at the age of 24. And this was the other thing that made a deep impression on me as child and has remained with me. Knowing this she wrote,
‘I thought immediately of the joyful thing that I had to learn, so I went over to the window. I was able to see that I was not mistaken. Ah! my soul was filled with a great consolation; I was interiorly persuaded that Jesus, on the anniversary of His own death, wanted to have me hear His first call!’
It seemed extraordinary to me that Thérèse could face that knowledge in such a way.
Thérèse continued, as she already had living a very ordinary unspectacular life in the convent.
We would know nothing of any of this had she not been instructed by her superiors to write the story of her spiritual life. This was published after her death as the Autobiography of the Soul.
Thérèse was canonised a saint on 1925, and declared a Doctor (that is a Teacher) of the Church in 1997.
In many ways Thérèse was a person of her time, background and place which was French, middle class, conservative and Catholic. But although typical of her time she also transcends it. So what is her teaching?
She was not in the position to do great or heroic things for her faith. She wrote:
‘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. Miss no single opportunity of making some small sacrifice, here by a smiling look, there by a kindly word; always doing the smallest right and doing it all for love’.
And elsewhere:
“You know well enough that Our Lord does not look so much at the greatness of our actions, nor even at their difficulty, but at the love with which we do them.”
Thérèse’s way is called the little way, and it shows the way for the little ones like you and me. It also encapsulates Jesus, teaching about the kingdom of God which is ‘like yeast that a woman took and mixed into about sixty pounds of flour until it worked all through the dough,’. or like ‘the seed scattered on the ground, night and day, whether we sleeps or get up, the seed sprouts and grows, though we does not know how’. The Little Way is hidden and small, perhaps no one will notice except God, and our acceptance of that is I think an important part of being a person of faith.
Her message is simply to say to us, do not worry about what you cannot do. Do the good that your life and situation allows you, begin where you are today, and do it with love and for the sake love.
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