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Thérèse of Lisieux – A Saint for All Christians
By Dwight Longenecker
It was during a hitch-hiking pilgrimage to Jerusalem that I met a saint. From England I decided to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem staying in monasteries and convents en route. I wanted a holiday, but I also wanted the chance to reflect on my faith and explore the historic heartland of Christendom.
The first leg of the journey was through the Western French province of Normandy. After landing in France I hitched to the town of Lisieux. I knew Lisieux was the home town of St Thérèse, and planned to stop not because I had any particular interest in the saint called ‘the little flower’ but because, as a pilgrimage destination there would probably be a religious hostel where I could spend the night.
I had been brought up in a Protestant home in Pennsylvania. After college I had moved to England to train for the Anglican ministry and during training my understanding of the Church moved in a more Catholic direction. Despite being an Anglican my basic religion was still quite Protestant in its outlook. Certainly devotion to someone as thoroughly Roman Catholic as ‘St Thérèse of the Child Jesus’ was not high on my list of priorities, to say the least.
With her simpering expression, clutching a bouquet of roses and a crucifix, Thérèse seemed one of the worst expressions of nineteenth century Catholic kitsch. The stories I’d heard about her life didn’t help. She was ‘God’s little girl’-- a kind of sweet pretty saint who fed Roman Catholics’ unfortunate taste for greeting card Christianity. I liked a robust faith and she represented the worst excesses of ‘meek and mild’ Christianity.
Nevertheless, I approached Lisieux with a certain detached curiosity. I found my way to the pilgrim’s hostel and was greeted by a cheerful and practical nun who showed me to a simply furnished room. After dinner that night I wandered through the town. Adjacent to the hostel was the Carmelite convent where the saint lived for just nine years before her death at the age of 24. On the hill on the edge of town was a huge basilica built in honour of the saint. This little girl was certainly important to the Catholics, and I resolved to keep an open mind and try to learn a bit more about her.
The next day I visited the sites associated with the saint and picked up a paperback biography. I was impressed by what I discovered. It was true that Thérèse is called the ‘Little Flower’ but if she is a flower, then she is a steel magnolia. Under that sentimental language and kitsch image I discovered the story of an amazing individual; a Christian soul who was tough as well as tender. If she clutched roses, those roses definitely had thorns. I was not won over to her completely, but my reading and exploration was enough to make me want to learn more.
A Great Little Saint
Marie Françoise Thérèse Martin was born in Alençon in Normandy on January 2 1873. Her father was a watchmaker, and her mother made lace to supplement the family income. In the summer of 1877 her mother died, and that autumn M. Martin moved Thérèse and her four older sisters to a small house called Les Buissonets in the nearby town of Lisieux. Thérèse was a sensitive and loving child, and the home was very devout, but conventionally middle class. She took part in a religion which was woven seamlessly into the tapestry of everyday life. Her Christian family was a sharing in the Holy Family, and God was everywhere present. Thérèse spoke of her early awareness of Christ by saying, ‘From the age of three I have never refused the good God anything.’
She was four and a half when her mother died and from that point she went through ten years of religious worries and nervous hypersensitivity. On Christmas Eve when she was fourteen she describes how she suddenly became aware of God’s healing and regained her spiritual strength. She considered this experience to have been her conversion. By the time of this conversion experience she had not only lost her mother, but two of her older sisters had left the family to enter the Carmelite convent in Lisieux. The Carmelites are a strictly enclosed contemplative order, and when a girl entered the Carmel she took Christ’s call to leave one’s family for the sake of the kingdom quite literally. The nun would never again leave the convent, and strictly rationed family visits would be conducted through a grille and monitored by the superiors.
After her conversion at the age of fourteen Thérèse was determined to follow her sisters into the dedicated life of prayer at the Carmelite convent. Rules forbade entrance to the convent at such an early age, but Thérèse persisted, first of all winning her father’s, then finally the bishop’s approval by the winter of 1887. After entering the convent in April 1888 She lived what appeared to be an unremarkable life completely hidden in Christ.
Her way to God was called the ‘little way.’ She showed how to find God hidden in ordinary life and to become a saint not through heroic accomplishment, but being lost in ordinariness. Indeed, many who knew her overlooked her sanctity. One sister testified that Thérèse was ‘certainly good and conscientious but nothing outstanding….she had nothing to suffer and was rather insignificant.’ Another said, ‘I cannot understand why people speak of Sister Thérèse as if she were a saint. She never does anything notable.’ They missed the point. Thérèse had become humble. Her theory was, ‘One must behave like everyone else, not leaving the ranks either for weal or for woe, not pushing oneself forward or becoming the centre of attention; one must behave as if there were nothing lacking.’ Nothing was lacking for she had learned to trust in God utterly. ‘Sanctity’ she wrote, ‘consists in a disposition of the heart that leaves us little and humble in God’s arms. Aware of our weakness and trusting unto folly in his Fatherly goodness.’
Her life and her ‘little way’ became famous through her autobiography entitled, The Story of a Soul. Being humble, she didn’t care about writing her story, but she was ordered to by her superior in the convent. Only after her death did her sisters consider publication, and when the first two thousand copies were printed everyone wondered how they would ever get rid of so many books. Yet in the first twelve years after publication forty seven thousand copies were sold. In 1914 Pope Pius X called her ‘the greatest saint of modern times.’ Thérèse was beatified by Pius XI in 1923, and in 1925, just twenty eight years after her death, there were 500,000 people in Saint Peter’s Square to celebrate her being named a saint by Pope Pius XI. The fame and honour of this provincial French girl continued. In 1944 she was declared patroness of France along with Joan of Arc; and at the centenary of her death in 1997 she was declared a Doctor of the Church by Pope John Paul II.
I Stand Corrected
As I read more about Thérèse I began to wonder, ‘If she has been so celebrated, if she has been made a doctor of the Church, there must be more to this girl than puppies and kittens spirituality.’ Books about Thérèse and her teaching are numerous. As I read more about her I realised she lived her faith in a radical way which is accessible to all Christians—not just Catholics. With great simplicity she echoes the great Christian themes which spring from the gospel.
As a Christian from a Protestant background I found Thérèse’s writings amazingly refreshing. They broke a lot of my pre-conceptions about Catholic thought and spirituality. Indeed, she seems to have revolutionised the Catholic Church as well. The mighty structure of the Catholic Church was both refreshed and challenged by her teaching. Admitting as much, Pope Pius XI, said she has a ‘new mission’, proclaims a ‘new message’ and he recognises in her a ‘new model for sanctity.’ It is no exaggeration to say that this teenage girl hidden in a convent in a remote part of France challenged and changed the Catholic Church. She did so with no hint of revolution or rebellion, but with a hidden life lived totally for Christ.
Thérèse’s emphasis was in trusting God totally as a child trusts her father. In other words she relies totally on God’s grace. In her emphasis on grace Thérèse is a prophet of the new found solutions between Catholics and Lutherans on the question of salvation. In the Joint Declaration the Doctrine of Justification, signed in October 1999, both Catholics and Lutherans were able to say, ‘By grace alone, in faith in Christ’s saving work and not because of any merit on our part, we are accepted by God and receive the Holy Spirit, who renews our hearts while equipping and calling us to good works.’
Thérèse is one of the key teachers to bring Catholics to this point, and like Luther, Thérèse came to her understandings through the Scriptures. She loved to read and was extraordinarily well read for a child of her age and background, but in the convent she found that extra-biblical books simply didn’t interest her any longer. She writes, ‘If I open a book composed by a spiritual author… I feel my heart contract immediately and I read without understanding. Or if I do understand, my mind comes to a standstill without the capacity of meditating. In this helplessness, Holy Scripture and the Imitation of Christ come to my aid. In them I find a solid and very pure nourishment.‘ Elsewhere she writes, ‘I can find nothing in books any more; the Gospels are enough for me.’
Thérèse committed great portions of Scripture to memory, and her sisters in the convent were amazed by her display of Scripture knowledge. She always carried a New Testament, and in her cell she was busy compiling her own personal concordance. The theologian Hans Urs vonBalthasar says, ‘Luther, brought face to face with Scripture, came to conclusions that might be considered remotely parallel to those of Thérèse: the personal certainty of salvation, the stress upon trusting faith as opposed to ascetic practices and other good works, the clear cut preference for New Testament mercy as against Old Testament justice. And, in this sense, with all due reserves having been made, the ‘little way’ can be regarded as the Catholic answer to the demands and questions raised by Luther.’
Thérèse the Missionary
Another connectiong point with my evangelical faith was Thérèse’s fascination with missionary work. She maintained an encouraging correspondence with two missionary priests, supported them daily in prayer. and wished to go the mission field herself. Her language is as dynamic as any revivalist preacher, ‘I want to enlighten souls. I want to travel the earth,’ Thérèse prays, ‘O my beloved, to preach Your name and to set up Your glorious Cross in pagan lands. But one mission only would not suffice for me’ would that I could at one and the same time proclaim the Gospel all the world over, even to the remotest of its lands. I would desire to be a missionary not only for a few years, but to have been one from the creation of the world and so to continue to the end of time.’
On her deathbed Thérèse said she fervently believed every one of her desires had been fulfilled. By this time she was taking an eternal perspective, seeing that her hidden life would be powerfully used by God in the future. But how was her passionate desire to be an ‘eternal missionary’ fulfilled? Within the mystery of God’s providence it is no co-incidence or exaggeration to see Thérèse’s wish to be a missionary fulfilled in that other little saint, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who has been one of the most radiant Christian witnesses in the second half of this century. Indeed, Teresa of Calcutta chose her name in honour of Thérèse of Lisieux. She taught all her missionaries to follow the ‘little way’ and witnessed to the fact that her world-wide missionary enterprise was inspired by the teenage nun of Lisieux.
Thérèse’s little way is not just theologically sound. Most of all it is a way of life—a way of radical discipleship. With fiery zeal and uncompromising faith it takes Christians to a point of total surrender to the One who totally surrendered himself to the Father’s will. Thérèse demands total conversion. ‘You cannot be half a saint!’ she proclaims, ‘You must be a whole saint or no saint at all.’ Her ‘little way of spiritual childhood calls for the personality to die so the person can be re-born. This too, is a real connection with the personal faith of evangelical Christians. Thérèse does not preach her own idea or her own technique for Christian perfection. She simply proclaims the message of John chapter three where Christ says ‘You must be born again.’ As Balthasar points out, ‘The little way is one way, yet it is also the way… The love of God and one’s neighbour contains the whole of the law, and all mysticism and asceticism, thus this little way, which makes this love absolutely central, can be described as the way’ for all Christians.
My journey of faith has been influenced by many people, but among them, the teenager of Lisieux has been one of the greatest. My experience in Lisieux brought me into contact with one of the most extraordinary Christians of the last century. In just twenty four years she lived an amazing life which climaxed in 1897 when, after a terrible illness combined with a more terrible spiritual darkness, Thérèse died. In time she stands as a bridge between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. As a child she speaks prophetically to the grown-up sin and cynicism of our age. As a Catholic, without even knowing it, she embraces all that is good in Protestantism. As a prophetic soul she points forward to a new Christian unity in which all Christians may proclaim together the simple gospel, that we are called to be little children-- sons and daughters of the King who are destined to live in his courts forever.
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Dwight Longenecker is a freelance writer. His book Listen My Son—St Benedict for Fathers is published by Morehouse. In Spring on 2002 his book, St Benedict and St Thérèse—the Little Rule and the Little Way is published by Our Sunday Visitor. He lives in England, and is married with four young children.
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