St. Thérèse of Lisieux

Usually I have a little biography of the Saint of the Day and then I give a reflection on the readings. Tonight both topics actually come together very well.

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 was what God had in mind for marriage! Well they followed his advice very well because they had nine children. The five children who lived were all daughters who were close all their lives.  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, and never performed great works. She was ordered by her prioress to keep a journal, which after her death a brief edited version was published. That book was so powerful that within 28 years of her death, the public demanded that she be canonized.

Jesus said - “Foxes have dens and birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to rest his head. So are we ready to follow the Lord wherever he may lead us? Jesus was utterly honest in telling people what it would cost to follow him. When a would-be disciple approached Jesus and said he was ready to follow, Jesus told him it would require sacrifice – the sacrifice of certain creaturely comforts.

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. 

For Therese the worst part of being sick was all the people sitting around her bed staring at her like, in her own words, "a string of onions." Therese prayed to Mary and one day 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.  

On Christmas Eve, just a few days before Therese's fourteenth birthday, she underwent an experience which she ever after referred to as "my conversion." It was to exert a profound influence on her life. In her own words: "On that blessed night the sweet infant Jesus, scarcely an hour old, filled the darkness of my soul with floods of light. By becoming weak and little, for love of me, He made me strong and brave: He put His own weapons into my hands so that I went on from strength to strength, beginning, if I may say so, 'to run as a giant." It was by reason of this vision that the saint was to become known as "Therese of the Child Jesus."

Therese fought to join the convent – rejected because she was too young, on a pilgrimage to Rome she saw the Pope, being a determined young lady she broke loose from her father’s hand and ran up to the Pope and begged him to let her enter the convent. She was carried away by two guards.

Shortly after she was admitted to the convent. In the convent she suffered much because of jealousy and internal politics. When her father suffered a series of strokes that affected him both physically and mentally and he was taken to an asylum for the insane she could not visit him because she was a cloistered nun.  

She and her four sisters were all of the same convent and because of politics in the convent she was asked by her older sister, the prioress of the convent to remain a novice and not take her permanent vows – she was asked to make the ultimate sacrifice. She accepted because she believed no sacrifice was too great.

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.

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.

Her writings were publish and it was discovered that 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.

In 1925 she was declared a saint and Doctor of the Church a mere 28 years after her death. She gave up everything for Jesus.