Thérèse of Lisieux is a modern addition to the Carmelite all-star team.  Actually, more and more of the Carmelite Greats are nineteenth and twentieth century—Elizabeth of the Trinity, Edith Stein, Jessica Powers, Thérèse was born on January 2nd 1873 to Louis Martin and Zélie-Marie Guérin.  The family was very bourgeois, Thérèse’s father being a watchmaker and her mother having a career in producing the lace for which their town, Alençon was famous.  Thérèse was their ninth child, but only the fifth to survive. Shortly after her birth, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer—a disease that in the nineteenth century was always fatal. Zélie died when Thérèse was but four years old.  Louis  Martin moved his daughters to Lisieux, the home town of his wife, to be near his brother-in-Law, Isidore Guérin, who seems to have exercised a supervisory role over the family after the death of his sister.  The family,in fact, seems to have been very sheltered, with the Martin girls having almost no acquaintances beyond their own and their uncle’s family. 

When Thérèse’s elder sisters, first Pauline—who was a second mother to her—and then Marie entered the Carmelite Monastery of Lisieux, Thérèse too desired to become a Carmelite nun.  She sought permission to enter at age 15, and when permission was refused by the bishop’s Vicar General, Thérèse appealed personally to Pope Leo XIII during a visit to the Vatican in 1887.  In the end the Vicar General relented and Thérèse entered the monastery in March 1888.   She professed her vows in 1889.  Her father had suffered a stroke shortly before and was hospitalized in a private sanitarium  for three years.  He returned home to Lisieux in 1892 but was never himself and he died in 1894, whereupon Thérèse’s sister Celine entered the Carmel.  Only one daughter, Leonie, remained outside.  Leonie had tried her vocation several times—first with the Poor Clares and later with the Visitation Nuns, but she seems to have been of a particularly sensitive temperament—which is a kind way of saying that she was a very difficult person to get along with—and her attempts had always been successful.  It was only after the death of Thérèse that she finally found a permanent  place in the Visitation of Caen. 

Thérèse was a remarkably mature young women.  She had been quite spoiled, and herself of “a particularly sensitive temperament” until a rather spectacular flash of self-awareness  on Christmas eve night of 1887 made her see just how self-involved she was.  She resolved to change and change she did.   She lived in the monastery without any undue attachment to her sisters Marie and Pauline, and later Celine.  She showed a remarkable patience and understanding with all the sisters—even the most difficult.  Nothing seemed to flap her.  Because of her maturity she was named assistant novice mistress, but in fact, she was the formation director for the novices. 

Good Friday morning 1896 Thérèse began coughing up blood due to a pulmonary hæmoptysis.  She had tuberculosis.  Her initial response was one of a profound joy that heaven was awaiting her, but within day she entered a time of profound spiritual darkness in which her faith was shaken to its foundation.  While depression might be regarded as a normal response to the inevitability of death in so youthful a person, this was no depression but a trial of faith.  To all who knew her she seemed her usual cheerful self, she never gave in to any form of pity or narcissistic self-indulgence of any sort.  But inside, as would be known only later and from her journal, she was in a spiritual darkness in which she had to struggle with all her power to sustain her faith.  This darkness would endure up to the moment of her death. 

 

Her sister, Pauline, was now the Prioress of the monastery and after hearing Thérèse recount some childhood stories, asked her to write down her memories and thoughts about their life as a family before they had entered Carmel.  Pauline no doubt expected a simple narrative of pleasant family anecdotes, but what she got was something quite different.  Thérèse’s journal related not merely incidents she remembered, but her deepest reflections on how those incidents—normal family stories of family outings and days at school and childhood sicknesses  and Christmas celebrations—had affected her and revealed to her the mysteries of God’s profound love.  Confident that the book would be read only by her sister, she told of the development of her soul, how she learned instinctively to pray, her scruples and her battle to overcome them.  At the request of Marie, her other sister, she wrote more and related her interior growth during her years in Carmel.  All in all she produced a journal that was a remarkable spiritual classic.  Pauline would edit it after Thérèse’s death and publish it—catapulting this unknown nun into fame as the most outstanding saint of the twentieth century. 

 

Thérèse died on September 30, 1897 at the age of 24, but the dramatic effect her journal had on the lives of hundreds of thousands of Catholics led to her being canonized a saint in 1925.  She was declared a Doctor of the Church by Pope John Paul II in 1997.  Due to an unfulfilled desire to go to the missions—she had wanted to transfer to the Hanoi (Viet Nam—then French Indochina) Carmel she was made patroness of the missions.  She has since been named patroness of those who are living with HIV-AIDS.  She also has been adopted as patroness by those who wish to see women being able to pursue a priestly vocation in the Catholic Church.  She is also patroness of the Carmelite Priory at Whitefriars Hall, site of this library.

Her doctrine is remarkably simple, yet remarkably profound.  She understood that love sums up the whole of Christian life, but that love is far more than some emotion.  She understood well that love, genuine love, places a harsh demand on us, or rather a demand that would be harsh were it not for love, that we surrender our self completely in acts of kindness, not for those whom we love, but for those whom God—the object of our love—loves.  We are to do the ordinary things of life with great love.   Her spiritual life was nourished by the scriptures.  She practiclly knew the gospels by heart.  She wrote

"Sometimes, when I read spiritual treatises, in which perfection is shown with a thousand obstacles in the way and a host of illusions round about it, my poor little mind soon grows weary, I close the learned book, which leaves my head splitting and my heart parched, and I take the Holy Scriptures. Then all seems luminous, a single word opens up infinite horizons to my soul, perfection seems easy; I see that it is enough to realise one's nothingness, and give oneself wholly, like a child, into the arms of the good God. Leaving to great souls, great minds, the fine books I cannot understand, I rejoice to be little because 'only children, and those who are like them, will be admitted to the heavenly banquet'."

Some Quotes from Thérèse of Lisieux:

Even though I had on my conscience all the sins that can be committed I would go, my heart broken with sorrow, and throw myself into Jesus’s arms, for I know how much he loves the prodigal child who returns to him  it is not because God, in his anticipating Mercy, has preserved my soul from mortal sin that I go to Him with confidence and love.

O Jesus I know it, love is repaid by love alone.

I made a resolution to give myself up more than ever to a serious and mortified life.  When I say mortified this is not to give the impression that I performed acts of penance,  Alas, I never made any.  Far from resembling beautiful souls who practiced every kind of mortification from their childhood, I had no attraction for this.  Undoubtedly this stemmed from my cowardliness, for I could have, like Celine, found a thousand ways of making myself suffer.   Instead of this I allowed myself to be wrapped in cotton wool and fattened like a little bird that needs no penance.  My mortification consisted in breaking my will, always so ready to impose itself on others, in holding back a reply, in rendering little services without any recognition, in not leaning my back against a support when seated, etc. etc.  It was through the practice of these nothings that I prepared myself to become the fiancée of Jesus, and I cannot express how much this waiting left me with sweet memories.

“See, then, all that Jesus lays claim to from us; He has no need of our works, but only of our love, for the same God who declared He has no need to tell us when He is hungry did not fear to beg for a little water from the Samaritan woman   He was thirsty.  But when He said: Give me to drink, it was the love of this poor creature the Creator of the universe was seeking.  He was thirsty for love.  Ah, I feel it more than ever before. Jesus is parched for he meets only the ungrateful and the indifferent among His disciples in the world, and among his own disciples, alas, he finds few hearts who surrender to him without reservation, who understand the real tenderness of His Infinite Love."

Charity consists in bearing with the faults of others, in not being surprised at their weakness, in being edified by the smallest acts of virtue we see them practice.  But I understood above all that charity must not remain hidden in the bottom of the Heart.  Jesus has said: No one lights a lamp and puts it under a bushel basket but upon the lamp-stand so as to give light to ALL in the house. It seems to be that this lamp represents charity which must enlighten and rejoice not only those who are dearest to us, but All who are in the house  without distinction.

But when Jesus gave His Apostles a new commandment, HIS OWN COMMANDMENT, as He calls it later on, it is no longer a question of loving one’s neighbor as oneself, but of loving him as He, Jesus, has loved him, and will love him to the consummation of the Ages.

I say very simply to God what I wish to say, without composing beautiful sentences, and He always understands me.  For me, prayer is an aspiration of the heart, it is a simple glance directed to heaven, it is a cry of gratitude and love in the midst of trial as well as joy,  finally it is something great, supernatural, which expands my soul and unites me to Jesus.

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