Since my
longing for martyrdom was powerful and unsettling, I turned to the epistles of
St Paul in the hope of finally finding an answer. By chance the 12th and 13th
chapters of the 1st epistle to the Corinthians caught my attention, and in the
first section I read that not everyone can be an apostle, prophet or teacher,
that the Church is composed of a variety of members, and that the eye cannot be
the hand. Even with such an answer revealed before me, I was not satisfied and
did not find peace.
I persevered in
the reading and did not let my mind wander until I found this encouraging
theme: Set your desires on the greater gifts. And I will show you the way which
surpasses all others. For the Apostle insists that the greater gifts are
nothing at all without love and that this same love is surely the best path
leading directly to God. At length I had found peace of mind.
When I had
looked upon the mystical body of the Church, I recognized myself in none of the
members which St Paul described, and what is more, I desired to distinguish
myself more favorably within the whole body.
Love appeared
to me to be the hinge for my vocation. Indeed I knew that the Church had a body
composed of various members, but in this body the necessary and more noble
member was not lacking; I knew that the Church had a heart and that such a
heart appeared to be aflame with love. I knew that one love drove the members
of the Church to action, that if this love were extinguished, the apostles
would have proclaimed the Gospel no longer, the martyrs would have shed their
blood no more.
I saw and realized
that love sets off the bounds of all vocations, that love is everything, that
this same love embraces every time and every place. In one word, that love is
everlasting.
Then, nearly
ecstatic with the supreme joy in my soul, I proclaimed: O Jesus, my love, at
last I have found my calling: my call is love. Certainly I have found my place
in the Church, and you gave me that very place, my God. In the heart of the
Church, my mother, I will be love, and thus I will be all things, as my desire
finds its direction.
St.
Therese of Lisieux, Story of a Soul
Reflection
– Today is the feast of St. Therese of Lisieux, the
Little Flower of Jesus. I have written
about her before on the blog; she is really my favorite saint, the first
saint who I got to know as a person, and a constant spiritual guide and help
for me, as she is for many millions of people.
It never fails to amaze me, that God would
pluck someone whose life was so utterly obscure, so thoroughly ordinary in its
external details, and elevate her to the status of one of the most well known
and well beloved saints of the Church. There is a prophetic quality to this
story—Therese stands at the very dawn of the 20th century and
presents to us something vitally important about sanctity and the ways of God
among men. It is a point of some irony, perhaps, that the vision of sanctity
she presents is one especially suitable to the age of the laity in the Church,
given that she herself is a consecrated Carmelite nun.
What is this vision? It’s more or less what
she presents here, although she says it in different ways in her book. Namely,
that it is great love that makes a saint, not great
deeds. The vision of sanctity that excusably might emerge from the study of
many of the canonized saints of the Church is that of a sort of spiritual
Olympics—higher, faster, stronger—filled with people who shed their blood for
Christ, founded orders, wrote great works of theology, performed prodigies of
service to the poor, traveled to mission lands. Sanctity then, is limited to
people of unusual gifts and strengths, or who find themselves in situations
allowing for extremities like dying a martyr’s death (me, I’d like to die for
Christ, but nobody has shown up who’s willing to kill me just yet!).
Therese, then, corrects this sort of
spiritual elitism, by showing us that it is not deeds but love, not
extraordinary events but extraordinary faithfulness in whatever events are
ours, not prodigies of intellect or body, but a will wholly set on doing
everything that is pleasing to God in the real circumstances of our real lives.
And this, then, opens the path to holiness
for everyone no matter what. It is both a consoling vision, and a very
challenging one. God does not demand what we cannot do—that our lives and our
persons be other than what they are, before He can make us a great saint.
Instead He asks that we live the lives we are living today, no matter what they
consist of, with such love and fidelity, such prayer and devotion, that He can
make us into a flame of love right here and right now. And this is the life of
the Church, and the life of the world, that which makes everything luminous and
joyous and beautiful.
And that is what St. Therese of Lisieux
came to teach us.