The Church Has a Heart

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 20^th 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.

The Turn on The Stairs

I was really unbearable because of my extreme touchiness; if I happened to cause anyone I loved some little trouble… I cried like a Magdalene, and then when I began to cheer up, I’d begin to cry for having cried…

God would have to work a little miracle to make me grow up in an instant, and this miracle he performed on the unforgettable Christmas day. On that luminous night which sheds such light on the delights of the Holy Trinity, Jesus, the gentle, little Child of only one hour, changed the night of my soul into rays of light…

Since that night I have never been defeated in any combat, but rather walked from victory to victory, so to speak, to ‘run as a giant.’ The source of my tears was dried up and has since re-opened rarely and with great difficulty…

We had come back from Midnight Mass where I had the happiness of receiving the strong and powerful God. Upon arriving at Les Buissonets, I used to love to take my shoes from the chimney-corner and examine the presents in them; this old custom had given us so much joy in our youth that Celine wanted to continue treating me as a baby since I was the youngest in the family…

However, Jesus desired to show me that I was to give up the defects of my childhood and so He withdrew its innocent pleasures. He permitted Papa, tired out after the Midnight Mass, to experience annoyance when seeing my shoes at the fireplace, and that he speak those words which pierced my heart: “Well, fortunately, this will be the last year!”

I was going upstairs at the time, to remove my hat,  and Celine, knowing how sensitive I was and seeing the tears already glistening in my eyes, wanted to cry too, for she loved me very much and understood my grief. She said, “O, Thérèse, don’t go downstairs; it would cause you too much grief to look at your slippers right now!”

But Thérèse was no longer the same; Jesus had changed her heart. Forcing back my tears, I descended the stairs rapidly; controlling the poundings of my heart, I took my slippers and placed them in front of Papa, and withdrew all the objects joyfully. I had the happy appearance of a Queen…  Thérèse had discovered once again the strength of soul which she had lost at the age of four and a half, and was to preserve it forever!.. 

The work I had been unable to do in ten years was done by Jesus in one instant, contenting himself with my good will which was never lacking. I could say to Him like His apostles: ‘Master, I fished all night and caught nothing.” More merciful to me that He was to His disciples, Jesus took the net Himself, cast it, and drew it in filled with fish.

St.  Thérèse of Lisieux, Story of a Soul

Reflection – One more passage from my favorite saint. This of course is her great conversion, the grace of Christmas 1886 when she was fourteen years old. Her tearfulness, her utter inability to master her own emotions was not, in my opinion, ‘neurosis’ exactly (I have always disliked the characterization of the Little Flower as a neurotic). It was, simply, grief that she could not shake off.

Left motherless twice in succession, by the death of Leonie Martin when she was four and the entry to Carmel of her sister Pauline when she was nine, she simply had a wound of grief, severe and prolonged, that was more than a sensitive little girl could handle, and that had brought her to that sad state of tearful over-sensitivity.

And so there is this beautiful moment of grace, when Jesus, all unexpected, does something she never could have and truly sets her on this giant’s course of love and sacrifice and prayer. The ‘turn on the stairs’, the moment when all of the sudden  Thérèse is no longer bound by her weakness and wounds but breaks through to selfless love, to living not from herself but living for the other and from the Other.

It seems to me that, while every one of us is so different, and certainly the specifics of Thérèse’s life are not at all what most people experience, some version of this has to happen in all our lives. We all have to have that ‘turn on the stairs’, that graced moment when we mysteriously pass from living by our own lights to living in the Light of Christ.

It is such a strange and mysterious passage in all our lives—notice that  Thérèse herself can give no explanation of exactly what transpired here, what made the difference at that moment, how she changed instantaneously and became, essentially, the woman of faith she was meant to be. It is, in the proper and technical sense of the word, a mystical grace, entirely accomplished by God in a manner that is unaccountable.

But mystical is not a synonym for ‘unusual’ or ‘exceptional’, you know. We all have to get there, somehow, on the stairs, turning around, choosing to receive this gift of overcoming ourselves to simply love, simply serve, simply move towards the other out of a great freedom of spirit. God needs to set us on that wide open space of freedom, but of course it is our tottering feet that need to walk out into it.

It seems to me that, with all the troubles in the world, troubles in the Church, troubles in our lives, and all the complex and endless snarls and snags and genuine problems and dilemmas we face individually and communally, the hidden dynamic that determines much of how things go in this world is precisely this turn on the stairs, this decision every human being has to make between self and God, self and love. There is no way around it; all of us stand on the stairs on that Christmas night when (in a sense) God turned around towards us in a definitive way, choosing whether we will swallow our tears, our pride, our grief, our pain and go back down to love, or run upstairs to wrap ourselves in ourselves.

It really is the essential point, the basic decision, the turn on which the fate of the world, and our own individual fate, is settled.

Gathering Flowers in a Broken World

What this child asks for is Love. She knows only one thing: to love you, O Jesus. Astounding words are forbidden to her; she cannot preach the Gospel, shed her blood; but what does it matter since her brother work in her stead and she, a little child, stays very close to the throne of the King and Queen? She loves in her brothers’ place while they do the fighting.

But how will she prove his love, since love is proved by works? Well the little child will strew flowers, she will perfume the royal throne with their sweet scents, and she will sing in her silvery tones the canticle of love.

Yes, my Beloved, this is how my life will be consumed. I have no other means of proving my love for you than that of strewing flowers, that is, not allowing one little sacrifice to escape, not one look, one word, profiting by all the smallest things and doing them through love.

I desire to suffer for love and even to rejoice through love; and in this way I shall strew flowers before Your throne. I shall not come upon one without unpetalling it for You. While I am strewing my flowers, I shall sing, for could one cry while doing such a joyous action? I shall sing even when I must gather my flowers in the midst of thorns, and my song will be all the more melodious in proportion to the length and sharpness of the thorns.

St. Therese of Lisieux, Story of a Soul

Reflection – A little more St. Therese today. This is the kind of passage from her that leads some people to pass quickly over her writings, dismissing them as too sugary, too ‘pious’, too… well, flowery, to use the obvious word.

Now I’m not really a ‘flower’ kind of guy, to be honest. Flowers are pretty and all with the colors and the petals and so forth, but they don’t exactly send me around the moon. No offense, but on Corpus Christi when I see little girls strewing the petals from their baskets in the procession with the Blessed Sacrament, while the girls are very lovely and cute, about the flowers I mostly think ‘well, that’s a mess someone has to clean up!’

All of which is to say that I get why people might be put off by the imagery here, and it’s not exactly my natural style of expression. But as is always the case with the Little Flower, as soon as you dig even a bit into what she is actually saying, the flowery sweetness falls away and the stark reality of what she is living shines forth in splendor and majesty.

Essentially, she is saying that the raw material of sanctity (which is Love) is present in every life. As wild flowers grow everywhere, every life, even one day of one life, has ample material in it to make a soul into a saint. Simply, we are not to let one opportunity for love and sacrifice, for an offering to God, escape us. This is what ‘strewing flowers’ means for Therese, and there is no shortage of such flowers in anyone’s life.

‘I don’t want to waste anything!’ An elderly nun of my acquaintance likes to say that, both about the normal frugality of housekeeping and the spiritual frugality of the heart, and that’s what’s going on here. We all waste quite a bit, when we are lackadaisical or half-hearted, resentful and complaining, or simply heedless of the ample opportunities, piled up on every side, to perform acts of love and service and mortification.

They are ‘little’ acts, for the most part. Most of us are not rescuing babies from burning buildings, talking suicides off of ledges, or performing open heart surgery, at least not on a daily basis. The genius of Therese and her little way is that she saw that it is not the size of the act that makes for sanctification, but the size of the love.

I truly believe Jesus raised up Therese Martin in the life of the Church, at the very dawn of the 20^th century when so many people would be broken under the wheels of history and so many truly tragic and painful things would happen in the world, to show that the materials for a genuinely successful life, a glorious life, do not come from what we think they come from—material sufficiency, emotional satisfaction, relational strength, professional accomplishment.

Under two world wars, a depression and the grinding poverty of so much of the world, these things would be denied a great proportion of humanity (we in North America, especially we younger ones, tend to be only dimly aware of that). St. Therese of Lisieux shows that even the barest and briefest of lives, even the most simple and basic level of subsistent living, is crammed, packed, jammed, with… well, with flowers.

Flowers to gather, flowers to unpetal, flowers to strew. Offerings of love that can be given to Love, and in that act of offering make the one offering into herself an offering, one with the Offering Himself. And that’s what it means, that’s all it means, that is the only thing that it means, to live a glorious, successful life.

A Little Ball of No Account

I had offered myself, for some time now, to the Child Jesus as his little plaything. I told him not to use me as a valuable toy children are content to look at but dare not touch, but to use me like a little ball of no value which he could throw on the ground, push with His foot, pierce, leave in a corner, or press to His heart if it pleased him; in a word, I wanted to amuse little Jesus, to give Him pleasure; I wanted to give myself up to His childish whims. He heard my prayer.

At Rome, Jesus pierced His little plaything; He wanted to see what there was inside it and having seen, content with His discovery, He let His little ball fall to the ground and He went off to sleep. What did He do during His gentle sleep and what became of the little abandoned ball? Jesus dreamed He was still playing with His toy, leaving it and taking it up in turns, and then having seen it roll quite far He pressed it to His heart, no longer allowing it to ever go far from His little hand.

St. Therese of Lisieux, Story of a Soul

Reflection – Just back from retreat, I don’t feel like jumping back in with more of Humanae Vitae, so we’ll skip that series for this weekend (cuz it’s my blo-og and I’ll write what I want to, write what I want to…).

One of my texts on retreat was Story of a Soul. Therese is my oldest and dearest friend among the saints—I first read her autobiography when I was about 20 and we have been buddies ever since. I suspect we might be related; my maternal great-grandmother was a Martin, that part of France is where much of the Canadian emigration came from, and there is a distinct family resemblance between Therese and many of the women in my family.

Be that as it may, we are spiritual kin, if not physical. And this passage is classic Theresian spirituality. The context is her disastrous (as it seemed to her) trip to Rome and her humiliating experience of petitioning the Pope to be received into Carmel at fifteen and being kindly turned away, and the seeming vanishing of her last earthly hope for an early entry to her vocation.

It is easy to look at this event from a position of worldly scorn and dismiss it as adolescent vapors at best, narcissistic entitlement at worst. It is easy to roll our eyes and talk about neurosis and immaturity and a hundred other reasons why it is proper to despise the spoiled little girl from Normandy. Many do; many have.

It is easy to point out that, if Therese had been at all versed in the ways of the world, she would have known that it was not the Pope, but the Vicar General of the Bayeux diocese who was watching her like a hawk throughout the pilgrimage, who really mattered here, and that his good opinion of her was more weighty in the long run (which is quite true, and in fact everything turned around dramatically upon their return to Lisieux).

But she was not versed in worldly ways (thank God), nor were her father or elder siblings seemingly, and fifteen year old girls are not known generally for their long view of things and sober mature perspective. And (this is the glory of Therese), none of that matters. The point is her heart was broken, rightly or wrongly, wisely or foolishly, and she saw in that breaking of her heart Jesus taking her at her word and piercing her like a little ball of no account that He could do with as He pleased. And this is how the silly little girl from Normandy became a very great saint, one of the greatest.

It occurs to me that the Lord, upon the birth of this little child, rubbed His hands together in heaven and said ‘Ah, now here’s a challenge! Here is a life made up of a succession of nothings, trivialities, ordinary events, joys, sorrows—not even terribly long by any human reckoning… and a heart aflame with love. Let’s show these foolish human creatures of mine just what it takes to make a great saint: nothing… and love.’

And this is the great glory and beauty of Therese. It is not that her life is extraordinary. It really isn’t. Heck, I’ve been to Rome, as have millions upon millions of people. It is not an extraordinary life; it is that she saw in every movement of her life a movement of Jesus. In joy, Jesus was embracing her to his heart; in sorrow and desolation, he was piercing her, throwing her into a corner; in dryness and aridity, he was asleep, having completely forgotten about his little ball.

And she loved Him enough, had a nobility and greatness of spirit enough, that this pleased her, even through her adolescent tears and (perhaps) overdone emotions. She was generous enough and humble enough to offer herself as a ball to child Jesus, and to see in the ordinary trials of life his acceptance of that offer. And that’s what it takes to make a saint in this world—not great deeds or epic sufferings, but great love and generosity that makes every deed, however small, an act of love, every sorrow, however small, an act of abandonment.

All about Jesus, all directed towards Jesus, nothing without Jesus, nothing except Jesus – this is the Theresian spirit, and it is at once great enough to be the basis of life for the truly great ones of the earth, and little and humble enough that a child or the most broken, weak, and degraded person in the world can live it and be made holy.