Life of Saints - Saint Therese
‘Little Flower of Jesus’
‘Little Flower of Jesus’
Therese was born in France in 1873 to a family of nine children, the pampered daughter of a mother who had wanted to be a saint and a father who had wanted to be a monk. Her mother died of breast cancer when she was four and a half years old and her sixteen year old sister Pauline became her second mother. Pauline entered the Carmelite convent five years later and a few months later, Therese became so ill with a fever that everyone thought she was dying. When Therese saw her sisters praying to statue of Mary in her room, Therese also prayed. She saw Mary smile at her and suddenly she was cured.
By the time she was eleven years old she had developed the habit of mental prayer. She would find a place between her bed and the wall and in that solitude think about God, life, eternity. When her other sisters, Marie and Leonie, left to join religious orders (the Carmelites and Poor Clares, respectively), Therese was left alone with her last sister Celine and her father. Therese wanted to be good but she had an odd way of going about. This spoiled little Queen of her father's wouldn't do housework. She thought if she made the beds she was doing a great favor!
Every time Therese even imagined that someone was criticizing her or didn't appreciate her, she burst into tears. Then she would cry because she had cried! Any inner wall she built to contain her wild emotions crumpled immediately before the tiniest comment. Therese wanted to enter the Carmelite convent to join Pauline and Marie but found it hard to convince others that she could handle the rigors of Carmelite life, when she couldn't handle her own emotional outbursts. She had prayed that Jesus would help her but there was no sign of an answer.
On Christmas day in 1886, the fourteen-year-old Therese hurried home from church and something incredible had happened to Therese; Jesus had come into her heart and done what she could not do herself. Therese is known as the Little Flower but she had a will of steel. When the superior of the Carmelite convent refused to take Therese because she was so young, the formerly shy little girl went to the bishop. When the bishop also said no, she decided to go over his head as well and when she went for an audience with the Pope she begged that he let her enter the Carmelite convent.
Soon Therese was admitted to the Carmelite convent that her sisters Pauline and Marie had already joined. Her romantic ideas of convent life and suffering soon met up with reality in a way she had never expected. Her father suffered a series of strokes that left him affected physically and mentally and as a cloistered nun she couldn't even visit her father.
This began a horrible time of suffering when she experienced such dryness in prayer that she stated "Jesus isn't doing much to keep the conversation going." She was so grief-stricken that she often fell asleep in prayer. She consoled herself by saying that mothers loved children when they lie asleep in their arms so that God must love her when she slept during prayer.
She knew as a Carmelite nun she would never be able to perform great deeds. She thought to herself, " Love proves itself by deeds, so how am I to show my love? Great deeds are forbidden me. The only way I can prove my love is by scattering flowers and these flowers are every little sacrifice, every glance and word, and the doing of the least actions for love." She took every chance to sacrifice, no matter how small it would seem. She smiled at the sisters she didn't like. She ate everything she was given without complaining -- so that she was often given the worst leftovers. These little sacrifices cost her more than bigger ones, for these went unrecognized by others. No one told her how wonderful she was for these little secret humiliations and good deeds.
When Pauline was elected prioress, she asked Therese for the ultimate sacrifice. Pauline asked Therese to remain a novice, in order to allay the fears of the others that the three sisters would push everyone else around. This meant she would never be a fully professed nun and that she would always have to ask permission for everything she did.
Therese continued to worry about how she could achieve holiness in the life she led. She didn't want to just be ‘good’, she wanted to be a saint. She thought there must be a way for people living hidden, little lives like hers. she told herself that ‘God would not make her wish for something impossible and so, in spite of her littleness, can aim at being a saint. It was impossible for her to grow bigger, so she put up with herself as she was, with all her countless faults and looked for some means of going to heaven by a little way which is very short and very straight, a little way that is quite new.
So she sought in Holy Scripture for some idea of what this life she wanted would be, and she read these words: "Whosoever is a little one, come to me."She prayed to Jesus “It is your arms, Jesus, that are the lift to carry me to heaven. And so there is no need for me to grow up: I must stay little and become less and less." When she worried about her vocation she asked Jesus, what her vocation should be, and at last she found it..”Her vocation was Love!"
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. Pauline had already had her writing down her memories for journal and she wanted her to continue, so they would have something to circulate on her life after her death. She tried to remain smiling and cheerful until her death.
Her one dream , she would want to do after her death was 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. She herself felt it was a blessing God allowed her to die at exactly that age. she had always felt that she had a vocation to be a priest and felt God let her die at the age she would have been ordained if she had been a man so that she wouldn't have to suffer.
After she died, everything at the convent went back to normal. One nun commented that there was nothing to say about Therese. But Pauline put together Therese's writings and sent 2000 copies to other convents. 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. The only book of hers, published after her death, was an brief edited version of her journal called "Story of a Soul." (Collections of her letters and restored versions of her journals have been published recently.) Within 28 years of her death, the public demand was so great that she was canonized in 1925.
Therese of Lisieux is one of the patron saints of the missions, not because she ever went anywhere, but because of her special love of the missions, and the prayers and letters she gave in support of missionaries. This is reminder to all of us who feel we can do nothing, that it is the little things that keep God's kingdom growing.
Little Flower of Jesus
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Pour My Love On You
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