Transcript

I'm in front of this grand and glorious basilica, dedicated to a very simple woman, also one of the strangest and most extraordinary of the saints of the church, Thérèse of Lisieux.

She was a cloistered Carmelite nun, who died at the age of 24. At the time of her death, she was known only to her family and to the sisters in the convent.

And yet, within a few years of her death, she had a worldwide reputation.

She was declared a saint and eventually a doctor of the church.

When a reliquary containing her bones was brought to the U.S. in the 1990s, millions of people responded.

They say when that same reliquary was brought to Ireland, almost the entire country moved to see it.

How do we begin to explain this?

It has a lot to do with her extraordinary spiritual autobiography, called The Story of a Soul.

I'll confess that when I first read The Story of a Soul, I didn't like it particularly.

Like many others, I found it a bit overly sentimental, emotionally overwrought.

And as a post-Freudian, I was only too willing to see evidence of neuroses and repressions.

But then I noticed something.

The number of truly great intellectuals who loved Thérèse.

Think of Dorothy Day, Edith Stein, Thomas Merton, John Paul II, Hans Urs von Balthasar, just to name a few.

And then when I was a doctoral student in Paris, my thesis director, Michel Corbin, a very brilliant man, was explaining one day to me how the French don't refer to Thérèse as the little flower, as we do, but rather as la petite Thérèse, the little Thérèse, as opposed to la grande Thérèse, the great Thérèse, who's Thérèse of Avil.

But then he added this, after many years of reading Thérèse of Lisieux, he said, I realize elle est vraiment la grande Thérèse.

She is truly the great Thérèse.

I realized I had to take a second look.

She was born on January 2nd, 1873, the youngest child of Louis Martin and his wife Zélie, two extremely pious members of the French middle class.

By her own admission, Thérèse's childhood was blissful.

The youngest child, she was doted on by everyone, especially her father.

He was her petit roi, little king, and she was his petite reine, little queen.

Very early in life, she had the intuition that she would follow her sister Pauline into the Carmelite convent and become a religious.

She never wavered from this resolution.

The bliss of her childhood came to an abrupt end with the death of her mother in 1877, when Thérèse was only four.

Afterwards, she became withdrawn, moody, as she herself said, sensitive to an excessive degree.

Her time at school in Lisieux was not pleasant, as she was picked on by her classmates.

For the first time in her life, she felt herself, as she put it, weighed and found wanting.

The full effect of her mother's death on Thérèse would appear when Pauline, her older sister and substitute mother, decided to enter the convent.

Thérèse experienced a strange malady with both physical and psychological symptoms, some of them quite frightening.

She would cry violently, suffer from severe headaches, fall into fits of shivering.

Here is Thérèse's own description of this period.

I was absolutely terrified of everything.

What saved her finally was a manifestation of grace.

On May 13, 1883, Thérèse found herself here in bed.

She was utterly debilitated, physically, psychologically, unable to help herself.

And then she noticed the statue of the Blessed Mother.

It had been in a room before, but it was as though she was noticing it for the first time.

She said she was struck by the ravishing beauty of the statue, and especially by the Virgin Mary's smile.

When she noticed the smile of the Blessed Mother, all of her physical and psychological symptoms left her.

She was healed.

Now, how do we explain this extraordinary incident?

We can look at it many ways, I suppose.

But Thérèse saw it as a manifestation of God's grace, God's unmerited love.

When she came of age, she became one of the great doctors of grace in our tradition.

Yes, we cooperate with God's love, but finally the beginning and the end of the spiritual life is grace.

The next great step in Thérèse's spiritual journey was, again, a private, small matter, nothing to which a conventional biographer would draw attention.

It took place on Christmas Day.

There was a custom in the Martin family that very early on Christmas morning, just after midnight mass, the children would come home and they would draw from their shoes that were arranged right here in front of the fireplace, little gifts that their parents had placed in them.

Well, Thérèse loved this ritual, and especially her father's participation in it.

But that Christmas morning of 1886, Thérèse went up this staircase, and when she was presumably out of earshot, she heard her father say, well, fortunately, this is the last time.

Now, that comment normally would have broken her heart, and she would have dissolved in tears.

But something different happened.

Significantly, on this birthday of Jesus, she realized that Jesus had invaded her heart.

So instead, she suppressed those feelings, she came down those stairs, and with unfeigned enthusiasm, she participated in this family ritual.

What do we see here in this very simple scene?

We see the invasion of grace.

Thérèse realized now that her life had to be completely determined by the love of Jesus.

In the wake of this event, the desire to become a Carmelite, which had been in her since childhood, now became a burning preoccupation.

After she convinced her father that this was right for her, she met, with extraordinary courage, a number of bishops and ecclesiastics who opposed her and told her that she was too young.

But she resolved to bring the case to the highest possible court.

She joined a group of pilgrims going to Rome, hoping to present her plea personally to Pope Leo XIII himself.

On November 20, 1887, Thérèse had her audience.

Though she had been told to say nothing to the Pope, she blurted out, Holy Father, in honor of your Jubilee, permit me to enter Carmel at the age of 15. The Pope smiled and told her to do what her superiors ordered.

But she persisted, Oh Holy Father, if you say yes, everyone will agree.

The Pope responded, Go, go, you will enter if God wills it.

At that point, still begging and weeping, she was carried off bodily by two papal guards.

A month later, the Bishop of Bayeux relented, and she was given permission to enter Carmel.

For the next nine years until her death at 24, Thérèse never left the confines of the Lisieux Carmel, living the simple life of a Carmelite religious.

But in the course of those years, she began to cultivate a spiritual path that she came to call the little way.

It was not the path of her great Carmelite forebearers, Thérèse of Avila and John of the Cross, not the way of spiritual athletes, but a way that any simple believer could follow.

It had a great deal to do with spiritual childhood, becoming a little child in the presence of God the Father, dependent, hopeful, waiting to receive gifts.

She wrote this in the story of a soul, Jesus deigned to show me the road that leads to this divine furnace, and this road is the surrender of the little child who sleeps without fear in its father's arms.

It evolved, too, a willingness to do simple and ordinary things out of great love.

Little acts of kindness, small sacrifices accepted graciously.

One of the most memorable passages in the story of the soul is Thérèse's delicious description of her very patient dealings with a cranky old nun to whom she'd been assigned.

At the heart of the little way is the prudence to know in any given situation what is the demand of love, willing the good of the other as other.

Toward the end of her life, Thérèse experienced the intense desire to do all the things the great figures in the history of the Church had done.

She said, I wanted to be priest, martyr, missionary, evangelist, and doctor.

Then she thought, how could I possibly be any of these things in my little monastery here in Carmel?

Then she read Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, and she was struck by that magnificent passage where Paul talks about the more excellent way, the way of love.

Thérèse realized in a flash that love was the form of all the virtues.

Love was what made the lives of all the saints possible.

Love was what undergirded the work of priest, missionary, evangelist, doctor.

And so she said, Jesus, my love, I found my vocation.

I will be love in the heart of the Church.

That is the little way.

I mentioned at the outset how I, like many others, was initially put off by the overly emotional, sentimental style of The Little Flower.

But even the most skeptical reader is usually won over by the account of her terrible struggle at the end of her life with unbelief.

What began to plague Thérèse were doubts about the very existence of heaven.

Like Hamlet, she began to wonder whether anything followed this sleep of death.

And this was no passing bout of intellectual scrupulosity.

It would last up until the very end of her life.

She wrote, this trial was to last not a matter of days or weeks.

It would not be extinguished until the hour set by God himself.

And that hour has not yet come.

She wrote that just a few weeks before she died.

What's extraordinary is how she interpreted this struggle as a participation in the pain of so many of her contemporaries who no longer believe in God.

She wrote, during the joyful days of Easter, Jesus made me really feel there are souls who have no faith.

He allowed my soul to be invaded by the thickest darkness.

Thérèse died of tuberculosis on September the 30th, 1897. As I mentioned at the outset, at the time of her death, she was known only by a handful of people.

Yet, within a few years of her passing, through the influence of the story of a soul, the little way began to beguile people all over the world.

I spoke of Catherine Drexel's sanctity as a sort of elevated justice.

We might characterize Thérèse's holiness as transfigured prudence.

Prudence is a kind of moral know-how.

The little way is prudence elevated and transfigured by the radicality of Christ's love.

She had a great poetic imagination.

That's what grabs people, too.

She always protested that she was not one of these spiritual athletes.

She knew about John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila and these great figures.

She admired them.

She would say, but I'm not like that.

I'm not a spiritual athlete.

I'm not one of these great trees that grow up to God.

I'm just a little flower.

That's where the nickname comes from.

I'm a little flower on the floor of the forest.

No one's going to notice me.

But the sun can shine equally on all of them.

The sun hits the high trees and the sun comes down to the forest floor.

It's a great metaphor for the universality of grace, that we're all susceptible to the influence of grace.

As the sun shines on the good and the bad alike.

It shines on the great and the small alike.

So that was a great bit of spiritual intuition she had, I think, that appeals to people.

What about that analogy of, like, you said she lifted her hands up to God?

Oh, yeah.

That's a splendid one, I think.

It's beautiful.

And there's kind of a wry smile behind it, because she again acknowledges the spiritual athletes.

You know, the really serious people.

They're climbing their way up to God.

And she admired them.

But she also, with that little wry smile, would say, well, I'm just this little child.

I can't climb the mountain.

But I can raise my arms up like this, and of course, of course, he's going to want to pick me up.

And then she sort of winks at the spiritual athletes and says, and actually, I get higher than you, because he lifts me right up.

It's that kind of perception that I think people find very moving and very attractive.