If you're in Paris this summer, please visit a photographic exhibit called "St. Therese of Lisieux: Burning with Love", which is now open at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris.  Admission is free.  It will close on September 16, 2012. 

Image courtesy of the Cathedral of Notre Dame of Paris.

The exhibit is made up of 36 photographic panels highlighting the different aspects of love that formed the life of St. Therese.  Translated from the Web site of the Cathedral of Notre Dame: 

The exhibition is designed to be shown in places of solitude and of distress – prisons, hospitals, retreat houses, public places … to show the extraordinary fruitfulness of the life of Thérèse with her double message of hope. The exposition wants to tell us, on the one hand, that Thérèse is a source of graces and of abundant consolation to all who suffer and who call upon her; and, on the other hand, that no life, however poor and limited it may be, is necessarily wasted – that is the life of Thérèse herself, who had always suffered, and who died at the age of 24 years (1873-1897), in the Carmel where she had withdrawn.

 For details in English, see the site of the  Congregation of the Blessed Sacrament; for details in French and more photographs, see the site of the  Cathedral of Notre Dame of Paris  (with thanks to the Internet Archive).

On the afternoon of Pentecost Sunday, May 29, 1887, Thérèse asked her father’s permission to enter Carmel.  She was only fourteen years old at the time and the previous Christmas she had experienced her “complete conversion.”  That conversion experience, she believed, had given her the inner strength and certainty that she was ready and capable of joining religious life.  Her conversion has changed her life. It had made her a new person. It had made her grow up out of her childhood.

 Thérèse does not say specifically why she chose Pentecost to ask her father’s permission, but it seems likely that she felt that she was being inspired by the Holy Spirit to make her request on that special day. She seems also to have been expressing thanksgiving for the Holy Spirit having given her the grace of her conversion.  She believed that God’s Spirit had come to her in a special way to accomplish her conversion and she believe that now the Holy Spirit was inspiring her to take all the means necessary to enter Carmel.

 Thérèse later would speak of God as Love stooping down to her.  Her image of God was that of a loving parent who bends down to care for the child, lifting the child up in an intimate embrace.  She saw God stooping to help her at her creation, at the Incarnation, and at the Eucharist. She saw God lovingly reaching to embrace her also at each moment of her life in the working of divine providence through the activity of the Holy Spirit.

She appreciated God’s Holy Spirit at the dawn of the creation of the universe and at her own creation. She reverenced the Holy Spirit’s role in “overshadowing” Mary and bringing Jesus into the world. She adored in the bread and wine being transformed into the body and blood of Christ the power of Holy Spirit. And she especially revered the Holy Spirit as she experienced God’s embracing her in divine providence at each moment of her life.  Minute by minute, in the everyday duties and simple experiences of life she was aware of the Holy Spirit’s presence in her life.

 We are being invited by the Church to foster our devotion to the Holy Spirit at this time of Pentecost.  The Holy Spirit has been called the forgotten person of the Trinity, but when we understand that the Holy Spirit is the name the Church gives to Christ’s resurrected presence in the world today and in our own lives at each successive moment, we can follow Thérèse’s lead in making the Holy Spirit the focal point of our constant prayer.

On the evening of Wednesday, June 20, 2012, Brother Joseph Schmidt, F.S.C. will present "The Stepping Stones of Therese's Little Way Toward Lives of Peace and Love" at Daylesford Abbey in Paoli, Pennsylvania. 

I recently read a report on the results of a survey of why Catholics have left the Church. The survey was taken in one particular diocese on the east coast of the United States. It elicited one comment that struck the researchers as particularly significant.  One layman, describing his experience in trying to engage his pastor around a personally distressing issue, said: “every time you ask a question, you get a rule.”

 To get a rule is, of course, to get your real concern ignored and often to feel disrespected as well. It is not easy to live with the feelings evoked when “you get a rule;” and those feelings can erupt into all kinds of further difficult feelings and problematic actions – including leaving the Church. In fact, that seems to have been partly what precipitated many to walk from the Church in the past. Church history provides examples.

 At times, in the past, when the faithful sought a way into a deeper spirituality and a richer expression of their relationship with Christ, they received “a rule.” To “get a rule” is quite different than “to get a way.”  And it is significant that the early Christians identified the good news as a “way” (Cf. Acts 9:2). Real questions are answered better by a way of thinking, a way of seeing, and a way of acting than by a rule of thinking, a rule of seeing, or a rule of acting.  The good news of the Gospel is not a new rule or a clarification of old rules, it is a new life in Christ, and a new way to live that life without violence. 

 One of the stepping stones on Therese’s little way is a “new” emphasis on a way of thinking, a way of seeing, and a way of acting. She emphasized faith and love as our contribution to receive and then to live God’s love, which has been poured out to us in Christ. This is “new” not because Therese discovered it. It is new because Therese rediscovered it after it had been hidden under the teaching of Jansenism that permeated the Church in her day

 That is what Pope John Paul II said in 1997 when he made Therese a Doctor of the Church: “she helped to heal souls of the rigors and fears of Jansenism, which tended to stress God’s justice rather than his divine mercy. In God’s mercy she contemplated and adored all the divine perfections.”

Therese’s spirituality does not give us rules; it does not even give us pious devotions.  It invites us to look at life in a spirit of faith, with confidence and love in God’s mercy, and to respond in integrity and compassion without violence to ourselves or others.

Societies and institutions must be built on rules and laws. But spiritual life must be lived from a “way” - a spirit of faith, which, of course, will include obedience to legitimate rules.

 The tension between rules and Christian life is becoming more obvious to me as I continue to experience African life and society, although this tension is true of all life and all societies.   Rules, which must include enforcement, necessarily lead to violence, as Jesus experienced in his own life.

 That we get a “way” and not just a “rule” is another reason why today more than ever we need, personally and socially, Therese’s Little Way of love without violence.  Her life and teaching might offer a better response to those asking questions of the Church today, than just giving questioners “a rule.”

Brother Joseph Schmidt, F.S.C.

Nairobi, Kenya