Confronting several impasses in my personal life--in accepting the early deaths of persons I love and in my relationship with friends, members of my family, my local church, and other communities to which I have given myself--I experience the pain and powerlessness of being unable to make a difference in areas that matter deeply to me.  Reflecting on the experience of impasse, I realize that Therese confronted impasse very often. 

At fourteen she felt so strongly that Jesus was calling her to be a Carmelite nun that, she said, "had I been forced to pass through fire, I would have done so."  Having exhausted all her church appeals, she returned to Lisieux from Rome without the "yes" she had so desired.  Pauline described her first conversation with Therese after the pilgrimage:  "In spite of her real disapointment, she nevertheless displayed a great peace of soul, founded on her complete surrender to God's will.  That conversation inspired me with such respect for her that I can still remember it quite vividly."

At sixteen she had to suffer her father's being confined to a mental asylum, and for five years she lived out her vocation in the face of his great trial.  "Jesus has sent us the best chosen Cross he was able to find in His immense love.  How can we complain when He Himself was looked upon as a man struck by God and humbled?"

During the priorate of her sister she had to sustain the constant conflict between Mother Agnes and the former Prioress, Mother Marie de Gonzague.  After one painful scene between them, Therese is reported to have said "Now I know what Jesus suffered when He saw His mother suffering."

When Mother Marie de Gonzague was prioress, Therese had to live in a community not administered as she herself believed it should be administered, but she never stopped searching for ways "to please Jesus" in that context.

Sister Marie-Madeleine, a young lay sister who was one of the five novices Therese trained, was so afraid of Therese that when she was supposed to confer with her she would run away and hide.  Marie-Madeleine testified "From the time I entered until she died, I never felt any natural affection for her.  I even avoided her . . . . I found her too perfect.  But she . .  . often arranged things so that she could wash up beside me and chat to me.  She showed trust in me, in an effort to enable me to trust her."    On her death-bed Therese sent Marie-Madeleine this message:  "Tell her I will pray for her in heaven and that I will love her just as much as I do the other novices."  Years later Marie-Madeleine said "I was not then in a condition to profit from her advice, but since her death, how she has changed me! It's incredible. I am all peaceful and confident. I don't recognize myself." 

Confronted with an impasse, Therese "saw God in everything" and never gave up being faithful to prayer, faithful to love, and faithful to charity. She lived out the counsel of her father St. John of the Cross:  "Think nothing else but that God ordains all, and, where there is no love, put love, and you will draw out love."  Since her death we have seen many miracles God worked at her intercession.  In her lifetime she herself was the miracle; without ever seeing much fruit from her efforts, she continued to risk everything and to repeat "You have given me delight, O Lord, in all your doing." 

In the month of November, when the Church especially remembers the dead, I am thinking of Therese's relationship with those who went before her.  On August 10, 1897, in her last letter to her spiritual brother, the seminarian Maurice Belliere, she wrote:

"I admit to you, little Brother, that we do not understand heaven in the same way.  It seems to you that, sharing in the justice, in the holiness of God, I would be unable as on earth to excuse your faults.  Are you forgetting, then, that I will be sharing also in the infinite mercy of the Lord?  I believe the Blessed in heaven have a great compassion on our miseries, they remember, being weak and mortal like us, they committed the same faults, sustained the same combats, and their fraternal tenderness becomes greater than it was when they were on earth, and for this reason they never cease protecting and praying for us."¹

How consoling to think that those who loved us on earth understand us better, love us more intimately, and are more powerful to help us than ever before.  How generously Therese must share with those around her in heaven her mission of doing good to souls.   

¹Letters of Saint Therese: General Correspondence, Volume Two, translated by John Clarke, O.C.D.  Copyright 1988 by Washington Province of Discalced Carmelites, Inc., ICS Publications, p. 1173.

      I'm sorry I did not write last week, but a young friend died suddenly, and I was occupied in supporting his family.  In February 2007 my beautiful niece, Meghan, died suddenly in a car accident at the age of 20.  On October 18 I learned that her dear friend, Jarrod, had died suddenly on October 17 at age 22. 

     Thinking about the sudden and premature deaths of these two sensitive, accepting young people, I turned (as always) to Therese for consolation.  I found her letter to her seminarian-spiritual-brother, Maurice Belliere, of June 9, 1897:  "Dear little Brother, I would like to tell you many things that I understand now that I am at the door of eternity, but I am not dying, I am entering into Life, and all that I cannot say to you here below, I will make you understand from the heights of Heaven."¹   I am happy to think that Meghan and Jarrod, who had no opportunity to say or receive good-byes from their families and friends, are also in communion wth us in heaven and can make us understand everything left unsaid.

     On July 14, 1897 Therese wrote to her priest-brother, Adolphe Roulland:  "I really count on not remaining inactive in heaven.  My desire is to work still for the Church and for souls.  I am asking God for this and I am certain He will answer me.  Are not the angels continually occupied with us without ever ceasing to see the divine Face and to lose themselves in the Ocean of Love without shores?  Why would Jesus not allow me to imitate them?"²   What a consolation to think that these two young people, who had such great desires to be of service, will accomplish much more now than they ever would have on earth.

     And Therese's desire to help souls was not abstract, but tender, intimate, and personal.   On July 18 she wrote to Maurice Belliere, who had expressed his deep sorrow at her impending death:  "Yes, I am certain of it, after my entrance into life, my dear little Brother's sadness will be changed into a peaceful joy that no one will be able to take from him.  I feel it, we must go to heaven by the same way, that of suffering united to love . . . When I shall be in port, I shall teach you, dear little Brother of my soul, how you must sail the stormy sea of the world with the abandonment and the love of a child who knows his Father loves him and would be unable to leave him in the hour of danger.  Ah! how I would like to be able to make you understand the tenderness of the Heart of Jesus, what He expects from you."³ 

     Therese is the patron of those who suffer with AIDs, and she has strengthened and helped many young people who died early and those who mourn them.  Surely part of her mission is to help all who are called to accept and recover from the tragic deaths of young persons, whether from illness or other causes, by allowing us to see that those we love share in her "heaven doing good on earth."   In the face of the stark reaity of their premature deaths, Therese helps us trust that the beloved young who have have lost themselves in "the Ocean of Love without shores" will launch us "full sail upon the waves of confidence and love."  They have returned to the Source only to draw us there.

 ¹Letters of Saint Therese: General Correspondence, Volume Two, translated by John Clarke, O.C.D.  Copyright 1988 by Washington Province of Discalced Carmelites, Inc., ICS Publications, p. 1128.

²Ibid., p. 1142.

³Ibid., p. 1152.

Therese celebrated her feast every year on October 15, the feast of St. Teresa of Avila ("Therese" being merely the French version of "Teresa").  On October 15, 1889 she wrote to her sister Celine to thank her for feast day gifts.  Therese was then a 16-year-old novice, already in Carmel for eighteen months.  Eight months before their father had been taken to the Bon Sauveur aslyum at Caen, where he would remain for two and a half years more.  An excerpt from Therese's letter:

"Celine . . . . Your letter pleased me very much; I felt how much our souls were made to understand each other, and to walk by the same way! . . . . Life, ah, it's true, for us it has no more attraction . . . but I am mistaken.  It's true that the attractions of this world have vanished for us, but this is only a smoke, and the reality remains for us.  Yes, life is a treasure . . . each moment is an eternity, an eternity of joy in heaven, an eternity of seeing God face to face, of being one with Him!  . . . There is only Jesus who is; all the rest is not . . . . Let us love Him, then, unto folly; let us save souls for Him."¹

"Only Jesus is; all the rest is not . . . ."  How these words echo Therese's courageous dedication to reality, she who would say at the end of her life,  "O my God . . . . Make me see things as they really are.  Let nothing cause me to be deceived."²

http://thereseoflisieux.org

¹"Letters of Saint Therese: General Correspondence," Volume One, translated by John Clarke, O.C.D.  Copyright 1982 by Washington Province of Discalced Carmelites, Inc., ICS Publications.

²"St. Therese of Lisieux: Her Last Conversations,"  translated by John Clarke, O.C.D.  Copyright 1977 by Washington Province of Discalced Carmelites, Inc., ICS Publications., p. 105, July 21, 1897

Thanks to the Baron de Moidrey and the electronic library at Lisieux, I discovered an album of photos of the town taken in 1872, the year before Therese's birth and five years before Louis Martin and his five daughters moved there.  At http://www.bmlisieux.com/galeries/lisieux01/lis01.htm you may see the appearance in 1872 of the Martins' parish church, St. Jacques; the Cathedral of St. Pierre, where they went to Sunday Mass; the old houses on the Grande-Rue; and the Public Gardens, which Therese crossed on her way home from the Guerins. The town, home to a Carmelite monastery founded thirty-four years earlier, looks very tranquil.  One would not guess that in 1925 Pius XI, receiving the pilgrims from Lisieux who had come to Rome for the canonization of the little girl born in Alencon and brought up in Lisieux, would say "A storm, a deluge of glory has descended on Lisieux." 

http://thereseoflisieux.org