Fr Leonard E Dollentas
St Therese of the Child Jesus is a powerful intercessor and she is beloved by many. In fact, she is one of the most popular saints in the Catholic Church. If you have a devotion to St Therese it is most likely you have experienced the blessing of receiving a rose from her as a sign of her intercession.
I had an aunt with an interesting love story. She was a public school teacher in the 60s in our town in Southern Luzon, in the Philippines. In her late 20s, she was quite a town beauty with unique disposition and traits. She decided that she needed divine intervention to choose from among her suitors: an engineer working for the public works, a young man studying medicine, and a lawyer too shy and overly meditative that her father had mistaken him for the parish priest.
She sought St Therese – known for working wonders – for divine insights and a sign that would lead to her prudent decision. On her usual visit to St Therese, one rainy afternoon, she noticed three red roses at the feet of St Therese. She decided that the roses could be the lead sign for her to choose from among the suitors. That week, on the scheduled visit of her suitors, the medical student and the engineer were ready with their never ending litany of promises of the moon and the stars and all that the solar system holds. The lawyer usually came in the evening. That evening was enchantingly different. He looked at her intently and with a voice fueled with certainly expressed his love and devotion … he handed her red roses. She almost fainted, but definitely took it as the sign and the answer to her prayers.
After a few weeks she accepted his proposal of engagement, and after some months they were married. Soon after they had their first child, a daughter. In honor of her devotion to St Therese, my aunt wanted to name the child Mary Therese. My uncle was delighted and told my aunt that when he was courting her, he was devoted to St Therese and that the week before my aunt accepted her proposal he prayed for the intercession of St Therese. He even offered red roses to St Therese and promised St Therese he would bring another set of roses to her beloved. If she would accept the roses, that would be the sign, she is the woman God wanted him to grow old with. They were ecstatic after they realized they prayed to the same St Therese. They were grateful to St Therese, whom they knew had worked an efficacious intervention to connect their hearts forever.
ST THERESE, THE LITTLE FLOWER
St Therese of Lisieux also known as St Therese of the Child Jesus, is a doctor of the Church, patroness of all missionaries and the missions and patroness of France. Pope Pius X called her the “greatest saint of modern times.” She was Born in Normandy, France, in 1873. Therese Martin grew up in a happy, loving and a devout family. Her parents St Louis Martin and St Zelie Martina were canonized recently. This couple predisposed their five daughters (of which the youngest was St Therese of the Child Jesus) to deep holiness. At the tender age of 4, her mother died. This experience wounded her intensely and triggered a painful experience in her. As she was growing, one by one her sisters left home to join the local Carmelite convent. She also felt the same urgent call to religious life herself. But she was too young to be admitted to the convent life. Her pleading with the local bishop and even Pope Leo XIII during a pilgrimage to Rome were all in vain, but she learned to surrendered her will to God, she patiently waited. Finally, she was granted permission to enter the cloister at the age of 15, joining two of her blood sisters in the Carmelite way of contemplative life.
THERESE AND HER “LITTLE WAY”
Therese’s life in the convent were centered on hours of prayer, silence and work. Her hardship, inner conflict, physical and moral endurance, which she received with the same joy in her heart, pave the way for her to discern a spirituality that she would come to call her “Little Way”.
Her “Little Way” was the fruit of her contemplation that love was the essence of her vocation.
This was vivid in her soul when she meditated on Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians chapter 12 and 13, where she recalled that she felt a spiritual explosion of joy within her: “Love appeared to me to be the hinge for my vocation … I knew that the Church had a heart and that such a heart appeared to be aflame with love … I saw and realized that love sets off the bounds of all vocations, that love is everything … 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 … 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.” This has led her to realized that: “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.” (excerpt from her autobiography: The Story of a Soul)
From then on her small acts of virtue, often unnoticed by others, became her path to holiness.
HER “LITTLE WAY” IN OUR TIME
Therese had done nothing extraordinary in her life. This prompted two nuns in her convent to wonder, before Therese’s death, what the mother superior would say about her in her obituary. Though she admired those who do great and heroic deeds to attain holiness, for her it was not necessary. “What matters in life,” she wrote, “is not great deeds, but great love.”
In her autobiography Story of a Soul, her reflections showed her virtues and her way to holiness which we are invited to apply to our daily lives. Her “Little Way” teaches us to do simple things — the ordinary tasks and duties of the day done with great love. Hence, our humble way towards holiness is simply in the concrete situation of duties and relationships in which we all find ourselves. She wrote: “Holiness is not a matter of any one particular method of spirituality: it is a disposition of the heart that makes us small and humble within the arms of God, aware of our weaknesses, but almost rashly confident in His Fatherly goodness.” (Mornings with St Therese, Readings extracted from the writings of St Therese of Lisieux, Doubleday 2015)
St Therese is telling us essentially that doing household chores, and other little things can be just as pleasing to God as winning a Nobel Prize if we do them as best we can and with a deep love for our Lord.
She died and was quietly buried in the local cemetery on September 30, 1897 after suffering from tuberculosis, an incurable illness during her time.
Let us pray regularly to St Therese. Let us ask her for favors and she will not disappoint us.
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