The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [14]
The hymn we sing in Jerome’s honor is a pleasant, generic hymn in praise of the saints, entitled “Who Are These Like Stars Appearing,” and it amuses me greatly to envision Jerome, of all people, shining like a star, and hating every minute of it. As we’re leaving the church, I mention this to one of the monks. “Ah, poor Jerome,” he said, “forced to smile and sing for all of eternity. Maybe that’s his punishment.” One of the theology students has overheard us. “The feast of St. Jerome,” he says, “Wickedness is in the air.”
October 1
THÉRÈSE OF THE CHILD JESUS
It’s always a relief to come to St. Thérèse after Jerome: from the bitter to the sweet, from the brutally ridiculous to the offhandedly sublime. For a few years, in the 1870s and early 1880s, Thérèse and Emily Dickinson were contemporaries. Thérèse was thirteen when Dickinson died, and already determined to join the Carmelite convent at Lisieux.
As Emily Dickinson was known to be attracted to the company of children—they were the eager recipients of cookies and gingerbread that she baked and lowered in baskets from the window of her room—I love to think that she might have enjoyed a conversation with the four-year-old Thérèse, whose response to being offered a handful of ribbons from which to choose was to say, simply, “I choose all.”
Both Thérèse and Emily Dickinson did choose all, I think, and in doing so gave up almost everything. First Corinthians attracted them both; I suspect it is where each woman found her calling. Emily Dickinson, attracted to Paul’s confession of “weakness and much fear and trembling,” his knowing “nothing but Christ crucified,” speaks in her poems of daily crucifixion, of “newer—nearer Crucifixion.” Near the end of her life, she wrote in a letter: “When Jesus tells us about his Father, we distrust him. When he shows us his Home, we turn away, but when he confides to us that he is ‘acquainted with Grief,’ we listen, for that also is an Acquaintance of our own.”
Commenting on First Corinthians in her autobiography, Thérèse laments that for a long time she could not find herself in any of the members which Paul describes in the epistle—not a martyr (that’s a matter of opinion), not an apostle, but an insignificant young nun who was known in her convent mainly for her tendency to fall asleep during the Liturgy of the Hours. Remembering, suddenly, to be the bold child who chooses all, she states, “I have found my calling: my call is love,” and writes: “In the heart of the Church, my mother, I will be love, and thus I will be all things . . .”
This is the reading in the breviary for this day, and the text I had expected to hear at morning prayer. Instead, I am startled awake by Thérèse in another mode: “For a long time,” she says, “I have wondered why the good Lord has preferences . . . I was surprised to see the Lord give extraordinary favors to saints who had offended him.” (She may be referring here to St. Jerome.) Why these saints, she wonders, blessed all their lives by God’s interfering presence, when there are so many people Thérèse considers to be unimaginably poor, “dying without even hearing the name of God . . .”
She finds her answer in the “book of nature” that Jesus has given her. Contemplating the diversity of flowers, she writes, “I have come to realize, that the radiance of the rose and the whiteness of the lily do not take away the fragrance of the little violet or the delightful simplicity of the daisy.” She decides that “perfection consists in being what God wants us to be.”
It was a decision that was to cost her dearly. Emerging out of the narrow confines of nineteenth-century Jansenism, a thickly pious little girl, adored and spoiled by her parents and older sisters, she rushed headlong into the wide spaces of sanctity, only to be confined again by tuberculosis, a disease in which the lungs become brittle over time, and are finally coughed out. With a temerity equal to that of Paul (and Emily Dickinson), she addressed Jesus