The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show - Ariel Gore [40]
Read about Thérèse in sourcebooks or encyclopedias and her story might sound like pious drivel, but look at the photographs of the moon-faced nun, look into her eyes, imagine the determined little girl from Normandy who wanted only to please God.
In 1877, when Thérèse was four years old, her mother died of cancer, and her father moved the family to Lisieux. Both parents had dreamed of cloistered lives for themselves, encouraged their children’s religious interests, but Thérèse seemed downright obsessed. A sickly kid, she was temporarily cured when a statue of the Blessed Virgin smiled at her.
“Oh, when can I join the convent?” she cried.
“Come back when you’re grown,” a solemn-faced mother superior told her, shaking her head.
Her father thought she should wait, too. She was only a kid, after all, and one often delirious with fever.
She appealed to an uncle, then to the bishop.
Not only did Thérèse want to be a nun, she intended to be a saint. And she had a strategy. She called her path the Little Way of love in action—total trust in God. She’d train herself to respond to every chore, every encounter, and every insult with love. Birds gathered at her feet to hear her strategy. “I’m the Little Flower,” she said. A hippie chick before her time. She had no grand plans—just the radical belief that she could fulfill her destiny simply by being herself.
At age fifteen, Thérèse traveled to Rome with her father, begged the pope himself for permission to join a convent.
Ol’ Leo XIII told the girl it would happen if God willed it.
Well, God must have willed it, because Thérèse went home and took the veil as a Carmelite nun.
She moved into her new cell, but at first she felt like she’d lost her calling. What am I doing here? God was silent.
Pretty soon, teenage mood swings sent Thérèse careening back and forth between ecstatic joy and bitter sadness. Love, she told herself. Stick to the Little Way. But convent life didn’t provide easy peace. One sister had an annoying way of fidgeting with her rosary. Another splashed Thérèse with dirty water at the laundry sink. Therese thought, I must pray for her even though her attitude makes me believe she has no love for me. How can a girl learn forgiveness, after all, if she’s got no one to forgive? I will be love, Thérèse vowed.
She persisted through all the aggravations of community life and through the illness—always the illness—recurring, painful, draining.
After seven years in the convent, maybe it all got to be too much for her. Maybe she missed her mother. Maybe she couldn’t imagine waiting another moment to see the face of God. She closed her eyes, wanted to give up. She offered herself in prayer as a victim to divine merciful love. She’d begun reciting the stations of the cross, preparing for death, when—cometlike—a fiery flash darted from the magic vault of heaven and pierced through her chest and into her four-chambered heart. She thought she’d die right there from the rush of pain and love: unconditional, unconditional.
Her sister Pauline, now the prioress at the convent, could see that Thérèse wasn’t long for this world. She instructed her to begin writing a spiritual memoir.
Bird friends sang at the window as Thérèse wrote. She continued her daily chores through her fatigue, but by year’s end it was obvious to everyone: tuberculosis. Thérèse’s superiors relieved her of her duties. She should spend all of her energy writing The Story of a Soul.
When she finished her pages, Thérèse set down her pen and, surrounded by birds, the Little Flower died, crying, “My God! I love thee!”
She would spend her heaven doing good on earth.
Dead at the age of twenty-four, Thérèse had founded nothing, built no great pyramids or shrines. Just a motherless and sickly kid, she learned to live in her community and imagined, largehearted, that we were all saints-in-progress.
“Our Lord does not look so much at the greatness of our actions, nor even at their difficulty, but at the love with which