Religion

St. Therese of Lisieux

There are some people that find the great St. Teresa of Avila, the namesake of my Therese Martin, rather terrifying. When you get to know a little about her, she seems very charming and you begin to like her. Little Therese, on the other hand, has never been disliked and has never made anybody in the least afraid. She was characterized by a complete ordinariness and if it wasn't for her being an exceptional person, she would be a "normal" woman. Nevertheless, her main significance lies in her spiritual doctrine, the method which she herself described as the "Little Way". A large part of her appeal is that she made the astounding promise just before her death that she would spend her heaven doing good on earth, a promise which has been carried out by the performance of countless miracles, a good number of them miracles of grace. There are certain things about her that have to be overcome. One of these, which was not her fault, is her upbringing. The "saint of antimacassars" or "of the lace curtains" is one of the most astonishing of all the great saints.

Therese's "Little Way" of spirituality did not once permit her to have any ecstasies or visions. She made no prophecies. "She had nothing in the nature of a stigmata, nor did she wear any invisible ring, such as was put on the finger of St. Catherine of Siena." (Maynard, 290) Her life was so ordinary that when she lay dying, she heard two Sisters talking in the kitchen, saying that they wondered what the Reverend Mother would find to say about Therese went she sent out her obituary notices. Therese did experience the phenomenon of what is called second sight, but that is a known psychic symptom and has no necessary connection with holiness. If she was a mystic at all she belonged to that class which enjoys nothing more than union with God.

The Martin family is known mainly for one thing: they all aimed at holiness. Therese's father, Louis Martin, in 1847, when he was twenty-four traveled to the monastery of St. Bernard and applied for admission as a beginner. He was told that he did not know enough Latin, and was advised to return home and learn more before applying again. He went back to Alencon, his home town, and did study for a while, meanwhile carrying on his trade as a watchmaker. Therese's mother, Zelie Guerin, applied at the convent of St. Vincent de Paul and had been rejected by the prioress because she said it was not God's will. Eventually, a marriage was established in which ten children were born. Though all four boys and a girl died at infancy, the other five daughters became nuns, four of them Carmelites in the same convent as Therese, the youngest of the family.

Zelie worked as a maker of delicate lace, for which she got excellent prices. So profitable was this activity, that it allowed her husband to retire at an early age. When she died, the joint savings the two saved made it possible to buy a house in Lisieux. Lisieux was chosen because Zelie's brother owned a business there and Madame Guerin was needed in order to raise Therese. Therese had the best education available locally when she attended the day school conducted by the Benedictine nuns. She was virtuous from her earliest words. Therese would never leave out a word in a prayer and at the end would say she had also to pray for grace. "Dear little mother," she said, "I wish you would die, because then you'd go to Heaven." (Fremantle, 166) Her wish came true when four days later her mother, at the age of forty-six, died in agony of cancer of the breast. When she went to make her first confession, she knew exactly what to do and say. The first word she learned to read was ciel (heaven). Therese says the date of her conviction was at Christmas, 1886, when she was only a few days short of her fourteenth birthday.

When Therese was only nine, her sister Pauline told her that she was going to enter Carmel. She got Pauline to take her to Mother Mary of Gonzaga, the Carmelite prioress. The prioress pretended to believe in the child's vocation but said Therese must wait until she was sixteen. "There was also another objection: it was considered inadvisable to admit a third member of the same family to the community