"I rejoice to be little, because only children and those who are like them will be admitted to the heavenly banquet."
~ St. Therese
Therese Martin was born at Alencon (France) in 1873. At the age of fifteen she entered the Carmel at Lisieux. She practised heroic humility, evangelical simplicity and trust in God and taught the novices these virtues by word and example. She offered her life for the salvation of souls and the spread of the faith. She died on 30th September, 1897, was canonised in 1925 and declared a Doctor of the Church on Mission Sunday, 19th October, 1997.
"What pleases God in my soul is that He sees me loving my littleness and my poverty, the blind hope I have in His mercy."
~ St. Therese
"For me, prayer is an uplifting of the heart, a glance towards Heaven, a cry of gratitude and of love in times of sorrow as well as of joy."
~ St. Therese
A reading from the autobiography of Saint Therese of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face (MS B f. 3r-v)
"In the heart of the Church, my mother, I shall be love"
My desires caused me a veritable martyrdom, and I opened the Epistles of St Paul to find some kind of answer. Chapters Twelve and Thirteen of the First Epistle to the Corinthians fell under my eyes. I read there, in the first if these chapters, that all cannot be apostles, prophets, doctors, and so on, that the Church is composed of different members, and that the eye cannot be the hand at one and the same time. The answer was clear, but it did not fulfil my desires and gave me no peace. Without becoming discouraged, I continued my reading, and this sentence consoled me: ‘Yet strive after the better gifts, and I point out to you a yet more excellent way.’ And the Apostle explains how all the most perfect gifts are nothing without love. That charity is the excellent way that leads most surely to God.
I finally had rest. Considering the mystical body of the Church, I had not recognized myself in any of the members described by St Paul; or rather I desired to see myself in them all. Charity gave me the key to my vocation. I understood that if the Church had a body composed of different members, the most necessary and most noble of all could not be lacking to it, and so I understood that the Church had a heart and that this heart was burning with love. I understood it was love alone that made the Church’s members act, that if love ever became extinct, apostles would not preach the Gospel and martyrs would not shed their blood. I understood that love comprised all vocations, that love was everything, that it embraced all times and places… in a word, that it was eternal!
Then, in the excess of my delirious joy, I cried out: ‘O Jesus, my Love… My vocation, at last I have found it… my vocation is Love!’
Yes, I have found my place in the Church and it is you, O my God, who have given me this place; in the heart of the Church, my mother, I shall be love. Thus I shall be everything, and thus my dream will be realized.
"We can never have too much confidence in our God
who is so mighty and so merciful."
~ St. Therese
Prayer:
God our Father,
you have promised your kingdom to those who are willing to become like little children. Help us to follow the way of Saint Therese with confidence, so that by her prayers we may come to know your eternal glory.
Grant this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Amen.
"Our Lord does not look so much at the greatness of our actions, or even at their difficulty, as at the love with which we do them."
~ St. Therese
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