'Little Flower' a likely doctor of church for an age of anxiety - St. Therese of Lisieux was a spiritual writer whose love of life and flowers was balanced by her hunger for suffering as a way to love Jesus, and both embrace life, and celebrate life - Brief Article

National Catholic Reporter, Oct 24, 1997 by H.D. Kreilkamp

Pope John Paul II officially designated St. Therese of Lisieux a a doctor of the church Oct. 9, only the third woman to be so named. The pope's announcement illustrates the continuing influence of the "Little Flower" in this century and into the third millennium.

The story of Therese's life has been translated into more than 40 languages, with millions of copies circulating. Her words continue to provoke in readers a sea change in attitudes towards life, death and eternal destiny.

A cursory reading of her story reveals how much she loved life, family and sisters -- both within and outside her convent -- and how much she was delighted by flowers and beautiful things such as poetry and lace. Part of Therese's universal appeal is this love of life and gaiety. These aspects of Therese are warm familiar and unchallenging.

Her love of suffering, however, is a different matter. Her writings lead us to, and reveal, the experience of suffering out of love for Christ. In a time when whole industries exist to help us avoid even the most minor experiences of discomfort, embracing pain for the sake of Christ may seem inexplicable, even grotesque. Yet we recognize this love of the cross as part of Therese's inheritance from St. John of the Cross. As Fr. Henri Nouwen said, the cross is at the center of Christian faith -- even though it often seems incomprehensible to our culture.

Therese's Story of a Soul, her spiritual autobiography, written simply for her Carmelite sisters, reveals such a profound love of suffering that it is a scandal to many and incomprehensible to others who do not share our faith in redemption through the sufferings of Jesus. Therese's love of suffering sets her in a place apart in the gallery of Christian spiritual writers like St. Augustine; even he did not share her hunger for suffering, although he chastised himself for the sins of his youth.

In this sense, Therese shows us how to embrace and celebrate all of life. Her love of suffering is not depressing or dark but rather an affirmation that all of life's experiences can be paths to holiness if only we will choose to walk down them.

Because of this vision, Therese has deeply influenced many well-known Catholic writers. Thomas Merton testified in his autobiography to the tremendous impact Therese had on him. He considered her the greatest saint in the church for the last several hundred years, "even greater, in some respects, than the two tremendous reformers of her order, St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila." Her "Little Way," with its remarkably honest yet firm trust in the merciful love of Jesus, was a source of inspiration for Merton, as it was for Graham Greene. Greene acknowledged that Therese's sense of hope was reflected in some of his characters.

What is amazing about Therese is the way her influence took off, as she predicted, with her death. Before that, in her Carmelite convent in Lisieux, she was hidden, unnoticed, even among her own sisters. This was as she hoped, because of her love for the "hidden Christ," described by Isaiah as a man "despised" even among his own people.

We're accustomed to thinking of the saints at death as simply "entering into their rest," their eternal sabbath -- which indeed they do -- but Therese has changed our perspective of death as the end of a human being's activity on this earth. She determined (as she did not a few other things in her life!) that death would be just the beginning of her activity on earth as the "apostle of apostles."

To Pere Roulland, a missionary in China who had asked her to pray for his parents, she promised that when they died, she would come and seek them out in his name "And introduce them to heaven." In another letter to him, she wrote of her impending death as the moment when she would fly with him to "distant missions," after which she would make clear from the heights of Heaven any thoughts she could not explain to him in writing. Such claims may sound presumptuous to us or to anyone unfamiliar with Therese and her mountain-moving faith but the history of the church since her death has vindicated her claims.

She wrote to Abbe Belliere a few months before she died, say would soon be doing I much better than writing, him letters. After her death, she wrote, she would be "very near him," seeing to all his needs, "and I shall give the good God no rest till he has given me all I want!" This "Little Flower" knew better than most the love of the Lord, and she was certain that in death as in life she could touch and taste that love, and lead others to do the same. Therese's death did not mark the end of her victories but only the beginning.

St. Therese is a saint not only for our century but for the third millennium of Christianity. Her message is that the love of Jesus is the only answer to the great problems that beset the human race everywhere. Hers is the kind of love that is essential to any solution to these problems -- the willingness to suffer so that others may live, the kind of love that suffers and prays, that trusts in God, that discerns what God is calling us to do and does it fearlessly.