Teaching from the table of sinners

Spiritual Life, Fall 2000 by Sullivan, John

You are dreaming about the light, about a fatherland embalmed in the sweetest perfumes; you are dreaming about the eternal possession of the Creator of all these marvels; you believe that one day you will walk out of this fog which surrounds you! Advance, advance; rejoice in death which will give you not what you hope for but a night still more profound, the night of nothingness.20

In spite of this somber picture, Therese casts a last glance after Diana Vaughan, that is Diana's true persona, Leo Taxil, when she writes, "I was unable to believe there were really impious people who had no faith... [but] Jesus made me feel that there were really souls who have no faith, and who, through the abuse of grace, lost this precious treasure, the source of the only real and pure joyS."21

L'abbe Belliere (1874-1907) Bishop Guy Gaucher is again a good source of information to describe the story of the first "spiritual brother" of Therese.

The Story

Maurice Belliere, a 21-year-old seminarian wrote to the Carmel of Lisieux on October 17, 1895, "asking for a sister who would devote herself especially to the salvation of his soul and aid him through her prayers and sacrifices when he was a missionary so that he could save many souls."22 Mother Agnes, prioress at that time, asked her sister Therese to assume this task. For Therese, it did not appear at all burdensome since she had always dreamt of having a priest-brother. The death of her two little brothers seemed to have deprived her forever of this hope. And now, close in age to the seminarian, she received a brother and a future priest-missionary. She said, "Not for years had I experienced this kind of happiness. I felt this part of my soul renewed."23 She immediately wrote a prayer for Abbe Belliere. He did not recontact the Carmel till November 1895 when he sent a simple card announcing that he was leaving for military service-something quite normal for secularized and anticlerical France. Things for him became complicated while serving his country.

In a later letter to Therese, Maurice Belliere reveals that during his time in the army he underwent certain experiences (never really identified for us although characterized by him in a letter to the prioress as "many unheard of stupidities"24) that left him very troubled. Therese, far from abandoning the young man out of a pharisaical sense of self righteousness or even because of a prudence she could have invoked in the name of limited life-experience, made quite an effort to get him past the failings his conduct provoked. At the heart of the further exchange of letters between this almost sad-sack seminarian and his cloistered spiritual sister will be her repeated attempts to help him shed his poor self image by showing him how to trust in God's mercy. In all, Therese wrote to him eleven times. The very motto of her recent centenary year, "No, I am not dying, I am entering into life," comes from Letter 244 sent to Belliere on June 9,1897. The holy card she signed and sent to him on August 25,189?, was the last thing she wrote to another human being. Selections from her counsels to him give adequate proof of how hard she tried to help.