Thérèse and Little things

Lisieux is the first pilgrimage site I visited. It was a school visit- I was about 12 and went there for the day with my class. We had tours and talks and I still have the medal and the book on St Therese's life I bought that day!

Why "la petite vie"? No, its not a reference to Hanya Yanagihara's recent novel, but Thérèse is often called la petite Thérèse or the Little Flower and her major contribution may have been her approach to faith she called "The Little Way."

I have visited many times since as my parents lived not too far for many years and there is a very large antiques market twice a year. Ideal for someone like me!

We have written earlier about the huge basilica dedicated to St Thérèse at Lisieux and the much smaller site of her convent in the centre of town, but a recent find meant it was time to revisit the topic.

Who was St Thérèse?

Although she was fairly obscure in her lifetime, Thérèse is now often seen as the model for sanctity and faith. She was born to middle class parents in Alençon and had a highly religious upbringing. After several attempts in 1888 she was finally accepted to become a nun at the local cloistered Carmelite community where she became known as Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus. She was 15 at the time. 

She began to write intensely but suffered from several spiritual crises and physically from tuberculosis. She died on 30 September 1897, aged only 24. Her prioress  eventually published a series of her essays about her spiritual development in 1898 under the title Histoire d’une âme (“Story of a Soul”). The books were a melange of autobiography with an honest account of the development of her relationship with Jesus and God.

What is The Little Way?

Thérèse offered a new model for faith based on smallness, which, reading today, seems almost like an eastern philosophy. Its basis is to do ordinary things with extraordinary love. This “Little Way,” consisted in performing “little virtues”.

She would write:

Sometimes, when I read spiritual treatises in which perfection is shown with a thousand obstacles, surrounded by a crowd of illusions, my poor little mind quickly tires. I close the learned book which is breaking my head and drying up my heart, and I take up Holy Scripture. Then all seems luminous to me; a single word uncovers for my soul infinite horizons; perfection seems simple; I see that it is enough to recognize one's nothingness and to abandon oneself, like a child, into God's arms. Leaving to great souls, to great minds, the beautiful books I cannot understand, I rejoice to be little because only children, and those who are like them, will be admitted to the heavenly banquet. 

Sanctification

St Thérèse’s own story didn’t end with her death. As was custom, she was buried quickly and without great ceremony at the Carmelite plot of the municipal cemetery. It was to this grave that the first pilgrims began to arrive after the book began to grow in popularity.

Word of mouth quickly spread; although she was not a radical, Thérèse’s approach to faith was compelling and simple and approachable. Soon came the first reports came of miraculous healings and visions at the cemetery. Bishops were dispatched to write verification reports. The body was exhumed in 1910 and reburied in a new plot where the crowds could be managed. Queuing systems were created, the cemetery began to collect discarded crutches from those who claimed to have been healed on the spot.

Posthumously famous across Europe, Pius X signed the decree for the opening of the process of canonization in 1914. Pope Benedict XV, in order to hasten the process, dispensed with the usual fifty-year delay required between death and beatification and in 1921, he promulgated the decree on the heroic virtues of Thérèse declaring her venerable. She was beatified in 1923.

After her official beatification, her body was moved again, this time back to the Carmel in the centre of Lisieux to a new tomb and centre for visitors. Within a few years construction would begin of the enormous Basilica in Lisieux and St Thérèse became one of the most popular saints of the 20th Century.

St Thérèse- a global phenomenon

By this time St Thérèse and ”the Little Way” was famous worldwide and the reburial was a huge event, heavily covered by media at the time- after all, saints aren't (re)buried every day.

It was still a surprise to be given this extraordinary collection of contemporary photographs recently. It was a present from a couple I met at the Lisieux brocante and who we have stayed in touch with.

The pictures, all mounted, show the procession and reburial in all its pomp and finery- a remarkable end after such a humble life. These are high quality enough for us to believe they were made by either a very skilled amateur or a professional for the press, but we still haven’t found any clues who the photographer(s) might be. And in case you're wondering, these are not for sale. I have given some of them to a customer I have known for a long time who has a special connection to St Therese but I am keeping the rest!

St Thérèse is still highly popular worldwide, enough so for her relics to occasional to go on tour; the UK, the USA, South Africa, even aboard a space shuttle flight. She is still highly popular in the USA where there is a National Shrine of St. Thérèse in Darien, Illinois. There are also basilicas dedicated to her in  San Antonio, Juneau as well as the Philippines, Egypt and cathedrals in Japan, Brazil, China and Indonesia.

The Statues

Of course we occasionally find small statues of her, appropriately small things kept for use in the home, a daily reminder of the Little Way. She's usually depicted in her brown nun's habit and holding flowers and a crucifix. She is often called “the Little Flower” because she imagined herself as a little flower in God’s garden of souls. As she put it, “If every tiny flower wanted to be a rose, spring would lose its loveliness.”

I wrote earlier about the miserable weather on our recent buying trip to Chambord. It was a hard day, cold, wet with lots of trudging through mud. And yet we still found something astonishing.

This is a replica of Thérèse's recumbent statue in the Carmel in Lisieux- a sculpture of the nun in the moment of her passing. The sculpture itself is beautiful- well crafted and delicately painted. It's relatively big at almost 50cm long and weighing several kilos. Finding this in freezing cold and pouring rain was- well, not a miracle but certainly heartwarming and surprising. It made a hard trip worthwhile!

You can find more photographs and details on the statue here.

Postscript

The story continues: The statue of St Thérèse was sent to one of my dearest customers in the USA. The statue is big and heavy and the box it was in was even bigger and heavier! There was a nail biting few days whilst it was in transit- not just because of the cost but I knew that this particular customer has a deep connection with Thérèse and we often look for Thérèsiana for her (I'm not sure if that is a real word... well, it is now!).

Thérèse arrived safely in Ohio where we know she will be treasured and loved for some time to come.

(Not The End.)