St. Thérèse and Flowers

 We all associate Thérèse with roses because she promised to send down a shower of roses after her death, and the many miracles attributed to her intercession in the early years were known as the showers of roses.

When Thérèse wrote her story, now known as ‘Story of a Soul’, she entitled it, ‘The Springtime Story of a Little White Flower’, which of course was how she became known as ‘The Little Flower’. She explains this title when she recalls the day she asked her father’s permission to enter Carmel.  It was Pentecost Sunday 1897.  Thérèse tells of the symbolic action her father performed, without realising its full significance. She wrote: ‘Going up to a low wall he pointed to some little white flowers…and plucking one of them he gave it to me, explaining the care with which God brought it into being and preserved it to that very day’ While I listened I believed that I was hearing my own story, so great was the resemblance between what Jesus had done for the little flower and for little Thérèse.  Thérèse pressed the little flower, which was a white saxifrage, and kept it in her copy of ‘The Imitation of Christ’.  She was probably inspired to do this by her father, who when he visited the Monastery of St. Bernard on the Swiss Alps, had picked a little white mountain flower and preserved it for the rest of his life.

Thérèse had always loved flowers, as a child in Alencon she enjoyed running among the wild flowers in the fields and bringing some of them home for Our Lady’s statue, she especially loved the corn-cockle and the daisies.

The symbolism of flowers spoke powerfully to Thérèse, so much so she used it at the beginning of her Story, to emphasise that God gives different gifts and graces to different people.  She said that Jesus taught her in the book of nature that, ‘All the flowers he has created are beautiful, the splendour of the rose and the whiteness of the lily do not take away the perfume of the little violet or the delightful simplicity of the daisy.’ Thérèse applied this to people, coming to the conclusion that each one has her own unique place in God’s heart, and that, ‘Perfection consists in doing his will and being what he wants us to be’.

Thérèse also used flower imagery in her poetry, especially in ‘Strewing Flowers’ and ‘The Unpetalled Rose’. Both of these poems use the flower image of the unpetalled rose to express Thérèse’s total abandonment to God.  In the first she refers to the summer evening ritual of throwing roses at the crucifix in the cloister courtyard as a sign of devotion and love.

‘The flower petals caressing your Face
Tell you that my heart is yours forever.
You understand the language of my unpetalled rose,
And you smile at my love.’

In the second as she is nearing her death she sees her whole life as a rose unpetalled to give joy to Jesus,

‘For you I must die, Child, Beauty Supreme,
What a blessed fate! 


In being unpetalled, I want to prove to you that I love you,
O my Treasure!
Under your baby steps, I want to live here below
 With mystery,
And I’d like to soften once more on Calvary
Your last steps!’