St Therese

 

  In a nut- shell Therese tells each of us - you are God’s precious child. He delights in you. You are the apple of His eye.  Have boundless confidence in  your merciful loving Abba Father.  Dare to  hope. That same power which raised Jesus from the dead  is working in you too.  Nourish your life on the Scriptures. Be love in the heart of the church and the world..

  But Therese, tell us again how you came by this wisdom at a time when God was seen as a stern judge. Your Mother died of breast cancer when you were only 4 and  the life nearly went out of you with grief and loss. Your sisters became your little mothers but you were still fragile and lost. “God would have to work a little miracle to make me grow up. I was really unbearable because of my extreme touchiness. It was Christmas night of 1886 that I received the grace of my complete conversion…He made me a fisher of souls. I felt charity enter into my soul and the need to forget myself and please others: since then, I’ve been happy."

 A year later you knocked on the door of Carmel to enter with one dream in your heart. I wanted to love …to love Jesus with a passion giving him a thousand proofs of my love. I came to Carmel to save souls and to pray  for priests.

 But with the passage of time Therese, you came to realize that to love Jesus as He loved you was beyond you.  God  would have to do it in you. “Instead of becoming discouraged I said to myself: God cannot inspire unrealizable desires. I can then in  spite of my littleness aspire to holiness” You searched the scriptures for your answer and the whole mystery of God’s mercy came toppling in over you. God gives himself to the little ones, the poor in spirit. He comes down to lift us up. Being Love itself he is drawn to the helpless.. Having nothing I shall receive  everything from God. You found your little way.

 God worked marvels for you Therese in your life and ever since. You kept your promise - “ I will come down… I will spend my Heaven doing good on earth”.

 On your feast-day this year please send healing and peace to all who call on  you.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Storms and springtime

Image
At this time of year, the weather here in Ireland vacillates between cold winter storms and warm bright days with a taste of springtime. This can happen even within the same day! In the midst of particularly bad storms, like we had recently with Storm Isha, and especially for those whose homes or property was damaged, it is hard to imagine the good and pleasant days of late spring and summer. Similarly, on a lovely warm spring afternoon like we had here in Dublin a few days ago, with temperatures hitting record highs for January, it is hard to remember that only a few days previously the top came off our old monkey puzzle tree trunk in Storm Isha! This reminds me of the verse from the Book of Ecclesiasticus (Sirach): “At a time of prosperity, adversity is forgotten, and at a time of adversity, prosperity is not remembered” (Sir 11:25). Isn’t human life just like this? We have storms and sunshine at different times during our lives. Hopefully nobody has a lifetime full of only storm...
Read more

The life of Alfred Batzdorf

Image
  I heard recently that Alfred Batzdorf died on April 2nd 2022, at Santa Rosa, California, aged 100. Alfred was the husband of Edith Stein’s niece Susanne, now 101. Together they have done great work to promote holocaust awareness. In November 1988, the Batzdorffs’ began speaking publicly to churches, community groups and schools about their flight from Nazi Germany. Alfred, known as Al was born in February 1922 in Breslau, Germany. In 1994 he gave an oral history interview for the holocaust Memorial Project. He told of his experience on Kristallnacht November 9th-10th 1938, that terrible Night of Broken Glass, when synagogues and Jewish businesses were destroyed and over 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Al’s father who was a surgeon had already registered for emigration and was in Berlin that night. On the morning of 10th the storm troopers entered the Batzdorff’s apartment intending to arrest him but when they found he was away they took Alfred ...
Read more

Friendship with God

Image
For many people Lent is a time to give up things, perhaps things that could be harmful to us if taken in excess, like smoking, drinking alcohol or overeating.  Forgoing such things can be a good discipline and improve our health, but the real purpose of giving things up in Lent is to unite with Jesus 40 days of fasting in the desert.   Some saints and spiritual writers see a more basic call to give up all that is not necessary to make room for God to enter and fill us with his Loving merciful presence. Among our Carmelite writers we see it especially in St. John of the Cross, but even further back we find similar ideas expressed by Johann Tauler (1300-1365). He was a Dominican priest and theologian and was a follower of Meister Eckhart, but he holds his own place as one of the Rhineland Mystics, who stressed friendship with God.  He wrote: It is certain that if God is to be born in the soul it must turn back to eternity. It must turn in towards itself with all i...
Read more