The "Little Flower"—even her nickname was off-putting. The talk of spiritual childhood, the simpering, too-perfect-for-words little girl in the Catholic Treasure Box stories I read to the kids, the saccharine holy cards and statues, all that devotional froufrou repelled me. Little did I know.
Two things changed that. The first was reading about the "trial of faith" that Thérèse underwent amid the protracted, intense physical suffering of her last illness. She lost her certainty of the goodness of God, of the value of her religious vocation, of the reality of heaven; she was haunted by the thought that, awaiting her on the other side of death was, not the God whom she loved with all her being, but—nothing. In place of a veil, there was now a wall between Thérèse and the heaven she had longed for. As with another Thérèse, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, she learned to persevere in the works of faith even when that faith seemed to have deserted her. There was nothing simpering or childish here.
The second happened in 1999, when the relics of St.Thérèse visited New York. I joined a group of pilgrims for an hour of prayer, late in the night, at St. Patrick's Cathedral. In the silence, I realized that Thérèse's "Little Way" was not childish at all. And it wasn't the froufrou that had made her, by orders of magnitude the most beloved saint of modern times. After walking down the aisle to kiss the small casket of relics in the cathedral crossing, I received a postcard-sized prayer card with a photograph of saint to take home with me. The face that looked out at me from that photo had nothing sentimental or sacherrine about it; there was nothing at all simpering about those eyes.
St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face, help me never to confuse simplicity with naïveté and to persevere no matter how deep the darkness.
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