P. Pierre-Marie Soubeyrand, Community of Beatitude, France
(Part 1)
(This lecture may be familiar to many readers: it was presented at the international meeting organized by the Community of Beatitude in Lisieux last summer and is available in the form of an audio recording (simultaneous translation). We now offer you its adaptation based on the original French text in written form.)
We just sang: “Jesus, loving you is my joy.” In his first lecture, Brother Ephraim reminded us that love was for Therese a game, a child’s game, that carried her straight from this earth into the Kingdom. You may know the story that happened to “great” Teresa, Teresa of Avila. Therese of Lisieux experienced the same. Once she met the Child Jesus on the stairs (I believe, of the Incarnation monastery) and a kind of game of love took place between them. The Child Jesus asked Teresa: “Who are you?” She replied: “Teresa of Jesus.” And the Child Jesus immediately responded, “I am Jesus of Teresa.” This is the game of love that Teresa wants to introduce us to. It must be a game of a very small child. Therese plays it out for our century, which claims to be a century of science and technological progress. At the end of this century, we can observe all the developments in technology that rely so much on reason, yet at the same time, we can calmly say that it is becoming increasingly unreasonable.
It is therefore a child and above all a child to whom the Kingdom of God is opened, for as Jesus says, this kingdom belongs to children and those who are like them. A child is granted an understanding of love. This love, which Therese recognized in Jesus, will captivate her entire life. In fact, she chooses or accepts the name Therese of the Child Jesus – precisely this name. However, we must not forget the second part: and of the Holy Face. Yet we will see that this second mystery – the humiliated Holy Face of Jesus – can only be experienced as a child.
Even though from the depths of her heart she longs to resemble the examples of heroism that have appeared since the very beginning in the Church – especially the martyrs – she feels nothing of those great heroes. She senses that in front of these great ascetics and martyrs she is tiny and sees them as peaks lost in the clouds. Therese will live as a very small one, like a child in the image of the Child Jesus, completely immersed in love, in the presence of God, Love.
One very striking thing is this: when we read Therese's writings, when we meditate on her life, we see that Therese is shaped by love. Love never abandons her, even in her greatest sufferings – until her death. Her last cry will be: “My God, how I love you!” (Vs 151; 169; 178). Meanwhile, she experiences the night of faith, yet even then she does not cease to love.
Therese reaches the conclusion of what Paul wrote, that among the great virtues, which are faith, hope, and love, the greatest of this trio is the one that endures forever, and that is love. The center of this love is none other than the Heart of the Trinity. In Jesus, Therese finds her happiness and joy at being able to love as he does. She enters Carmel primarily and solely to love. For her, to love means: “To save souls and pray for priests” (AS 145).
For a whole stage of her life, until the night of faith, trials, and suffering from her illness begins (this stage she will first experience as an engagement and then as a marriage, a time of great love when Jesus becomes everything for her), Therese strives to be everything for Jesus, so that between them there is nothing but love.
I believe that Therese can greatly help us find the essence of the gospel message. When Saint John tells us in his first letter that God is love (1 John 4:8) – then God is nothing other than love. He is the constant cycle of love that continually flows from one divine person to another and which, one might say, comes forth from itself to perform great works of love. If God is love, it is what Jesus tells us in the Gospel of John: “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love” (John 15:9).
The central task of Christian life is to abide in love, that is to remain in God, among the three divine persons like the Virgin Mary, who from the moment of her conception has never left this flow of love. Therese achieved this: she remained on this, so to speak, orbit of love.
Therese strives to remain in love and to multiply her simple acts of love with joy, smiles, attentiveness, simple movements, or gestures when she “walks in place of a missionary” (i.e., offers her walk for him, cf. Vs 187), when she picks up a pin out of love.
The Virgin Mary tells us in Medjugorje that only love has redemptive reach and touches even the Kingdom. Even the smallest act of love that we can perform and that Therese performed has an echo to the ends of the earth. We cannot even imagine how even the smallest act of love sounds like thunder up to heaven, to the Kingdom, and excites angels and saints, because it originates in the Heart of the Trinity.
Only love will save us. This is what Therese understood, and that is why she tries to stay in love, to love as Jesus loved. “It is enough to love,” said Teresa of Avila.
It is said quite simply. If we follow Therese, who opened for us this little way, we can be children, who from their mother’s womb are only love and whose consciousness sensitively perceives love. All the movements of the baby will be movements of love if surrounded by love and affection. Therese wants to introduce us into these simple movements of a child, into similar gestures as those performed by Jesus when he lived with Mary and Joseph in Nazareth. Therese's entire life from the moment of conception until her death “on the cross” was nothing other than a manifestation of love. In this divine atmosphere, Therese moves and breathes. Even when she is sick and struggling to breathe, she still exhales love. And her last breath is a sigh of love.
In one of her poems, she writes:
“Alas, I am nothing but sheer helplessness,
My God, you know well that I lack virtues.
But you also know that the only love I have,
Which enchants me, is you, Jesus himself!
When my young heart blazed brightly with this fire,
The fire of love – you asked for it.
And my heart in you found everything
And wants to love you endlessly.”
(B 76)
Thus, Therese draws an infinite desire to love from this infinite source of love. I believe that the reason Therese is so well known around the world is that she learned to love to the extreme, to the heavens, to the infinity of love, to the Heart of the Trinity. She managed to love like a very small child. How could we reject the love of a small child? Does not such a child attract even the most hardened adults? This is how Therese attracts souls to love – she wants nothing for herself, but everything for Jesus. Therefore, she remains in this divine environment connected to Jesus, wanting to be captivated and filled with divine love.
At Carmel, however, she recognizes that remaining in love also means embracing a mission. A mission that will overflow from this dwelling in love, from this contemplation of Jesus, who is her joy and happiness. It is the same with the Virgin Mary, who at the moment of the Annunciation sees how a new dimension suddenly appears in her life that she had not perceived until then. From that moment, she, who is entirely God's, must wholly offer herself to others, to the world through Jesus. In this way, Therese also realizes the meaning of the movement of love.
In the manuscript C, she writes moreover: “This year, my beloved mother, Jesus has given me the grace to understand what love is. I used to understand it too, that is true, but imperfectly. I did not thoroughly contemplate the words of Jesus: ‘The second commandment is LIKE the first: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ I especially tried to love God, and when I loved him, I understood that my love must not be expressed merely in words, for ‘not everyone who says to me: Lord, Lord, shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father in heaven’.
This will Jesus made known multiple times, I would say, almost on every page of his gospel. But at the Last Supper, when he knows that his disciples' hearts are burning with a heartfelt love for him, which comes from the fact that he has given himself to them in the unspeakable mystery of his eucharist, this sweet Savior wants to give them a new commandment. He gently tells them: ‘A new commandment I give to you: that you love one another. JUST AS I HAVE LOVED YOU, YOU ALSO MUST LOVE ONE ANOTHER. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another’” (AS 214).
Therese understood something fundamental. What Saint John reminds us: “He who does not love has not known God, for God is love” (1 John 4:8). When we read the following verses of the letter, we understand that when God draws us to his love, when Jesus captivated Therese in this way, in the same way, Jesus can express, demonstrate his merciful, tender, and almighty love, a love that never tires.
Love is what our world expects. There is something that touches me greatly. In Africa, unlike our western countries – despite all the evil we can observe, despite all the trials, epidemics, diseases, wars, famines, despite all the burdens of evil, darkness, the current flourishing of witchcraft and all possible sects – in the hearts of our African brothers, there is a certain innocence. When we announce to them God's love, this love which ignited us just as it ignited Therese's heart, it is nothing else but the call of Jesus, who cries out his thirst for love. As Therese says: “When you cried on the cross ‘I thirst,’ you thirsted for love for souls” (AS 97). It is a thirst for love.
We have seen this many times also during evangelizations. I remember during one evangelization, where more than twenty thousand people were present (not counting those who were in neighboring buildings or those who passed through the surrounding streets), I was just preaching when the muezzin called the Muslims to prayer. Knowing that many Muslims were also listening to us, I gave a different call in Arabic. “O God of love, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, who loved us so much that you sent your only Son into the world, who died out of love for us.” This simple exclamation led to the conversion of Muslims.
If we love, we can turn our old continent, and especially the oldest daughter of the Church, which is our country, France. To love! Today we are being persuaded that we are unable to love, to love with infinite love. We must go out and proclaim this love, proclaim it with our entire lives. This is what Therese wanted to proclaim to the very ends of the earth: to announce Jesus’ love, which loved the world so much.
As Jesus himself said to Saint Margaret Mary of Paray-le-Monial: “Behold this heart which loved men so much.”
Therese recognizes this fulfillment of love, which leads her to perfection, for it is not enough to say: “Lord, Lord, I love you.” It is necessary – and do not take it merely as a moral obligation – to have the enthusiasm of love, this fire burning in Therese's heart that drives her to expressions, to acts of love, to a desire to love in order to save souls. Distinct contrasts appear in her: on one side a small child, a poor nun – and at the same time an apostolic soul, a martyr soul, and as she herself says in the following excerpt, a warrior soul: “Jesus, only you can satisfy my soul, nothing else here on earth can enchant me. I want to love you like a little child, I want to fight like a valiant warrior.”
(According to the original French version by Hermína Lachmanová)
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